Black hospitals vanished in the U.S. decades ago. Some communities have paid a price

In the black part of this historical city located in the southern part of Mississippi which was once referred to as the jewel of the delta by President Roosevelt of the United States, dreams of renovating an abandoned hospital have completely come to a standstill. 
 
An art deco sign still hovers over the entrance and states WHITE CASTLE SYSTEMS INC; however, the front doors are now shut, and there are no cars around. Today, an ordinary store on the opposite of North Edwards Avenue is much more active than the gasping Taborian Hospital which was closed down several decades ago, over four decades to be precise. 
 
Myrna Smith-Thompson who is the head of the civic organization that has ownership of the depot says that she resides one hundred miles away from where the dilapidated structure is located in Memphis, Tennessee, and she has no clue as to what the fate of the building is. 
 
“I am open to suggestions,” replied Smith-Thompson who has direct link with the grandfather that headed the black fraternal organization, the Knights and Daughters of Tabor. 
 
During this period, the aforementioned group in 1942 founded Taborian Hospital admitting exclusively Blacks and staffed with Black doctors and nurses although under Jim Crow laws, Blacks could not access the same medical facilities as the whites. 
 
“This is a very painful conversation,” stated Smith-Thompson holding her nascent born at Taborian hospital in 1949. “This I believe it is as much a part of me as is my heart and kidneys. ” 
 
The same has similarly unfolded in hundreds of other small rural areas across the United States where over the last forty years hospitals have been closed. Accordingly, the history of Mound Bayou ‘s hospital was not exceptional in this regard. 
 
However, new perspectives for treating this hospital closure assert that there was more to that than downsizing of inpatient beds. It is also a story of how, across the U. S, hundreds of black hospitals became victims of social progress. 
 
So, there is no need to introduce socially institutionalized values and concepts into the lives of people as these structures are no longer present among them. 
 
The civil rights act of 1964, and the adoption of Medicare, and Medicaid in 1965 positively impacted the lives of many people. The federal campaign to desegregate hospitals, which reached its climax in a court case in Charlestown, South Carolina in 1969 also ensured that black patients wherever they were in the South were being admitted to the same health care facility as whites were being admitted to. Black doctors and nurses could no longer be banned from training or practicing medicine in whites’ hospitals. 
 
However, the elimination of lawful racial classification led to the disintegration of many Black hospitals that were vital for black employment and a source of pride. 
 
“And not just for physicians,” Information from the source Vanessa Northington Gamble who is a a medical doctor and a historian at George Washington University. “They were social and financial entities as well as medical bodies. ” 
 
Charleston: Hospital staff members of Cannon Street, which is a Black hospital began issuing a monthly journal called the hospital’s Herald in 1899 and they covered the field work of the hospital and public health, among other topics. La laid, when Kansas City, Mo. , was founded a hospital for blacks in 1918, the people cheered. 
 
Mound Bayou had Taborian hospital which consisted of two operating rooms and properly equipped tools. It is also the place where, one of the most renowned civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer passed on in 1977. 
 
“There were Swedish hospitals. There were Jewish hospitals. There were Catholic hospitals. That’s also part of the story,” said Gamble, author of Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement: Context and Chronology. 
 
“However, racism in medicine was the core of why there was creation of black hospitals”, she said. 
 
On screening the available records in January 1991, Gamble was only able to identify eight samples. 
 
“It spreads in a manner that impacts the social structure of a community”, Epidemiologist and the director of programme, Harvard University’s Mississippi Delta Partnership in Public Health, Bizu Gelaye asserts. 
 
Thus, while the findings are somewhat mixed, scholars have widely believed that hospital desegregation increased Black patients’ health in the long run. 
 
The one published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2009 addressing patients’ mortality rates from motor vehicle injuries in Mississippi during the 60s and 70s reported that Blacks experienced lower mortality after hospital desegregation. They could get a hospital near the scene of a crash which would have otherwise be a distanced that they could have covered half of by car. 
 
A paper on infant mortality by economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in 2006 showed that increased integration of hospitals in the South had a big contribute in decreasing deaths of black infants. That is mainly because the black infants with diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia for instance, were receiving improved hospital care, according to the researchers. 
 
A new paper accepted for publication in the Review of Economics and Statistics indicates that racism remained detrimental to Black patients’ health even after the hospitals were integrated. 
 
Integration of white hospitals commenced in the mid-1960s if indeed they wanted to access Medicare funds for their institution. However they did not perhaps offer similar treatment standards to black and white patients, revealed Mark Anderson, an economics professor at Montana State University and a contributor to the above paper. Hospital desegregation was also determined not to have had, or even a negative impact on Black postneonatal mortality in the South for 1959 to 1973. 
 
What kind of life is next for a Taborian? 
 
This hospital admitted about 3,000 babies in its delivery section when it shut down its activity in 1983. This building lay idle for many years until 10 years ago; the facility was revamp at the tune of 3 million federal grant into an urgent care center that initially closed down. It was shut down again one year later over a conflict of ownership in a legal proceeding, according to Smith-Thompson, and for this reason has deteriorated. 
 
“Ideally to reopen the building, let alone renovate it would cost at least millions, or, probably,” she said. “Now we’re here, precisely the location that was existing before the renovation process. ” 
 
The AHA also confirmed that in 2000 the hospital earned a position in the most endangered historic places in Mississippi by the Mississippi Heritage Trust. That is why some people would wish to see it open in any form that would afford its continuation as an historical structure. 
 
Hermon Johnson Jr. , a director of the Mound Bayou Museum born in 1956 at Taborian Hospital approved a proposal stating that this building could be a perfect meeting place or a museum. “It would definitely be a bonus to the whole society,” he added. 
 
However, the remaining former patients of the hospital have either been discharged dead or have relocated from Mound Bayou. It’s people count reduced to about half that of 1980 : U. S. Census Bureau records prove it. Bolivar County occupies one of the lowest ranks by per capita income and inhabitants die ten years earlier than Americans on average.

A community health center had remained operational in Mound Bayou, but the nearest hospital existed in Cleveland, Mississippi for approximately 15 minutes’ drive away. 
 
Asked about the future of Taborian Hospital, Mound Bayou Mayor and the K & D of Tabor board member Leighton Aldridge expressed the desire of his organization to retain the status of the health care facility, though pointing at the possible options for its further use, such as establishment of a children’s hospital there or conversion of the building into a rehabilitation center. 
 
‘We have to get something back in there as soon as possible,’ said the man. ” 
 
Smith-Thompson nodded in response and is convinced it is a case of crisis now. Observing another adverse aspect of the problem, she said, “The health care services that are available to folks in the Mississippi Delta are deplorable. ” “People really got it real bad. ”