By Dee Dixon, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas
Feb. 12–When people think about the segregation blacks endured before integration, what might come to mind are schools, water fountains and buses. But people might not think about hospitals, which were not immune to segregation practices.
When Baptist Hospital of Southeast Texas opened its new $1.3 million, 137-bed facility at College and 11th Street in 1949, it had a separate section for black patients.
Back then hospitals, like schools and water fountains, were separate for blacks and whites. When the hospital opened, it was nicknamed “The City of Healing” and billed as an all-inclusive hospital. “But this hospital must not open its doors to some, close them to others … there must be money for the care of all who need it,” according to the author of an August 1949 Beaumont Journal article. On the first floor of the four-story hospital was a unit for blacks. It was described in the article as being as “beautifully equipped as those for the white on the upper floors, both private, semi-private and four-bed rooms and maternity delivery rooms.”
May Guillory, who in September will have worked in the hospital’s laundry department 50 years, said when she talks to younger people about how the hospital was segregated they find it hard to believe. “Back then that’s just the way we were. The blacks just stayed to themselves and the whites just stayed to themselves,” Guillory said. “You passed each other and went on with your business.” She had all four of her children at Baptist Hospital. Back then, black patients immediately checked into the “negro ward” regardless of their medical condition.
Blacks rarely came off the floor. It was mostly pregnant women who were taken to the second floor to deliver their babies, but they were immediately returned to the “negro ward.” Their husbands or other family members were not allowed to accompany them to the second floor. “The doctor came downstairs and told my husband what I had, and that the mother and the baby were doing all right,” Guillory said. “It was so much different than what they do now. You have to live it to know exactly what it was like.”
She said the hospital’s dining area and coffee shop even were segregated, and blacks had to eat in the back and order their coffee from a window outside the shop.
Sarah Thomas, 68, was 13 when she first went into the “negro ward” at the back of Baptist. Her aunt had a massive stroke and watching the black nurses tend to her sparked her desire to become a nurse. After graduating from Prairie View A& M University, she returned to Beaumont and landed a job at Martin de Porres, where blacks were treated on the third floor of the hospital.
“Everything was treated on the floor … medical patients, pediatrics. It made for crowded conditions,” said Thomas, who added that sometimes patients had to be placed in the hallways.
She explained other differences.
In white hospitals, men and women were treated in separate wings. In the black hospital, because of space it was not uncommon for male patients to be treated near women.
At Martin de Porres, nurses had to deliver babies because doctors wouldn’t make it in time when they were called in, Thomas said. “Sometimes they didn’t even come,” she said. She later went on to become the first black nurse for Mobil Oil in 1963, where she worked for 25 years.
Dr. Frank Giglio, an obstetrician and gynecologist, had a private practice but would see patients or send patients to area hospitals. “Black patients couldn’t go to St. Elizabeth. You took them to Baptist to deliver them,” Giglio said.
He said the nuns tried to encourage blacks to go to Martin de Porres to deliver their babies or for any other medical treatment they needed. However, often black mothers didn’t have prenatal care, and when they were in labor they went to the nearest hospital.
While there was a separate wing for black patients, if they required facilities on another floor they did receive that care, Giglio said. “If they were in ICU they would move to the same ICU as the white people,” he said. “They had access to everything. It’s just they were segregated in the hospital.”
The situation became controversial on New Year’s Day when the first baby born was celebrated and inundated with gifts. “They only gave it to the first white baby born, and we objected to that. They said the black merchants had to give it to the first black baby,” Giglio said. “It seems strange now, but all the schools in the city were segregated and everything else was segregated.” He said while the hospital was segregated, patients were treated equally. Doris Price Nealy, one of the first black professors at Lamar University and a director of the associate nursing program, said nurses sometimes had to endure prejudice on the job. While doing her clinical studies as a student, the blacks were not addressed with courtesy titles like their white counterparts.
“It was so degrading. That is how they distinguished the black nurses from the white nurses. It was subtle stuff,” she said. In her hometown of Teague in the 1940s, Price Nealy remembers how black women were reluctant to go to the hospital. Instead, they had midwives who would come to their home to deliver their babies. At the hospital, the black babies weren’t kept in the nursery with the white babies but were kept in the room with their mom, Nealy said. “Now it’s called rooming in, but back then it was called separatism,” she said.
While there were segregated wings, Southeast Texas also had black-only hospitals and ones opened by black doctors for the black community. Three brothers, Drs. Maxie C., Ed and Curtis Sprott, opened the Sprott Hospital Clinic on the city’s south end to treat black patients. The clinic created an opportunity for black doctors to practice medicine in the city.
Hotel Dieu was a hospital started in 1897 by Catholic nuns in the Charlton-Pollard neighborhood. In the 1940s, the Martin de Perres hospital was built to treat black patients.
In 1958, the Jefferson County commissioners went on record in favor of having black patients at the county tuberculosis hospital. By 1965, the facility was closing and 16 black patients had to be relocated.
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