Story Experience: 1927 – 1954
Dr. Edith Irby Jones entering University of Arkansas College of Medicine, 1948.(Courtesy of Dr. Edith Irby Jones)
In September 1948, a young woman proudly stepped through the doors of the University of Arkansas College of Medicine in Little Rock. Dr. Edith Irby Jones, whose mother cleaned other people’s homes and whose father, a tenant farmer, died when she was 6 years old, became the first African American admitted to this medical school and was one of only three women in a class of ninety-one. Dr. Jones and a few other African-American students began to break through barriers at southern medical schools in the late 1940s. Dr. Jones later came to Houston as the second African American accepted for a residency at the Baylor University College of Medicine. Hear how Dr. Jones felt on her first day of medical school at University of Arkansas below:
In Houston, Dr. Jones joined a cadre of African-American physicians who, since the opening of the Houston Negro Hospital in 1927, had increased their numbers, expanded their facilities to provide better care for their patients, and continued to fight discrimination in Houston, which by 1930, was the largest segregated city in the United States.
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- Baylor University College of Medicine
Baylor College of Medicine, the only private medical school in the southwestern United States, began in 1900 as the University of Dallas Medical Department. It became affiliated with Baylor University in 1903 in Waco, Texas.
In 1943, the Texas Medical Center (TMC) invited the Baylor University College of Medicine to join. The first building in the new TMC was the Roy and Lillie Cullen Building. Completed in 1947, it became the permanent home for Baylor. The following year Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, a well-respected pioneer in cardiac surgery, came to Baylor as the new Chairman of Surgery and immediately gave the institution greater national attention.
In 1948, Baylor became affiliated with the Veterans Affairs Hospital. This affiliation provided teaching facilities where medical students gained practical training in a hospital setting. This same year, Baylor laid the groundwork for an association with Jefferson Davis Hospital. Other hospital affiliations followed, including the Methodist Hospital in 1951, Texas Children’s Hospital in 1952, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in 1954, and the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research in 1959.
Baylor College of Medicine began its affiliated residency program in 1955. Affiliated residency combined the resources of several hospitals into a comprehensive curriculum. It was one of the first such programs in the United States.
In the 1950s, Baylor admitted its first African-American resident, Dr. John Madison. He completed a residency in internal medicine. Dr. Edith Irby Jones followed him as the second African-American resident in medicine at the end of the decade.
By an executive order, President Harry Truman had ended segregation in the military in 1948. The order required that any facility operated and used by military be integrated. Thus, through Baylor’s affiliation, Dr. Madison and Dr. Jones trained at the Veterans Hospital in Houston at a time when other hospitals were not open to them.
In 1969, by mutual agreement, the College of Medicine ended its affiliation with Baylor University and became an independent institution. The separation allowed for greater nonsectarian support and greater access to federal research funding. The institution’s name changed to the Baylor College of Medicine.
In 1969, Baylor also admitted its first African-American medical students. Several of Houston’s physicians attended Baylor College of Medicine, or worked in one of its affiliated hospitals as a resident.
In 1975 Dr. Robert Bacon joined the staff as its first full-time African-American faculty member.
- Houston Negro Hospital
On June 19, 1926, Mr. Cullinan dedicated the cornerstone for the new hospital to the black community and in memory of his son John, who died shortly after his military service in World War I. As an army officer, John Cullinan led black soldiers, and his favorable impression of their service influenced his father’s decision to offer financial support. The bronze tablet posted on the front of the building read,
“This building erected A.D. 1926, in memory of Lieutenant John Halm Cullinan, 334th F. A. 90th Division, A. E. F., one of the millions of young Americans who served in the World War to preserve and perpetuate human liberty without regard to race, creed, or color, is dedicated to the American Negro to promote self-help, to inspire good citizenship and for the relief of suffering sickness and disease amongst them.”
Isaiah Milligan (I.M.) Terrell had retired the presidency of Houston College in 1925 to help raise funds for this new hospital. In the late 1800s, he had helped organize Prairie View A&M University for African-American students some 40 miles northwest of Houston. Named the hospital’s first superintendent, Professor Terrell expressed the gratitude of the African-American community at the dedication in 1926 and predicted that services the hospital would provide “would spread throughout the country,” inspiring others to, “erect similar buildings for the alleviation of human suffering.”1
The Houston Negro Hospital, which was later known as Riverside General Hospital, opened to patients on May 14, 1927. In a type of prepaid system that appeared in other facilities as well, the Houston Negro Hospital sold families memberships for $6 a year. These memberships guaranteed all family members were eligible for free hospitalization for a limited number of days each year. While such memberships were not a prerequisite for care and thus all African Americans were welcome at the hospital, this prepaid system helped underwrite hospital operations.
In addition to providing a much-needed facility for black patients, the Houston Negro Hospital gave African-American physicians a place to work. In creating entities such as the Houston Negro Hospital and the National Medical Association, “black professionals identified the Achilles’ heel of white supremacy: Segregation provided blacks the chance, indeed, the imperative, to develop a range of distinct institutions that they controlled. Maneuvering through their organizations and institutions, they exploited that fundamental weakness in the ‘separate but equal’ system permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. For all their violence, lynchings, prejudice, and hatred, white supremacists could not exterminate black people. The white supremacists’ major goal, after all, was to maintain a pliable, exploitable labor force that would remain permanently in a subordinate place.”
Their education separated black professionals from other members of the African-American community and allowed them to emerge as community leaders. Parallel institutions, such as the Houston Negro Hospital, provided relatively safe havens for African-American physicians to hone their skills, nurture professional relations, and develop financial security. Black doctors tended to be more financially secure than black attorneys, for example, who worked within the country’s singular legal system. Nonetheless, both groups used parallel professional organizations such as the Lone Star Medical Association to forge innovative strategies for resistance.
Citations
- "Houston Negro Hospital Opens on Juneteenth," The Houston Informer, 26 June 1926.
