Black Hospitals Face Extinction
Black hospitals, once centers of thriving Black communities, have fallen into a state of disrepair in the decades since the integration of hospitals under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
There are very few left and they are struggling to stay open. In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the once-prominent Taborian Hospital, founded in 1942 to serve Black patients during segregation, now stands empty. NPR reports, its future uncertain. Despite a $3 million renovation a decade ago, the facility closed again due to ownership disputes, leaving it to deteriorate.
Myrna Smith-Thompson, whose grandfather helped establish the hospital, told the outlet, “This is a very painful conversation.” Smith-Thompson, who was born at Taborian Hospital in 1949 and who serves as executive director of the civic group that owns the property, added, “It’s a part of my being.” She admits the reopening would require millions in funding. The Taborian Hospital situation is similar to what other Black hospitals have faced.
Black hospitals, which once numbered over 150, slowly phased out of commission after the passage of civil rights legislation, and the few that remain are incredibly under-resourced, reported VPM, Virginia’s NPR affiliate, in 2022.
According to Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a professor of Virginia Black history at Norfolk State University, Black hospitals began as a panacea for the racism that infected the American hospital system.
“Once you started to see the birth of these Black hospitals, which numbered, I believe, over 150 in the country at one point, that’s when they became competitors with white hospitals. And so, you will start to see a lot of white hospitals relegate Black patients in the attic, in the basement. And so, these Black hospitals were a very humane and respectable alternative to the very discriminatory way that African Americans were treated in the majority [of] hospitals,” Newby-Alexander said.
According to Axios, the original Richmond Community Hospital’s future is in doubt as Virginia Union University wants to use the land the hospital sits on to develop up to 200 market-rate housing units, a plan some Richmond residents fear means the demolition of the hospital.
According to the Richmond Free Press, Gary L. Flowers, a fifth-generation Richmond native, believes that a plan that ends in the demolition of the hospital is not a plan that honors the history of the hospital.
“If the building is demolished, there is no suitable memorialization of where it once stood. The building doesn’t take up a large footprint. It could be preserved and housing built around it — a historical oasis in the Sankofa sense.”
As Bizu Gelaye, an epidemiologist and the program director of Harvard University’s Mississippi Delta Partnership in Public Health told KFF Health News, the closing of the hospitals forever changed the communities they once existed in. “It has ripple effects in a way that affect the fabric of the community.”
According to a 2023 study published in the National Library of Medicine, hospitals that primarily serve Black patients consistently have lower revenues and profits. In the study’s conclusion, the authors argued that financing reforms needed to be reworked.
“U.S. hospital financing effectively assigns a lower dollar value to the care of Black patients. To reduce disparities in care, health financing reforms should eliminate the underpayment of hospitals serving a large share of Black patients.” The study’s authors wrote.
According to the study, “Moreover, hospitals where Black patients account for a large share of inpatients have relatively modest facilities (as measured by the dollar value of their buildings and equipment), and they are less likely than other hospitals to offer some lucrative higher-tech services like cardiac catheterization labs. These asset deficits reflect longstanding disparities in funding: a decades- and even centuries-long paucity of donations, government subsidies, and operating surpluses to finance hospital construction in Black neighborhoods.”
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