By Samuel Long
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — Darnella Wilson was 17 years old and a recent high school graduate when a friend enlisted her to join the Freedom House Ambulance Service.
Though intimidated by the “grown-ups” in the organization, which was founded in the late 1960s in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, she joined as a dispatcher in 1975. She loved the job, she said, until she didn’t: A few months after she arrived, the city, under Mayor Pete Flaherty, replaced the Freedom House program with a mostly white city emergency medical service.
| MORE: How Pittsburgh’s ‘Freedom House’ shaped modern EMS
Ms. Wilson, a native of the city’s Manchester neighborhood, recalled that she and a handful of her coworkers were able to continue working after rigorous retraining. But the new conditions were rampant with racial stigma, she said. As members of the original service quit, one by one, she watched the institutional knowledge of Freedom House slowly fade.
“All the time, if I even mentioned Freedom House, I got a dirty look,” Ms. Wilson, who eventually became a paramedic with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Emergency Medical Services, said. “It was like: ‘I can’t say nothing about it.’”
Thanks to more recent documentaries and references on TV, Freedom House is back in the conversation, and an attempt at federal recognition aims to keep it there.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D- Swissvale, during a Feb. 20 press conference at the Thelma Lovette YMCA in the Hill District, announced legislation to award the Freedom House Ambulance Service with one of the highest civilian honors: a Congressional Gold Medal. If passed, the bill would solidify the program in the history of emergency services in the U.S.
Before the service began operating in 1968, emergency patients tended to be transferred to hospitals via police or funeral homes — neither of which were trained to provide care en route. Freedom House pioneered a new model, with a professionally staffed ambulance service and paramedics trained beyond basic first aid. It was conceived by Phil Hallen, a former ambulance driver who headed the Pittsburgh -based Maurice Medical Fund, and at first served the Hill District and Downtown.
CPR pioneer Dr. Peter Safar, at the time an anesthesiologist and distinguished professor of resuscitation medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, trained dozens of men and women, most of whom were Black, to provide mobile emergency care to those in need.
The program’s story remained largely forgotten for decades, until documentaries, television shows and books helped it to resurface. Author Kevin Hazzard published a nonfiction recount of Freedom House’s struggles “American Sirens” in 2022, WQED-TV followed by releasing a 30-minute documentary, “Freedom House Ambulance: The FIRST Responders,” in 2023. More recently, the Pittsburgh -set HBO Max medical drama “The Pitt” referenced the service in its first season, with a storyline about a patient who was once a Freedom House medic.
“Freedom House Ambulance Service transformed how America responds to medical emergencies, saving countless lives for years on end,” Ms. Lee said in a Feb. 20 news release. “It’s only right our very own Pittsburgh -based lifesavers be recognized and honored for their groundbreaking legacy.”
Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, a pediatrician and the head of emergency medicine at UPMC Children’s Hospital, played a pivotal role in the bill being introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives. She recalled bringing “American Sirens” to Ms. Lee’s desk in 2023, after researching ways to recognize Freedom House and landing on the congressional medal.
“I looked up all the different types of awards and medals people could get in the United States, whether that be from the White House, congressional, what have you,” she said. “I looked at the different folks that got the Congressional Gold Medal, like Eleanor Roosevelt, the Tuskegee Airmen, the posthumous Emmett Till.
“I was like, ‘There’s no reason why these folks can’t get a Congressional Gold Medal.’”
As the process continued, Dr. Owusu-Ansah talked to more and more people about Freedom House. A “task force” — with people from the National Association of EMTs and other EMS leaders, as well as government lobbying organization Livingston Group — was formed to recruit more U.S. representatives and further educate the public about the Hill District trailblazers.
John Moon, a former Assistant EMS Chief with Pittsburgh Emergency Medical Service who retired in 2009 as part of a civil suit alleging racial discrimination against him as an African-American, was a member of that task force. Mr. Moon worked as a medical technician for Freedom House in the early 1970s, and he too wants the world to know that ambulance services started right here in Pittsburgh.
“It didn’t start out in Los Angeles, Seattle or Jacksonville or Miami,” he said. “It began right here in the Hill District with a group of Black men.”
Now 76, Mr. Moon joined Freedom House in 1972, in his early 20s. Before its formation, he said, the Hill District was often underserved and sometimes ignored when its residents called in about life-threatening emergencies.
“[Dr. Peter Safar] takes 25 Black men and puts us through the most intense training that had ever been done anywhere in this country,” he said.
This training set the foundation for the modern-day emergency services system “we all take for granted today,” Mr. Moon noted. Now, more than 50 years later, a Congressional Gold Medal would be “long overdue recognition for the organization as a whole.”
“I’m sad this organization went unnoticed for so long, and that’s the disappointment in this situation for me,” he said. “I’m elated that we’re getting all the accolades and this process is taking on a life of its own, but it’s somewhat disheartening that this organization went unnoticed and we were swept under the rug — erased from history, for lack of a better term.”
While with Pittsburgh EMS, Ms. Wilson recalled working with a man named Draper, one of the original Freedom House EMTs. Under the working conditions with the city service, he decided to quit and find a different job.
“I’m thinking: ‘Wow, this man started this and he would rather go pick up garbage than people, because it was so bad,’ I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Still, Ms. Wilson believes further recognition of Freedom House will be beneficial in the long term.
Dr. Owusu-Ansah hopes the legacy of the program will find a home in textbooks and become part of emergency medicine curricula. A bill honoring Freedom House with a Congressional Gold Medal is a step in solidifying its history.
“It’s important to know where you come from, to know where you’re going, and I think there are several angles in which this will help,” she said.
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