Building a case against segregated hospitals
After writing a series of letters asking segregated white hospitals to hire black doctors and dentists, a visit from a black patient who needed emergency care motivated Simkins to push more aggressively for integration of medical facilities. He describes his efforts to build a legal case based on the claim that because these ostensibly private hospitals were built using some public funds, they could not legally exclude African Americans. The case made it to the Supreme Court on appeal but died there.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with George Simkins, April 6, 1997. Interview R-0018. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
-
By the time the [Simkins v. Cone] case arose in 1962, why do you think
you and the other plaintiffs chose that route to try to open access for
blacks to better health care. Were there other options that you thought
about at the time, or was a lawsuit agreed on as the best way to go
about it?
- GEORGE SIMKINS:
-
We first wrote letters to Moses Cone and Wesley Long Hospitals, asking
them to admit black physicians and dentists on their staff. We just got
the run-around on that. We wrote several letters, and they just denied
us. After so many denials, it started like this. A patient came in my
office, I think his name was Donald Lines, he was a student at A
& T. He had a temperature of 103, and his jaw was swollen. I
knew right then that this boy needed to be in the hospital, where he
could get some attention. I called the black hospital, which was L.
Richardson, and they told me they could not admit him
because they had a waiting period of two and three weeks, and that they
just didn't have any beds available. You would go over there,
and there would be beds in the hallways. You'd have to walk
down a narrow path through the hallways without running into the beds,
because it was so crowded. Later that same day, I called up Cone and
Wesley Long hospitals, and they had beds available, but they would not
accept him because of his race.
- KAREN KRUSE THOMAS:
-
So they didn't even have separate wards, they were both
completely white hospitals?
- GEORGE SIMKINS:
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Wesley Long wouldn't accept you at all. Cone had a policy
where if it was something that L. Richardson did not have, they would
accept the patient, but he would lose his doctorߞhe would have
to get a white doctor who was on the staff there to work on him. This
case was nothing that L. Richardson couldn't handle, if they
had room. The boy needed to be on antibiotics and hospitalized, but Cone
would not accept him. So at that point, I called Jack Greenberg, who was
the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund out of New
York. I told Jack, "We really need to do something about these
hospitals. They will not accept any black patient, and if Cone accepts
them, they lose their doctor." He said, "George, if
you can organize the black physicians, I will see what I can
do." At this point, I knew that some of the younger fellows
wanted to open up these hospitals, and some of the older fellows
didn't. One of the reasons some of the older fellows
didn't want to was because everybody was operating at L.
Richardson. Whether you were qualified or not, you could operate over
there. These fellows didn't want to lose their income from
operating, and they knew if they had been admitting to Cone and Wesley
Long, they would have to be board certified to do any operations, so
they weren't too much for it. They also figured that if you
opened up Cone and Wesley Long, it would hurt L. Richardson. Patients
would stop going to L. Richardson. I went around with a petition, and
got guys that I knew who would sign upߞI put their names on
there first. Then I would approach the older fellows, and those that
were reluctant, when they saw all the younger fellows down there, some
of them signed, and some of them wouldn't sign. So I got
about 11 plaintiffs in all, some patients, the majority of dentists.
Then Jack asked me to see if either of these hospitals had been built
with federal Hill-Burton funds, because that was the way we had to go in
court. If they had not been built with Hill-Burton funds, there was
nothing we could do to open them up, because they were strictly private
hospitals. I was elated to find that both hospitals had been built with
Hill-Burton funds, and we preceded to attack them at that point, on the
grounds that they had been built with Hill-Burton funds. I went around
and got 50 dollars from each [plaintiff], so they could pay for the
expense of the suit. I sent that to the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, and we hired a local lawyer. He never would file suit
after we had done all the work, so I called Jack, and said,
"Jack, I think we've got a scared lawyer on our
hands. We need to get this thing filed." Because it was months
and months, and it never was filed. He understood, and said
he'd take care of it. So he called Conrad Pearson, who
was an NAACP attorney in Durham, and Conrad came over
the next day and filed the case. So that's how we got
started. Of course, we lost it in Middle District Court, Judge Stanley
ruled that the hospitals were private, and they had a right to
discriminate if they wanted to. Then we appealed it to the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals, and we won a 3-2 decision. Then the hospitals
appealed it to the United States Supreme Court, and they were denied.
Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney General at the time, and he wrote a brief
on our behalf to the Court to try to get the Court to open up these
hospitals to everybody. That was about it.