On Friday, October 23, the 20th annual Homer G. Phillips Public Health Lecture Series featured local author and historian John Wright as keynote speaker. Wright’s topic was “Homer G. Phillips and the Ville: Celebrating the Legacy.”
Will Ross, assistant dean for Diversity at Washington University School of Medicine, introduced Wright. In his opening remarks, Ross criticized local media for what he claimed was factually challenged coverage of a recent scandal. The scandal involved accusations that the hospital staff illegally took babies and offered them for adoption during the 1940-‘60s .
Lamenting the harm that this coverage caused to the hospital’s reputation, Ross announced a potentially promising development: the nationally broadcast program “20/20” has agreed to produce a program on the Homer G. Phillips “scandal.”
Wright prefaced his lecture with comments on the relationship between St. Louis and its black history, stating, “It’s easy for St. Louis to forget the role blacks have had in the making of the region.”
He noted the controversy surrounding the Siegfried Reinhardt mural at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. Wright pointed out that only through popular protest was a companion mural constructed depicting the role of blacks in the history of flight.
To Wright, Homer G. Phillips Hospital reflected the work and sacrifice of the surrounding community. He insinuated that the hospital’s story provides a metaphor for the black experience in St. Louis – nothing has been achieved without a fight.
Despite the passage of a 1923 bond, the city refused to allocate funds towards a new facility, instead favoring a segregated add-on to City Hospital. Only through a sustained effort on the part of Homer G. Phillips himself, with the black community’s support, did the city finally relent and allow an all-black hospital to be built. With the hospital’s dedication in 1937, at 2601 N. Whittier in the heart of the Ville, the segregated community finally had its own hospital.
Before Wright began his talk, Dr. Larry Shapiro, executive vice chancellor at Washington University School of Medicine, stated that Homer G. Phillips Hospital fostered a “culture of equity and excellence.” Wright’s lecture reinforced this by reminding attendees of why the hospital was so important, not just in St. Louis but nationally.
As one of just two hospitals of its caliber, it served as a primary training facility for young doctors, attracting nearly 50 percent of black medical school graduates. For the first half of the hospital’s lifespan, St. Louis remained segregated. Wright stated that thanks to the hospital and its high-caliber staff, blacks in St. Louis had access to a level of care that surpassed anything they could receive from a white hospital in that period.
More important still, Wright pointed out, was the connection that existed between the hospital and the Ville neighborhood where it stood. The Ville, he noted, provided the foundation for the black middle class in the period after segregation, boasting one of the best high schools in the Midwest in Sumner High School.
It was not uncommon, Wright stated, for those living near Homer G. Phillips to personally know a doctor who worked at the hospital. Many women from the Ville and neighboring black communities worked at the hospital as nurses.
For students at Sumner High School, the hospital provided proof that hard work could lead to success and respect. In effect, the hospital, which physically towered over the Ville, was a symbol of the strength of the black community, despite segregation.
However, soon after segregation ended in St. Louis, closing Homer G. Phillips became part of the city’s political agenda. Wright concluded that the closure of the hospital in 1979 was a betrayal of the trust between the white and black communities. He characterized the move as the action of a politically weak mayor, a mayor unwilling to confront whites in South City with the fact that the aging City Hospital was the more suitable building to close.
Thus, one of the largest employers of middle class blacks in the region was closed. Wright stressed this was particularly devastating to the economic vitality of the North Side, which was already suffering the effects of migration to the county.
