Michael Hamilton was 5 years old in 1974 when the dryer in his Algiers home caught fire and exploded while he was on top of it. He suffered second and third degree burns and was rushed to Flint-Goodridge Hospital for treatment.
His mother, Elise, didn’t know about the incident until three days later because she was at the same hospital for gallbladder surgery. While Michael was treated for his burns, Elise recovered from surgery. Elise Hamilton recalled treatment there fondly while speaking with Verite News.
“Those doctors and nurses back then, they really cared about you,” she said. “They took their time and spent time with you and examined you and more or less, became your friend.”
Flint-Goodridge began serving New Orleans’ Black community in 1896 under its original name, Phyllis Wheatley Sanitarium and Training School for Negro Nurses. The hospital went through multiple transformations and was eventually operated by Dillard University starting in 1932.
During its heyday, the hospital served as a training ground for Black doctors and nurses and boasted 128 beds. But like many Black-run hospitals in the Deep South, it shuttered due to lack of patients and increasing medical debt, both unintended consequences of racial integration. The hospital officially closed in 1985, ending its long run in New Orleans.
A similar scenario has played out in hundreds of other majority-Black communities across the United States, where Black hospitals fell casualty to social progress over the past 40 years. In that regard, the story of Flint-Goodridge isn’t unique.

The effects of integration
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 benefited millions of people. The federal campaign to desegregate hospitals, culminating in a 1969 court case out of Charleston, South Carolina, guaranteed Black patients across the South access to the same health care facilities as white patients. No longer were Black doctors and nurses prohibited from training or practicing medicine in white hospitals. But the end of legal racial segregation precipitated the demise of many Black hospitals, which were a major source of employment and a center of pride for Black Americans.
“And not just for physicians,” said Vanessa Northington Gamble, a medical doctor and historian at George Washington University. “They were social institutions, financial institutions, and also medical institutions.”
The hospital that would become Flint-Goodridge opened the same year the U.S. Supreme Court — in the New Orleans-based Plessy v. Ferguson case — ruled that racial segregation laws were constitutional, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine that would survive in the South for another half century. Over several decades, the hospital became “one of the largest and oldest Black-owned businesses” in Louisiana.
A Black hospital movement took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s to provide adequate care to the Black communities that were excluded from white hospitals.
In Charleston, staff members at a historically Black hospital on Cannon Street started publishing a monthly journal in 1899 called The Hospital Herald, which focused on hospital work and public hygiene, among other topics. When Kansas City, Missouri, opened a hospital for Black patients in 1918, people held a parade. Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi included 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 also part of the story,” said Gamble, author of “Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945.”
“But racism in medicine was the main reason why there was an establishment of Black hospitals,” she said.
By the early 1990s, Gamble estimated, there were only eight left.
“It has ripple effects in a way that affect the fabric of the community,” said Bizu Gelaye, an epidemiologist and program director of Harvard University’s Mississippi Delta Partnership in Public Health.
Researchers have largely concluded that hospital desegregation improved the health of Black patients over the long term.
One 2009 study focusing on motor vehicle accidents in Mississippi in the ’60s and ’70s found that Black people were less likely to die after hospital desegregation. They could access hospitals closer to the scene of a crash, reducing the distance they would have otherwise traveled by approximately 50 miles.
An analysis of infant mortality, published in 2006 by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that hospital desegregation in the South substantially helped close the mortality gap between Black and white infants. That’s partly because Black infants suffering from illnesses such as diarrhea and pneumonia got better access to hospitals, the researchers found.
A new analysis, 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 compelled to integrate starting in the mid-1960s if they wanted 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 co-author of the paper. His analysis found that hospital desegregation had “little, if any, effect on Black postneonatal mortality” in the South between 1959 and 1973.
‘People are really, really sick’
Nearly 3,000 babies were born at Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou before it closed its doors in 1983, two years before Flint-Goodridge was shuttered. The building remained vacant for decades until 10 years ago, when a $3 million federal grant helped renovate the facility into a short-lived urgent care center, said Myrna Smith-Thompson, who serves as executive director of the civic group that owns the Mound Bayou property. It closed again only one year later amid a legal battle over its ownership, Smith-Thompson said, and has since deteriorated.
Smith-Thompson’s grandfather led a Black fraternal organization now called the Knights and Daughters of Tabor. In 1942, that group established Taborian Hospital, during a time when Jim Crow laws barred them from accessing the same health care facilities as white patients.
“We would need at least millions, probably,” she said, estimating the cost of reopening the building. “Now, we’re back where we were prior to the renovation.”
In 2000, the hospital was listed as one of the most endangered historic places in Mississippi by the Mississippi Heritage Trust. That’s why some people would like to see it reopened in any capacity that ensures its survival as an important historical site.
Hermon Johnson Jr., director of the Mound Bayou Museum, who was born at Taborian Hospital in 1956, suggested the building could be used as a meeting space or museum. “It would be a huge boost to the community,” he said.
Meanwhile, most of the hospital’s former patients have died or left Mound Bayou. The city’s population has dropped by roughly half since 1980, U.S. Census Bureau records show. Bolivar County, where Bayou Mound is located, ranks among the poorest in the nation and life expectancy is a decade shorter than the national average.
A community health center is still open in Mound Bayou, but the closest hospital is in Cleveland, Mississippi, a 15-minute drive.
Mound Bayou Mayor Leighton Aldridge, also a board member of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, said he wants Taborian Hospital to remain a health care facility, suggesting it might be considered for a new children’s hospital or a rehabilitation center.
“We need to get something back in there as soon as possible,” he said.
Smith-Thompson agreed and feels the situation is urgent. “The health care services that are available to folks in the Mississippi Delta are deplorable,” she said. “People are really, really sick.”

New Orleans without Flint-Goodridge
In 1983, Dillard sold Flint-Goodridge to National Medical Enterprises, a national hospital chain, due to the financial burden of operating the hospital, according to a Louisiana Public Broadcasting documentary. A group of Black doctors attempted to buy the hospital and keep it in the Black community, but they couldn’t secure the necessary funding. The hospital was mostly used by patients on Medicare while paying patients were sent to white hospitals. NME closed the hospital in 1985.
Howard Rodgers, director of the New Orleans Area Council on Aging, said Flint-Goodridge provided Black New Orleanians with care by people from their own community. It was also a training ground for the next generation of medical workers.
“Flint-Goodridge was a hospital that provided a niche here in the city of New Orleans, for those individuals who wanted to be treated by African American physicians,” said Rodgers. His mother, Nelda, was among the first graduating class of Dillard University’s nursing school in 1947, which instructed students in the Flint-Goodridge Hospital.
Thirty-nine years after Flint-Goodridge Hospital closed — and more than 60 years after the end of health care segregation — the city’s Black residents are still experiencing disparities in health outcomes. The Data Center, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes demographic data about the New Orleans area, reported in 2020 that the life expectancy in majority-Black census tracts is 4.6 years below the life expectancy in majority non-Black census tracts.
Former patients of Flint-Goodridge say there was a strong sense of community in the city at that time, and that the hospital was a source of great pride. Elise Hamilton says that healthcare now just feels like business and that nurses aren’t as “friendly or attentive”.
“What I see now with hospitals, all they want to do is make money,” she said. “When you would go to see your doctor, your doctor spent time with you, right? [They] didn’t rush you in and rush you out.”
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