Our panel explores the history of desegregation in American hospitals from World War I through the 1970s. Inspired by the work of our chair, Vanessa Northington Gamble, our presentations challenge positivist linear narratives that suggest integration was a proverbial “magic-bullet” for the problem of race in medicine. By problematizing this interpretation, our work explores the unintended impact desegregation had on African American patients and medical communities as well as the enduring influence of white supremacy on both the practice of medicine and African American lives.

Hafeeza Anchrum and Adam Biggs both illustrate how efforts to develop interracial medical institutions often revealed intersectional tensions—particularly class hierarchies and patriarchal attitudes—embedded within African American medical communities. Biggs, focusing on New York City’s Harlem Hospital, shows how efforts to integrate the medical staff, ironically, often privileged graduates from elite white medical schools while marginalizing those from Howard and Meharry. In Philadelphia’s Mercy-Douglass Hospital and School of Nursing, Anchrum demonstrates how plans to develop the hospital into an interracial facility failed to take the needs and interests of Black nurses into account, exposing patriarchal attitudes endemic to the medical profession with significant implications for the equitable delivery of medical care. Ezelle Sanford’s work uses an innovative visual medium to illustrate and explore the unintended impact that the closing of Black hospitals, like Homer G. Phillips in St. Louis, could have on the health of local African American communities. Kylie Smith examines how efforts to enforce desegregation in southern mental health institutions exposed both the endemic abuse of Black patients as well as psychiatry’s ongoing complicity in the propagation of anti-Black stereotypes about African American mental capabilities.

Each of our panelist relies on innovative critical approaches and a rich foundation of primary source materials to offer nuanced interpretations of the desegregation process in American hospitals. Rather than a presumptive solution to the problem of race in medicine, our work demonstrates the determinant impact structural forms of white supremacy continued to exert on Black lives and medical careers even after integration took place and raises fundamental questions about what is required to meet the demand for civic equity and inclusion.