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Jeff Stein’s bad luck began when he arrived at the 2008 Republican National Conven­tion in St. Paul, Minn., to help set up a free medical clinic and join a heaving street demon-

stration—all in front of the local police station. The location all but guaranteed that Stein and his colleagues, who had come from across the country to dispense first aid to anyone injured in the planned mass protests, would end up in jail. And they did. “We were aiming to disrupt and take an intersection,” says Stein (CAS’11), who in addition to performing his medical services sometimes joins a protest. “We knew there was a good chance we would get arrested. We were going to try to avoid it, but none of us were terribly surprised.” Stein was held for three days, largely because he refused to give his name to police. “It’s a deliberate tactic,” he says. “It’s called jailhouse solidarity, and it means they couldn’t book us. And if they can’t book you, they can’t kick you out of jail. The point of that is to clog up their system. Then they said, ‘Give us your name or face contempt—30 days.’” Stein complied and was charged with misdemeanors, including disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. He was released on the evening of the third day. Stein faces the possibility of arrest every time he heads out to a public demonstration to administer first aid. In his three years at BU, he has taken his makeshift medical kit to some half-dozen large demonstrations, from Seattle, Wash., to Pittsburgh, Pa. Stein is a street medic, a member of the latest generation of a loose network of activists who first tended to marchers injured in civil rights–era actions in the 1960s and now appear at political protests and natural disasters all over the world. Stein, for example, flew to Haiti in the aftermath of last winter’s deadly earthquake. Other street medics offered their services in New Orleans after the city was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Street Medics are equipped to care for a variety of injur­ies, including cuts, bruises, broken bones, and pepper spray.

Street medics are prepared to treat a wide range of prob­lems, from blisters to gunshot wounds. Some are doctors, some are nurses, and some have no medical training save for a 20-hour basic first-aid course. Many street medics, like Stein, are also emergency medical technicians. No one keeps an official tally, but Stein and others say the ranks of street medics peaked during the Vietnam War. “There was a need for an alternative to hospitals,” recalls Tom Hayden, a founder of the 1960s student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society, who trained as a medic. “The police would go to hospitals looking for fugitives to arrest.” Hayden, a former California state senator and current director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in California, says the first street medics were medical pro­fessionals or medical students who wanted to treat victims of police brutality. Emergency care was needed, he says, to treat abrasions, bruises, broken bones, and pepper spray irritation. “I remember cleaning a head wound and applying a butterfly bandage to the head of a minister who was clubbed by the police seeking to arrest him,” Hayden says. “There were thousands of such cases. The need has continued ever since.”

The Black Sheep of the Bunch Street medics reappeared in relatively large numbers when protesters mobi­lized at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, according to Stein. They have established collec­tives that train and work together in the United States and abroad—they were among the activists in the ill-fated flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza last May—as well as at community health clinics, such as the Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans. Stein, who started as a street medic in high school, has worked at demonstrations large (meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, D.C.) and small (a tree-sit in southern Indiana). Pale and wiry, with a shock of brown hair darting every which way, Stein has an activist’s intensity. And he speaks like a scholar, which he is. He is among 20 Martin Luther King, Jr., scholars at BU, an academically gifted group committed to social justice and community service who receive scholarships in honor of one of the University’s most illustrious alums, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59). In high school, they earned GPAs of 3.8 and graduated in the top 5 percent of their classes. They have mentored at-risk youth, raised money for girls’ schools in Afghanistan, and created and led cultural, race relations, and advocacy groups. “The black sheep of the bunch,” Stein says with a self-deprecating smile. Katherine Kennedy, advisor to the King scholars, recalls that she suspected Stein was a little bit different when, as a freshman, he asked if he would lose his four-year full-tuition scholarship if he were arrested. “It took me a little off guard,” says Kennedy, director of the Howard Thurman Center, BU’s multicultural center. “I thought a moment and said, ‘Well, Jeff, Martin Luther King was arrested, so I guess my direct answer is no. But I will also say that it would deeply depend on what you were arrested for.’” Kennedy soon came to see Stein’s activism as “a well-thought-out, humanitarian” commitment. “He’s a very mature young man,” she says. “He knows the dangers, the risks. He is not reckless. But he’s determined to have these experiences and determined to have an experience that is uniquely his.” As she learned more about Stein, she says, “he didn’t seem like your average 21st-century young person. He reminded me of a young man from the days when I was in college, in the ’60s.” Struck by the Simplicity of It Stein grew up in Seattle, the son of a research technician and a Boeing project manager. He was an early reader, who showed signs of his future activism when, after reading a magazine article about animals raised for slaughter, he announced to his parents that he planned to become a vegetarian. He was eight. As a teenager, Stein joined the Seattle Young People’s Project, whose members, ages 13 to 18, form a young but tenacious voice for social change. “Probably the most well-known thing they did, before I got involved, was forcing the Seattle school district to use Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as a history text for all seniors,” he says. “We were also doing a lot of campaigning against standardized testing in Washington. I haven’t kept up with it, but it probably is still racist and biased against lower-income kids who don’t have the same cultural background as the kids in private schools.” When George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, Stein was moved, he says, to look “beyond established political theo­ries and means for change.” Anarchist theory seemed to offer a sane alternative. “I remember just being struck by the simplicity of it,” he recalls, “and saying, why can’t we just take care of each other and practice mutual aid and take care of our communities ourselves?” He adopted what he considers a moderate stance. “I don’t think most anarchists would say they can live their lives free of capitalist society. For me, it’s about using the tools I have, and the tools I have access to, to fight. I’m lucky enough to have this scholarship, and I hope to use it to further my goals, even if it means getting a higher paying job and giving all that money back to projects I care about.” Kennedy remembers asking Stein about his political leanings. Ultimately, she says, “he shows respect for Boston University, he shows the utmost respect for, and appre­ciation of, being a Martin Luther King scholar, and he shows me the utmost respect as the advisor and mentor to his program. That has endeared him to me immensely.”

In the Beginning Ann Hirschman, a longtime street medic and nurse who treated people teargassed, fire-hosed, and clubbed in the civil rights marches of the 1960s, says the street medics she has known have all had one thing in common: a yearning to be active in the movement for social change. “Street medics are activists,” says Hirschman. “As opposed to the early people in the Medical Committee for Human Rights, who certainly were on the side of the angels, but were very consciously professional medical people and therefore trying to maintain a more neutral stance. I will treat anybody who’s bleeding, whether they’re on my side or not. But the street medics were much more in your face—antiwar, civil rights—than the Medical Committee for Human Rights. We were considered radical nut jobs. I’m proud of that.” Hirschman says she and her colleagues were also teachers, who trained other activist groups in basic first aid: put pressure on a bleeding wound, stabilize the injured so they can be moved. They analyzed samples of tear gas and figured out a way to safely remove the substance from human skin—MOFIBA (mineral oil followed immediately by alcohol). “Street medics,” she says, “are about being able to do it pretty much with whatever you’ve got with you.” “I knew we were important when we started to be seen as dangerous by power structures,” says Hirschman, who has been teargassed, shot, and clubbed. “The first time would have been Chicago in 1968, when Mayor Richard Daley got on TV and said, ‘They must be planning violence; they brought their own medics.’ We had made an impact. Now, I don’t think anybody plans a demonstration without counting on the fact that there’s going to be street medics.” When You’re Being Shot At