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“Let Down Your Bucket Where You Are”

The Afro-American Hospital and Black Health Care in Mississippi, 1924-1966

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

David T. Beito  and
Linda Royster Beito
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Abstract

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Under the burden of Jim Crow, how did African Americans obtain health care? For nearly 40 years the Afro-American Hospital of Yazoo City, Mississippi, was a leading health care supplier for blacks in the Mississippi Delta. It was founded in 1928 by the Afro-American Sons and Daughters, a black fraternal society, and provided a wide range of medical services. The society, which eventually had 35,000 members, was led by Thomas J. Huddleston, a prosperous black entrepreneur and advocate of Booker T. Washington’s self-help philosophy. The hospital had a low death rate compared to other hospitals that served blacks in the South during the period. It ceased operation in 1966 as a fraternal entity after years of increasingly burdensome regulation, competitive pressure from government and third-party health care alternatives, and the migration of younger dues-paying blacks to the North.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 30 , Issue 4: The Persistence of the Health Insurance Dilemma , Winter 2006 , pp. 551 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2006 

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