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The Forgotten Founders of Emergency Medicine: Freedom House Ambulance Service

  • Writer: Jacob Sarasohn
    Jacob Sarasohn
  • 22 hours ago
  • 4 min read
A group of people pose by an ambulance outside an "Ambulance Entrance." They're wearing uniforms and look professional and composed.

Every February, we celebrate the Black Americans who changed this country. We talk about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.. We talk about scientists, artists, and activists.


But we rarely talk about the men who invented the way we save lives today.


Before 1967, if you had a heart attack in an American city, you didn’t get a doctor; you got a cop or a mortician. They’d throw you in the back of a vehicle and drive fast. That was it. No CPR, no drugs, and no airway management. This negligence killed up to 2,000 Americans every year—deaths that were entirely preventable.


In the majority Black Hill District in Pittsburgh, pre-hospital care was even worse and often non-existent. Police often didn't respond to medical emergencies in the neighborhood at all. When they did, they took their time. Historian Ralph Proctor Jr. estimated that about 2,000 Black Pittsburgh residents died each year simply because no one knew how to help them.


A Vision Born of Tragedy


Peter Safar, an Austrian-born anesthesiologist and pioneer of CPR, understood this gap better than anyone. In 1966, Safar lost his 11-year-old daughter to a severe asthma attack. She had been rushed to the hospital, but because there was no medical care available en route, she arrived too late. Safar viewed her death as a preventable tragedy, one that drove his obsession to turn ambulances into mobile emergency rooms rather than just transport vehicles.


At the same time, Phil Hallen was looking for a way to create jobs. He ran the Maurice Falk Medical Fund, which was created to improve health and social conditions for the marginalized; improving the lives and job prospects of those in Pittsburgh's Black neighborhoods became an early mission of the fund.


The Birth of Freedom House


Medical staff in a hospital setting treat a patient using equipment. A nurse looks on attentively; serious mood, black and white image.

Safar and Hallen saw a single solution to two different problems: Train the men the city had written off to become the most skilled emergency responders in the world.

In 1967, they recruited a cohort of 25 Black men from the Hill District. While the full group included two dozen recruits, men like John Moon, George McCary, and Mitchell Brown would become the foundational faces of the service. Most were in their twenties; some were Vietnam vets, others were high school dropouts or had criminal records.


Their training was grueling: 300 hours of education over nine months in operating rooms, X-ray labs, and morgues. They learned to intubate, start IVs, and read EKGs. The curriculum was so rigorous that it rivaled the intensity of medical school, demanding a level of expertise previously unknown to anyone outside of professional physicians.


"I Need to Know What Job They Do"


John Moon was one of the recruits who nearly missed his calling. At 22, he was working as a hospital orderly—a role where Black men were rarely afforded authority or respect. One afternoon, he saw two Black men walk into the ER. They weren't cleaning floors; they were in command, giving orders to the staff and treating a patient on a stretcher.

Moon was shocked to see Black men being treated with such profound respect by white doctors and nurses. He’d never seen anything like it. In that moment, he realized he didn't just want a job; he wanted that level of agency. He found out they were from Freedom House and signed up immediately.


Safar pushed them relentlessly. He once marched Moon into an operating room, bumped the anesthesiologist aside, and told Moon to intubate the patient. Moon got the tube in on the first try. He spent the rest of the day going from room to room, intubating patient after patient while stunned doctors watched a young Black man from "The Hill" perform a procedure they thought only surgeons could master.


The Gold Standard


Two paramedics perform CPR on a patient beside an ambulance, while three concerned women watch. The setting is urgent and serious.

On July 15, 1968, Freedom House Ambulance Service officially launched. They were the first in America to:

  • Transmit EKG data to hospitals while en route.

  • Use naloxone in the field for overdoses.

  • Use air casts for fractures.

  • Stabilize patients on-site rather than just "swooping and scooping".


By 1975, the federal government adopted the Freedom House manual—written by their medical director Dr. Nancy Caroline—as the national training standard.


Erasure and Legacy


People load a stretcher into an ambulance with a cross symbol. A woman in a plaid skirt watches. Trees in the background. Black and white.

Despite their success, the city of Pittsburgh shut Freedom House down in 1975. The official reason was funding, but the reality was more complicated: white neighborhoods had begun complaining that the "poorest, Blackest" part of the city was getting better medical care than they were.


When the city launched its own EMS service, it hired white paramedics from the suburbs and told the Freedom House veterans their training "didn't count". They were forced to re-test or carry bags for white medics with half their experience.


John Moon stayed for 35 years, eventually rising to Assistant Chief, but he spent decades fighting what he called a "concerted effort to eliminate" the legacy of Freedom House.

Today, the story is finally resurfacing through books like American Sirens and new training programs in Pittsburgh. But the true monument to Freedom House is every ambulance you see on the road. They built the foundation. We are all just living in the world they imagined.


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