Nurses tend to patients in this historic photograph in the pediatric ward at Wheatley Provident Hospital, a black hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. The hospital opened in 1918 but, like other black hospitals, closed during the federal government's hospital desegregation efforts in the 1960s. Missouri Valley Special Collections/Kansas City Public Library Hide caption
Toggle Caption Missouri Valley Special Collections/Kansas City Public Library
MOUND BAYOU, Mississippi — Dreams of revitalizing an abandoned hospital building in the heart of this historically black city once dubbed the “Jewel of the Delta” by President Theodore Roosevelt have all but vanished.
The Art Deco sign still stands over the front entrance, but the front doors are locked, the parking lot is empty, and these days the convenience store across North Edwards Avenue far outdoes the former Taborian Hospital, which closed more than 40 years ago.
Myrna Smith-Thompson, executive director of the civic group that owns the building, lives 100 miles away in Memphis, Tennessee, but said she's not sure what will become of the aging building.
“I welcome the proposal,” 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, which was staffed by black doctors and nurses and accepted only black patients, despite Jim Crow laws that prohibited black people from using the same medical facilities as white patients.
“This is a very difficult conversation to have,” said Smith Thompson, who was born at Taborian Hospital in 1949. “This is a part of me.”
Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was founded to serve only black patients during a time of racial segregation that denied blacks access to the same medical facilities as white patients. But its closure in 1983 underscores how hundreds of black hospitals across the country fell victim to social progress. Lauren Saucer/KFF Health News Hide Caption
Toggle caption Lauren Saucer/KFF Health News
Similar situations have occurred in hundreds of rural communities across the U.S. over the past four decades that have faced hospital closures, and in that respect, the Mound Bayou hospital story is not unique.
But historians say the hospital's closure represents more than a loss of inpatient beds — it's also a story of how hundreds of black hospitals across the country fell victim to social progress.
Loss of social institutions
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 benefited millions. The federal movement to desegregate hospitals culminated in a 1969 lawsuit in Charleston, South Carolina, which guaranteed black patients throughout the South access to the same medical facilities as white patients. Black doctors and nurses were no longer prohibited from training or practicing in white hospitals.
But legal desegregation hastened the demise of many black hospitals, which were major sources of employment and centers of pride for black Americans.
“They weren't just for doctors,” says Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and historian at George Washington University. “They were social institutions, financial institutions, and medical institutions.”
In Charleston, staff at the historically black-only hospital on Cannon Street began publishing a monthly magazine called “The Hospital Herald” in 1899, covering a variety of topics including hospital work and public health. When Kansas City, Missouri, opened a hospital for black patients in 1918, people held a parade.
Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou features two operating rooms and state-of-the-art equipment. It's also where famed 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 story,” said Gamble, author of “Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945.”
“But racism in health care was the main reason Black hospitals were established,” she said.
By the early 1990s, Gamble estimates that just eight remained.
“This is having such a ripple effect that it's affecting the fabric of the community,” said Biz Jerae, an epidemiologist and program director at the Harvard Mississippi Delta Public Health Partnership.
Researchers have generally concluded that hospital desegregation improved the health of black patients in the long term.
A 2009 study looking at car accidents in Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s found that black death rates fell after hospitals were desegregated: Black people were able to go to hospitals closer to the scene of their accidents, reducing their travel distance by about 50 miles.
A 2006 analysis of infant mortality rates by MIT economists found that desegregation of hospitals in the South played a major role in narrowing the gap between black and white infant mortality rates, in part because black infants were more likely to end up in hospitals with illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia, the researchers concluded.
A new analysis recently accepted for publication in the journal Economic and Statistical Reviews suggests that racial discrimination continued to negatively impact the health of black patients even after hospital mergers.
Since the mid-1960s, white hospitals have had to integrate to receive Medicare funding, but they didn't necessarily provide the same quality of care to white and black patients, said study co-author Mark Anderson, an economics professor at Montana State University. His analysis found that hospital segregation “had little or no effect on black newborn mortality” in the South between 1959 and 1973.
What does the future hold for Taborian?
Nearly 3,000 babies were born at Taborian Hospital before it closed in 1983. The building sat vacant for decades before being renovated as a short-term urgent care center 10 years ago with a $3 million federal grant. It closed again just a year later amid a legal battle over ownership and has fallen into disrepair ever since, Smith Thompson said.
“It's probably going to cost at least a few million dollars,” she said, estimating the cost of reopening the building. “It's now back to how it was before the renovation.”
In 2000, the hospital was designated one of Mississippi's most endangered historic places by the Mississippi Cultural Heritage Trust, so some would like to see the hospital reopened in a way that ensures its continued existence as an important historical site.
Mound Bayou Museum Director Harmon Johnson Jr., who was born at Taborian Hospital in 1956, suggested the building could be used as a conference center or museum. “It would be a great boost for the community,” he said.
Meanwhile, most of the hospital's former patients have died or left Mound Bayou, where the city's population has fallen by about half since 1980, according to U.S. Census Bureau records. Bolivar County is one of the poorest in the country, and life expectancy is 10 years lower than the national average.
While Mound Bayou has a community health center that is still open, the nearest hospital is a 15-minute drive away in Cleveland, Mississippi.
Mound Bayou Mayor Layton Aldridge, who is also a board member of the Knights and Daughters of Taborian, said he would like to see Taborian Hospital remain a medical facility and suggested it could be considered for a new children's hospital or rehabilitation center.
“We need to get something back as soon as possible,” he said.
Smith Thompson agrees, and feels the situation is urgent. “The health care available to people in the Mississippi Delta is deplorable,” she says. “People are really, really sick.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom producing in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF, an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism.
