by Daniel Johnson
August 12, 2024
At one point, there were more than 150 Black hospitals.
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.
The few left 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 dispute.
Myrna Smith-Thompson, whose grandfather helped establish the hospital, is executive director of the civic group that owns the property. She said reopening would require millions in funding.
Black hospitals, which once numbered over 150, have been slowly phased out of commission after the passage of civil rights legislation. The few that remain are incredibly under-resourced, VPM, Virginia’s NPR affiliate, reported in 2022.
“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,” Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a professor of Virginia Black history at Norfolk State University, 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.
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 Journal of General Internal Medicine, hospitals that primarily serve Black patients consistently have lower revenues and profits. “U.S. hospital financing effectively assigns a lower dollar value to the care of Black patients,” the study’s authors wrote. “To reduce disparities in care, health financing reforms should eliminate the underpayment of hospitals serving a large share of Black patients.”
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