As the nation marks six decades of Medicare and Medicaid, TOP reflects on the organizing tradition that built these programs and carries that legacy forward in its work today
July 30 marked 61 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law, and the Texas Organizing Project (TOP) is pausing to honor the milestone as one of the most significant victories of the civil rights era, a program born not from goodwill in Washington but from the organizing power of everyday people.
Medicare and Medicaid were never just healthcare policies. They were civil rights policies. When the programs launched in 1966, the federal government used the promise of Medicare funding as leverage to force hospitals across the segregated South to integrate, effectively ending the practice of separate and unequal hospital wards in a matter of months, faster than a decade of litigation had managed on its own. This was made real by hundreds of volunteers, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement. It stands as one of the clearest proofs in American history of what organized people can force powerful institutions to do.
That history sits close to home for TOP. The organization traces its own roots to the same tradition of Black and Latino communities organizing for dignity and self-determination that made Medicare and Medicaid possible in the first place, a reminder of what organized communities have always been capable of achieving.
“Medicare and Medicaid didn’t happen because politicians woke up generous. They happened because people organized, marched, and refused to accept a healthcare system built to exclude them,” said Brianna Brown, Executive Director of Texas Organizing Project. “Sixty-one years later, that history still grounds who we are as an organization. This anniversary is a reminder of what our people are capable of when we organize together.”
“I grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement, and Medicare and Medicaid coming out of that same fight has never been lost on me,” said Synacchia McQueen, TOP member in Houston. “Healthcare has always been about who gets treated like they matter. Sixty-one years later, I’m proud to be part of an organization still rooted in that same tradition, right here in Harris County and across the state.”
