Most black hospitals in the South closed long ago. Their impact continues

MOUND BAYOU, Miss. — In the center of this historically black town once considered the “jewel of the Delta” by President Theodore Roosevelt, dreams of revitalizing an abandoned hospital constructing have all but dried up.

An Art Deco sign still marks the important entrance, but the front doors are locked and the car parking zone is empty. Today, the food market across North Edwards Avenue is far busier than the old Taborian Hospital, which closed greater than 40 years ago.

Myrna Smith-Thompson, executive director of the civic organization that owns the property, lives 100 miles away in Memphis, Tennessee, and doesn’t know what’s going to occur to the decaying constructing.

“I’m open to suggestions,” said Smith-Thompson, whose grandfather led a black fraternal organization now called the Knights and Daughters of Tabor. In 1942, the group founded Taborian Hospital, a facility staffed by black doctors and nurses that saw only black patients at a time when Jim Crow laws barred them from the same health care facilities as white patients.

“It’s a very painful conversation to have,” said Smith-Thompson, who was born at Taborian Hospital in 1949. “It’s part of my being.”

An identical scenario has played out in a whole lot of other rural communities across the United States, where hospitals faced closure for the past 40 years. In this respect, the history of Mound Bayou Hospital is just not unique.

But historians say the hospital’s closure is about greater than just the lack of patient beds. It’s also a story about how a whole lot of black hospitals across the U.S. fell victim to social progress.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 brought advantages to hundreds of thousands of individuals. The federal campaign to desegregate hospitals that ended 1969 court case of Charleston, South Carolina, guaranteed black patients in the South access to the same health care facilities as white patients. Black doctors and nurses were now not barred from training or practicing medicine in white hospitals. However, the end of legal racial segregation hastened the decline of many black hospitals, which had been a serious source of employment and a middle of pride for black Americans.

“And not just for doctors,” said Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and historian at George Washington University. “It was social institutions, financial institutions, and medical institutions.”

In Charleston, the historically black hospital on Cannon Street began publishing a monthly in 1899 called The Hospital Herald, which focused on hospital work and public hygiene, amongst other topics. When Kansas City, Missouri, opened a hospital for black patients in 1918, people held a parade. Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou featured two operating rooms and state-of-the-art equipment. It was also where the famous civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977.

“There were Swedish hospitals. There were Jewish hospitals. There were Catholic hospitals. That’s part of the history, too,” said Gamble, creator of “Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945.”

“But racism in medicine was a major reason for creating hospitals for black people,” she said.

Gamble estimated that by the early Nineteen Nineties there have been only eight left.

“It has a domino effect on the fabric of the community,” said Bizu Gelaye, an epidemiologist and program director of the Mississippi Delta Partnership in Public Health at Harvard University.

The researchers concluded that hospital desegregation improved the long-term health of black patients.

One 2009 study, automotive crashes in Mississippi in the Sixties and Seventies, found that blacks were less more likely to die after hospitals were desegregated. They could get to hospitals closer to the scene of a crash, reducing the distance they might otherwise must travel by about 50 miles.

Some infant mortality evaluationpublished in 2006 by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that desegregating hospitals in the South helped significantly close the mortality gap between black and white infants. That’s partly because black infants with illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia had higher access to hospitals, the researchers found.

A brand new evaluation, recently accepted for publication in the Review of Economics and Statistics, suggests that racism continued to harm the health of black patients in the years after hospital integration. White hospitals were forced to integrate starting in the mid-Sixties in the event that they desired to receive Medicare funding. But they didn’t necessarily provide the same quality of care to black and white patients, said Mark Anderson, an economics professor at Montana State University and a co-author of the paper. His evaluation found that hospital desegregation had “little, if any, effect on black infant mortality” in the South between 1959 and 1973.

Nearly 3,000 babies were born at Taborian Hospital before it closed in 1983. The constructing sat empty for many years until 10 years ago, when a $3 million federal grant helped renovate the facility and switch it right into a short-term acute care facility. It closed again only a yr later amid a legal battle over its ownership, Smith-Thompson said, and has been deteriorating ever since.

“We would need at least millions, probably,” she said, estimating the cost of reopening the constructing. “We’re in the same place now as we were before the renovation.”

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In 2000, the hospital was listed as considered one of Mississippi’s most endangered historic sites by the Mississippi Heritage Trust. As a result, some would really like to see it reopened in a way that can ensure its survival as a very important historic site.

Hermon Johnson Jr., director of the Mound Bayou Museum, who was born at Taborian Hospital in 1956, suggested the constructing may very well be used as a gathering space or museum. “It would be a huge boost for the community,” he said.

Meanwhile, most of the hospital’s former patients have died or left Mound Bayou. The town’s population has fallen by about half since 1980, based on U.S. Census Bureau data. Bolivar County is amongst the poorest in the country, and life expectancy is a decade lower than the national average.

There remains to be a sanatorium in Mound Bayou, but the closest hospital is in Cleveland, Mississippi, a 15-minute drive away.

Mound Bayou Mayor Leighton Aldridge, a board member of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, said he would really like to see Taborian Hospital remain a health care facility, suggesting it may very well be considered for a brand new children’s hospital or rehabilitation center.

“We need to put something back in there as soon as possible,” he said.

Smith-Thompson agreed and said the situation is urgent. “The health care services available to people in the Mississippi Delta are deplorable,” she said. “People are really, really sick.”

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