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Criminal

The Paramedics

Criminal

Vox Media Podcast Network

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.738.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As recently as 1965, if you had a medical emergency, the people who showed up at your door would be volunteer firefighters, police officers, or undertakers with a hearse. Today, the story of how a group of Black men from Pittsburgh changed that. Kevin Hazzard’s book is American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Support for this show comes from Krakan.

0:03.0

Krypto is like the financial system, but different.

0:07.0

It doesn't care where you come from, what you look like, your credit score,

0:11.0

or your outrageous food delivery habits.

0:13.7

crypto is finance for everyone everywhere all the time.

0:18.4

Krakhan, see what crypto can be.

0:21.3

Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest.

0:25.0

This is a high-risk investment and you, I wanted to be a police officer.

0:38.0

I had no idea on how to pursue that goal because at that time individuals that look like me were not really

0:49.2

noticeable on the police force at that time. John Moon grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1960s in a predominantly black neighborhood called

0:57.4

the Hill District.

0:59.5

At one time it was the home of the nation's largest black newspaper at jazz clubs where Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong performed and had its own baseball team

1:10.0

But by the time John graduated from high school things had changed.

1:14.0

The businesses dissolved and the community itself

1:20.0

from my opinion became one of neglect and underserved and that was a lack of jobs,

1:32.0

a lot of unemployment.

1:35.0

John says that sometimes people who lived in the Hill District were called

1:38.8

unemployables.

1:41.1

John found a job working at a hospital.

1:43.0

I was an orderly at the hospital, and orderly at that time were kind of one step up from housekeeping if you get my drift. And so it was more or less a job that was at the bottom of the

1:58.8

rung. John says that at the time almost all of the orderlies in the hospital were black and almost all of the nurses and doctors were white.

2:09.0

One night in 1971 after John had been working at the hospital for a couple of years, he saw something he hadn't seen before.

...

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