Black Hospitals Facing Extinction

Black hospitals, once the centers of thriving black communities, have fallen into disrepair within the a long time since hospitals were integrated under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The few that remain are struggling to remain open. In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the once-prominent Taborian Hospital, founded in 1942 to serve black patients during segregation, now sits empty, NPR reports. his future is uncertainDespite a $3 million renovation a decade ago, the resort was closed again attributable to an ownership dispute.

Myrna Smith-Thompson, whose grandfather helped found the hospital, is executive director of the civic group that owns the property. She said reopening would require thousands and thousands of dollars in funding.

Black hospitals, once greater than 150 in number, slowly phased out after civil rights laws passed. The few that remain are staggeringly underfunded, Virginia-based NPR station VPM reported in 2022.

“When you started seeing the birth of these black hospitals, of which I think there were over 150 in the country at one point, that’s when they became competitors to white hospitals. And so you’d start seeing a lot of white hospitals relegating black patients to the attic, to 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 most (hospitals),” said Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a professor of black history in Virginia at Norfolk State University.

According to Axios, The way forward for the unique Richmond Community Hospital is uncertain. as Virginia Union University wants to make use of the land on which the hospital is situated to accumulate to 200 apartments on the open market, the plan Some Richmond residents fear it will mean the hospital may have to be demolished.

As Bizu Gelaye, an epidemiologist and program director for the Mississippi Delta Partnership in Public Health at Harvard University, said, hospital closures have ceaselessly modified the communities where they once existed. “It has a domino effect in a way that affects the fabric of communities.”

According to data from 2023 study published in hospitals that primarily serve black patients consistently have lower revenues and profits. “U.S. hospital funding effectively assigns a lower dollar value to the care of black patients,” the study authors wrote. “To reduce disparities in care, health care financing reforms should eliminate underpayments to hospitals that serve a large proportion of black patients.”