Mapping Segregated Medicine

As part of a larger project tracing how African Americans used St. Louis’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital (1937-1979) to engage in political, social, and economic struggles for equality and full citizenship in the United States, “Mapping Segregated Medicine” is a digital history project designed to chart the greater record of what historian Vanessa Northington Gamble calls the “Black Hospital Movement” across the twentieth century. Using GIS technology, it maps important health institutions that served Black communities in the Jim Crow era and overlays them with demographic data from the US census.

In visual form, my project reveals the impact of American healthcare’s desegregation in the 1960s. Analyzing the impact of hospital closures and mergers amid an increasingly privatized hospital system, my project attempts to answer the following questions: What did the network of healthcare institutions available to African Americans during the period of racial segregation look like across the United States over time? To what extent did the network of African American-established and Black-serving institutions spread across the United States? What happened to this network of health institutions after American hospitals were desegregated in the 1960s?

“Mapping Segregated Medicine” is intended to be used as a teaching tool to complement my larger project. Mapping this institutional network will provide new insights on an extensive African American health network in the Jim Crow era. It illustrates the extent to which segregation impacted where African Americans could obtain healthcare and enhances our understanding of how shifting African Americans populations themselves played a role in shaping the development of American healthcare.