Racial segregation at Southern Baptist Hospital

Racial segregation at Southern Baptist Hospital shaped who could receive care, the terms on which the hospital accepted federal oversight, and the meaning of Jannie Burgess’s later admission as a patient. The institution’s public mission promised relief from suffering, yet its history included resistance to integration and a long period in which Black nurses could care for patients at private hospitals where they themselves could not be treated. Its eventual changes came under pressure, and they did not erase the unequal history that preceded them.

A charitable mission with boundaries

Southern Baptist Hospital opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, after Clementine Morgan Kelly’s proposal gained support among Baptists and other New Orleanians. Almost eight hundred city residents contributed toward buying land. At the dedication, superintendent Louis J. Bristow described the purpose as glorifying God and relieving suffering; he promised that poor charity patients would have rooms like wealthy patients rather than being confined to separate wards. The hospital’s stated mission joined the alleviation of pain, the prolongation of life, and the relief of suffering.

Access to charity care nevertheless came with restrictive conditions. A family had to provide a church letter attesting to its need and promising a donation, and Bristow said the hospital could not help people whose churches declined to assist. Charity cases were initially defined narrowly, chiefly as widows, orphans, and older people. A poor man whose wife needed treatment might instead receive credit and a lecture that charity would undermine his dignity. Bristow also used stories of charity patients, especially children, in fundraising pamphlets. The hospital’s benevolence thus operated through gatekeeping, while its missionary work promoted the standing of white Baptists, a minority among the city’s Baptist churches. The denomination’s history included support for slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial segregation.

Exclusion and federal pressure

For a Black woman such as Jannie Burgess, the central contradiction was practical as well as institutional: she could work as a nurse in many of New Orleans’s private hospitals but could not be admitted as a patient to them. Burgess entered nursing to support her children after jobs that included taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician. She spent thirty-five years working in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes. Born only months after Southern Baptist Hospital opened, she would wait more than four decades before she could receive care there.

The hospital was among the last Southern hospitals to integrate. When Medicare and other federal hospital programs began in the mid-1960s, institutions that discriminated against or racially segregated patients could not receive reimbursements. Southern Baptist Hospital refused to participate. In a 1966 statement, it said it believed it could serve people better if it remained free from governmental entanglements dictating how it should operate. Some New Orleanians applauded that position in letters to the administrator, praising the hospital for resisting what they called federal interference and defending the rights of business and professional people.

The institution’s position changed as both federal requirements and denominational policy shifted. In 1968, the hospital began quietly accepting African American patients, in keeping with new nondiscrimination statements from the Southern Baptist Convention. The following November, it set aside its opposition to Medicare, saying participation would ease the financial burden on older patients. In 1969, the federal government found the hospital compliant with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The change also brought an immediate business consequence: the number of patients over sixty-five nearly tripled during the first two weeks of Medicare participation.

Integration and continuing disputes

The move toward patient integration did not settle questions about race within the institution. Between 1979 and 1980, at least six employees filed race-discrimination charges against the hospital with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; in at least two cases, the agency found no cause to believe the allegations. African American engineer Issac E. Frezel sued Southern Baptist Hospitals, Inc., alleging that the hospital had violated his rights under the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1866. He said he had been put on probation for unauthorized shift changes, passed over for promotion, and ultimately fired, while a white coworker involved in the same offense was not disciplined. The hospital denied that anything illegal had occurred, and the case settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Burgess’s own working life included the everyday burden of that unequal order. When patients treated her poorly, she said nothing, gritted her teeth, smiled, and continued. After retirement, she moved into senior housing at Flint-Goodridge Apartments, at the former site of Flint-Goodridge Hospital—the one private New Orleans hospital where Black patients could receive care and Black doctors could pursue residency training. The contrast between that institution and the private hospitals where Burgess had worked makes her eventual admission to Memorial more than a change in personal circumstance: it came after a system had denied people like her access to care in the very places where they provided it.

Burgess as patient during the 2005 crisis

In early August 2005, after surgery and chemotherapy had held her uterine cancer at bay for two years, Burgess’s legs became too weak to carry her properly. At Memorial, doctors found a bowel blockage; surgery revealed cancer in her liver that could not be removed. Burgess said she did not want to live on machines and declined dialysis if her kidneys failed. After discussing her wishes with Burgess, her sister, and a niece, her doctor shifted the aim of treatment toward comfort and ordered small doses of morphine as needed for pain.

When Memorial’s doctors later decided that patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders would be evacuated last, Burgess was among the four DNR patients in the intensive care unit, alongside Helen Breckenridge. The order meant that a patient whose heartbeat or breathing stopped should not be revived; it did not itself mean that evacuation should be withheld. The book identifies a misunderstanding of that distinction in the reasoning of medical chairman Richard Deichmann, who believed DNR patients had the least to lose in a disaster. Burgess’s place in the last-priority group therefore brought her history into sharp relief: a nurse once barred from being a patient at private hospitals was now a seriously ill patient whose treatment preferences could be read as a reason to defer her rescue. The evidence does not establish that race motivated the DNR policy, but her experience exposes how a formally medical category could have grave consequences for someone whose autonomy and access to care had already been constrained by segregation.

A separate refusal during the crisis showed that race remained a live point of disagreement, even amid extreme resource shortages. When a family with small children rowed up to Memorial, the family was turned away despite Bryant King’s protest that the hospital had to help people. Karen Wynn, herself African American, did not perceive the refusals as racist and believed the hospital had reached its limit; King was offended in large part because the people turned away were nearly all African American. The episode does not resolve that disagreement or establish discriminatory intent. It does show that decisions about who could enter a hospital under pressure were interpreted through sharply different experiences of race, capacity, and responsibility.