Journal of Urban History 2010 Kirouac Fram 594 616

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2010 36: 594 originally published online 19 April 2010Journal of Urban HistoryJaclyn Kirouac-Fram

Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, 1976-1984''To Serve the Community Best'': Reconsidering Black Politics in the Struggle to Save

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Journal of Urban History36(5) 594 –616

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“To Serve the Community Best”: Reconsidering Black Politics in the Struggle to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, 1976-1984

Jaclyn Kirouac-Fram1

Abstract

The move to consolidate, and eventually to close, Homer G. Phillips Hospital sparked a major uprising in St. Louis, Missouri, during the years 1976 through 1984. This article explores the struggle in St. Louis’s black community to keep open, and later to reopen, Homer G. Phillips Hospital from a vantage point that demonstrates the diversity of opinion surrounding the struggle. For many black St. Louis residents, the physical space of Homer G. Phillips Hospital was a metaphor for identity, a manifestation of citizenship rights, and a means of delineating a territory of shared histories, understandings, and values. For others, it was a relic of segregation and racism. In seeking to understand the diversity of public reaction, this article addresses class antagonism, examines the varied and divergent motivations for eliminating or maintaining services at the hospital, and reconsiders the discourse of “black politics.” It is a decisive illustration of how the national twin crises of deindustrialization and privatization affected a heterogeneous black community.

Keywords

African American, urban space, St. Louis, class, health care

“Hospitals are about the only thing that the people have left as far as city service is concerned.” Those were the sentiments of Benjamin L. Goins, license collector for the city of St. Louis in April 1976. Earlier that month, the city’s budget director had proposed the elimination of acute and long-term care services at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, a municipal hospital located on the heavily black north side of St. Louis, as part of a larger plan to bridge a $10 million budget gap for the 1976-1977 fiscal year.1 The plan proposed consolidating the city’s municipal acute and long-term care services at City Hospital #1, the city’s other municipal hospital, which was located in a more southern, majority-white section of the city. The Citywide Coalition to Save All City

1Saint Louis University, Missouri

Corresponding Author:Jaclyn Kirouac-Fram, Department of American Studies, Saint Louis University, 3800 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63108Email: [email protected]

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Kirouac-Fram 595

Hospitals, a grassroots group of concerned north side residents and hospital employees, held its first large-scale meeting to hear from the community in June of that year. Saint Louis University urban affairs professor Ernest Calloway led off the meeting by summarizing, “The private hospitals have moved out. Even before that our doctors moved out of the city. We are down to the public health and hospital services. I don’t think we can afford to have the hospitals go.”2 Later that year, when the only private hospital remaining on the north side closed its doors to move to a suburban county location, Calloway wrote, “Without Homer G., north St. Louis will become a health desert.”3

Homer G. Phillips Hospital, in addition to serving the health needs of the majority of St. Louis’s poor black residents, was a symbol of pride for the surrounding community. Since it opened in 1937 as the city’s municipal hospital for black patients, Phillips Hospital had been a nationally recognized and revered training hospital for black physicians and nurses, uplifting generations of black community leaders. By 1962, 55 percent of all black medical specialists in the United States had been trained at Phillips Hospital, and the Homer G. Phillips nursing school was the largest producer of black registered nurses in the world (see Figure 1). At that time, there was no sizable black community in the United States that was not served by at least one Homer G. Phillips–trained doctor.4 Desegregated in the mid-1950s, the hospital was a conflicted symbol of both segregation and self-improvement for black St. Louisans.

The move to consolidate, and eventually to close, Homer G. Phillips Hospital sparked a major uprising in St. Louis during the years 1976 through 1984. This article explores the struggle

Figure 1. Note: Photo of the class of 1965, Homer G. Phillips Hospital School of Nursing (Courtesy of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection).



596 JournalofUrbanHistory36(5)

in St. Louis’s black community to keep open, and later to reopen, Homer G. Phillips Hospital from a vantage point that demonstrates the diversity of opinion surrounding the struggle. It is not my intention to judge whether the local St. Louis government was correct in choosing to close the hospital. Instead, I am seeking to contextualize and understand the diversity of public reaction to the threat of its closure and to its eventual shuttering. Rather than presuming the existence of a single black community, I approach these events in a manner that addresses class antagonism, examines the multivalent motivations for eliminating or maintaining services at the hospital, and reconsiders the discourse of “black politics.”5

To interpret the scope of the conflict that erupted in 1979 in response to the consolidation announcement, I propose that the physical space of Homer G. Phillips Hospital was tied to ideo-logical space, serving as a metaphor for identity, a manifestation of citizenship rights, and a means of delineating a territory of shared histories, understandings, and values. Because the hospital denoted a range of meanings for a diversity of individuals, threats of its impending closure pre-cipitated a complex, divisive struggle whose participants articulated divergent but complimentary desires in retaining a full range of services at Phillips Hospital. Protesters faced opposition from budget-conscious city leaders, both black and white; the majority of the city’s white population; and middle- and upper-class black St. Louisans for whom Homer G. Phillips Hospital was a relic of segregation and racism. This article attempts to document and understand the strivings of north side residents and their allies to preserve heritage, follow a moral imperative to care for the sick and poor, and secure health care as an element of full national citizenship, while also recognizing the validity of competing motivations to close the hospital.6 By providing the context and the analysis through which to understand a significant conflict of which scant official documentation exists, this article offers a decisive illustration of how the national twin crises of deindustrializa-tion and privatization affected a heterogeneous black community.7

To understand the significance of the eight-year Homer G. Phillips Hospital struggle, one must first understand the particular history of segregation and black institutions in St. Louis. Although segregation in St. Louis was applied less evenly than in most Southern cities, blacks living in St. Louis in the first half of the twentieth century labored under strict school and residential segregation, employment discrimination, and harassment. By midcentury, St. Louis had emerged as one of the most residentially segregated cities in America. Between 1900 and 1950, the central corridor of St. Louis became home to a concentration of black families as white families moved to the urban periphery or beyond to the suburbs.8

Homer G. Phillips Hospital opened in 1937 in the Ville neighborhood of North St. Louis—one of the few areas where black families could purchase homes and the schools were within walking distance. At that time, the Ville was home to an emerging black middle class and the only high school in St. Louis that admitted black students; by 1925, the neighborhood offered educational opportunities from grade school through college.9 For their own protection, pride, and advancement, black St. Louisans in the first half of the century created a host of civic institu-tions, organizations, houses of worship, and social networks in which to navigate their path toward greater independence.10 Black leadership formed the St. Louis chapter of the Urban League, along with the local branch of the NAACP and the Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. St. Louis’s black-owned newspapers offered communication networks among diverse groups and organizations, and Poro Beauty College and Lincoln Law School, both located in the Ville, turned out skilled professionals.11

Still, the founding of a black hospital in segregated St. Louis was a divisive and controversial issue that rooted Phillips Hospital in conditions of struggle from its inception. Prior to 1914, blacks had few health care options; the city’s one public hospital, City Hospital #1, admitted black patients to a damp basement level but prevented black physicians from practicing there. That year, the city purchased a small abandoned building, made the requisite renovations, dubbed it City



Kirouac-Fram 597

Hospital #2, and opened it to the black population (see Figure 2). With only 177 beds, however, this building was grossly inadequate to serve the burgeoning St. Louis black community. In 1919, St. Louis resident and attorney Homer Phillips revived the issue of a black hospital, this time pushing for the construction of a large, state-of-the-art facility. In 1922, the city passed a bond issue that allocated $1 million for this purpose, but political infighting delayed construction until 1932, one year after Phillips’s death. Dedicated in 1937, Homer G. Phillips Hospital bore the name of the man who had championed it for nearly two decades (see Figure 3).12 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, and Missouri’s Governor Lloyd C. Stark

Figure 2. Note: Photo of City Hospital #2 (Courtesy of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection).




were present as guests of honor at the opening and dedication ceremony, held on February 22, 1937.13 Designed by architect Albert A. Osburg, the hospital complex is located at 2601 Whittier Street in North St. Louis and consists of a central administration building with four radiating patient wards, a service building, and a nurses’ residence. All of the buildings are faced with yellow brick, are trimmed with Art Deco terra cotta, and are scaled to six and seven floors to blend in with their residential surroundings (see Figure 4).14

Since Homer G. Phillips Hospital’s inception, the city of St. Louis treated it as a second priority in municipal health care. Over the course of its history, the hospital developed as an autonomous entity, separate from the other public hospital, City Hospital #1, and served an isolated population in an increasingly socially and economically isolated area of St. Louis. Regularly understaffed, Phillips Hospital consistently received considerably less funding and support than City Hospital #1. At the time it opened, 224 Works Progress Administration and National Youth Administration workers staffed Phillips Hospital; in July 1946, following termi-nation of government funds for these workers, the city made no substantial effort to replace them.15 Despite these challenges, the hospital staff and the surrounding community took great pride in the leadership of the hospital. At a 1946 meeting of intern alumni, 121 physicians attended from thirty-eight states. A history of the hospital, written in 1961, featured photos of all medical directors, superintendents, and directors of nursing since the hospital opened.16

Figure 3.Note: Photo of opening day celebration, Homer G. Phillips Hospital, 1937 (Courtesy of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection).



Kirouac-Fram 599

Once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled restrictive housing covenants unenforceable in 1948 (Shelley v. Kraemer), however, the black middle class began a slow move away from the Ville, replaced by working-class and indigent black residents who had been displaced by postwar urban renewal efforts in the central area of St. Louis. The Ville became one of a collection of neighbor-hoods referred to collectively and derisively as “the north side,” where working-class residents had fewer financial resources for home maintenance and homeownership and the physical appearance of the neighborhoods deteriorated. The self-contained nature of the Ville, which once fostered growth and pride, now functioned to isolate its residents from the larger St. Louis community. Those who had fled had little desire to revive a neighborhood that was to them a symbol of repression.17 Although segregation had provided the social-spatial framework in which black St. Louisans cultivated numerous institutions and a sense of community, it was also the condition most responsible for the decline of these same institutions, including Phillips Hospital, less than fifty years later.18

By the 1950s, city hospitals around the country had modeled themselves as custodial medical centers where patients presented themselves and were treated and released once recovered. In terms of staffing, equipment, and facilities, most were ill prepared for the growing emphasis on research and community-based preventive care. For many cities, the idea of getting out of the business of providing hospital care took hold in the 1960s: between 1961 and 1988, seventy-one black public hospitals were closed, consolidated, or privatized. Of these, forty-nine were closed.19 Between 1964 and 1974, five cities—Seattle, San Diego, Toledo, Kansas City, and Newark—transferred their public hospitals to state or private authorities and contracted for the care of indigent patients. Public hospitals had become a “costly, troublesome, constantly complaining, unattractive, unloved brat.”20

Figure 4.Note: Homer G. Phillips Hospital aerial photo (Courtesy of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection).




Diminishing city tax bases, the result of movement of middle- and upper-class households to suburban areas, as well as the resulting physical and emotional isolation of these classes from the inner-city poor, increased the difficulty of extracting necessary funds for public health care.21 In St. Louis, where the tax base for the city is separate from that of the suburban county, the problem of funding was even greater as city governments found it increasingly difficult to maintain hospi-tal revenue levels sufficient to cover rising medical costs.22 A March 1977 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch cited the basic concern in the hospital consolidation issue as cost. City officials and local newspaper editorials expressed confidence that consolidation of the city’s two public hospi-tals would improve the overall quality of medical care in St. Louis and that the quality of care would continue to decline as long as the city expended resources to maintain duplicate services at two hospitals (see Figure 5).23

By 1976, thoughts of closing the hospital had circulated in St. Louis government for more than twenty years; previous mayors, however, viewed any action toward that end to be “political suicide.”24 Sensing the unrest that immediate conversion or closure would precipitate, Mayor John H. Poelker ordered an independent feasibility study regarding potential consolidation with the city’s other municipal hospital, City Hospital #1, located closer to the city’s majority-white southern neighborhoods.25

The resulting report, released in September 1976, cited Phillips Hospital as a “principle resource to the local and national Black community . . . an anchor institution . . . providing eco-nomic resources as well as community services,” and “a major resource for the education of American Blacks.” Still, the report concluded that the city should close Phillips Hospital and con-solidate services at City Hospital #1, citing that a consolidation at Phillips would be too costly and

Figure 5.Note: Editorial cartoon, January 5, 1978 (St.LouisAmerican, January 5, 1978, p. 6).



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would result in a hospital of inadequate size, far from major highways, and with less ground area for parking.26

Several of the city’s black aldermen challenged these findings, asserting that the report lacked an economic analysis of the impact of closing Phillips Hospital, which provided more than six hundred jobs and $6 million in payroll to a severely depressed area. Nor, they agreed, did the report take into account structural deficiencies that would require extensive renovation at City Hospital #1 were the merger to take place.27 Reaction in the press, however, was stern. “It should now be abundantly clear,” wrote the Post-Dispatch, “that the city’s two general hospitals can and should be consolidated at City Hospital.”28 In October 1976, in the midst of heavy debate, the St. Louis Board of Estimate voted to keep both hospitals open through the use of federal revenue-sharing funds.

Nearly a year later, in June 1977, newly elected St. Louis mayor James F. Conway appointed a fourteen-member interracial task force to study the city’s health service system, declaring that he would endorse its decision even if it meant closing one of the two municipal hospitals.29 In its November 1977 report, the task force made several recommendations, including planning for construction of a new public acute care facility, merging the two hospitals’ staffs under one administration, eliminating duplicate services, and increasing utilization of neighborhood health clinics.30

Following through on his pledge of endorsement, Mayor Conway prepared a single budget for the two municipal hospitals and announced in February 1977 that the merger of staff and admin-istration would begin on May 1, 1978; he stated a long-term intention of replacing both hospitals with a new facility. Many black city aldermen saw the merger as the first step toward an ultimate closure of Phillips, prompting the mayor to defend his intentions. “We have no ploy,” Conway announced, “no design, no direction for closing Phillips.” Still, St. Louis’s black leadership har-bored considerable doubt that a new public hospital would ever be built. “I’m satisfied,” a bullish Conway later stated, “that all city residents, including the black community, will be supportive in the end.”31

In May 1978, with Mayor Conway’s announcement of the consolidation of the hospitals’ obstetrics and pediatrics divisions at City Hospital #1, Missouri State Senator J. B. “Jet” Banks expressed a common sentiment: “Conway’s doing this [hospital closure] piece by piece.” That same month, Detroit’s Mayor Coleman Young, while visiting St. Louis, gave a speech asserting his theory that racism was the motive for the consolidation. When, in December 1978, the St. Louis Board of Health and Hospitals recommended consolidation of all acute care (in-patient) services at City Hospital, leaving only emergency and out-patient clinic services at Phillips Hospital, north side alderman Freeman Bosley stated that keeping the Phillips Hospital open as a full-service hospital was “the last opportunity the black community has to save itself.”32

Black leaders’ early support for maintaining services at Homer G. Phillips, however, was short-lived and disappeared from press accounts and mayoral correspondence by 1980. St. Louis’s black city aldermen and state representatives were a professional class whose voting records demonstrate a commitment to urban renewal but also their awareness of the acceptable bound-aries of practical reform. They faced the problem of the “hollow prize,” a term coined by urban planner Paul Friesema in 1969 and later defined by historians Neil Kraus and Todd Swanstrom as a city that has been “depleted of the resources needed to significantly improve the quality of the lives of the city’s residents.”33 As industry, retail business, and taxable income followed the upper- and middle-income populations out of the central city in the 1970s, St. Louis faced the problem of maintaining infrastructure and public services for smaller populations with greater needs. Elected by a groundswell of registered black voters following the 1965 Voting Rights Act, St. Louis’s new black aldermen quickly understood that election to local government does not ensure the resources necessary to improve the quality of life for their majority-black




constituents. As the tax base shrank, St. Louis grew increasingly dependent on state and federal funding, and as Friesema predicted in 1969, “state legislatures, mostly whites representing other whites, [became] even less interested in providing funds or other aid to cities.”34 Black city aldermen faced the triple challenge of securing scarce funds during a period of fiscal con-servatism, situating and fortifying their position within the political system, and simultaneously making efforts to change the system itself to bring support back to the city.35 They were, accord-ing to historian Manning Marable, “astute in the noisy discourse of the streets, but comfortable in the quiet confines of corporate headquarters.”36 St. Louis’s black leadership, while aware of potential ramifications for poor black city residents, felt compelled to support growth and eco-nomic development projects that were clearly regressive, subsuming human interests to the promise of a rejuvenated tax base.37

Neither the local NAACP nor the local Urban League expressed an opinion regarding the Phillips Hospital issue during the seven years when its fate was debated. In April 1980, Mayor Conway was a guest at the Urban League’s annual dinner meeting, after which league president William Douthit sent a letter apologizing for the lack of enthusiasm for his presence. “I’m afraid,” he wrote, “the closing of Homer G. Phillips Hospital has left a sore place that is not yet healed. . . . You deserve some special gratitude; it isn’t easy to confront an audience that harbors hostile feelings, I know. . . . I believe the Black community will eventually accept your decision . . . as inevitable.”38

Arguments for consolidation of acute- and long-term care at City Hospital #1 were certainly not without merit. Mayor James Conway, for example, consistently placed Phillips Hospital in the context of the total municipal health system and argued for a more balanced, comprehensive pub-lic health care approach. “You cannot,” he wrote, “isolate Phillips Hospital from the rest of the system any more than you can look at one branch of a tree and isolate it from the other branches, from the trunk, from the roots, or from the climate.”39 He proposed consolidation of acute care services away from Phillips Hospital as the “preliminary step taken in order to upgrade the overall health care delivery to the poor of our city” and emphasized that “hospitalization is the conse-quence of lack of health care.” Allocating funds to keep Phillips open as a full-service hospital would deny funding to municipal clinics and education efforts that “prevent illness among our poor, and treat it at the earliest, pre-hospital stages.” He relied on the 1977 task force finding that priority be given to prevention, diagnosis, and out-patient treatment and declared in several letters to concerned citizens that “the poor are asking for a better overall health care system, and I intend to do everything in my power to help them get it.”40

Judging by the letters received in Mayor Conway’s office in 1979 regarding the Phillips Hospital consolidation, it is clear that many in the public saw their black leaders beginning to following this rubric.41 The rhetoric of City Hall and of black leaders supportive of the consoli-dation was rife with references to cost savings and distribution of resources across a spectrum of health care programs and devoid of reference to heritage, health security, or the genuine fear expressed by many north side residents of a slow dismantling of their neighborhood.42 Skepticism grew regarding leaders’ financial priorities, and accusations surfaced of valuing “a balanced budget more than human need.”43

In October 1979, political activist Angela Davis made a speech at a St. Louis rally in support of keeping Phillips Hospital open, urging listeners to boycott downtown: Mayor Conway “wants to save a measly $5 million [by closing the hospital], but he wants to put millions in that mall where he wants you to spend your money. We should make a resolute decision not to set foot downtown.”44 Indeed, in 1977, St. Louis built the Cervantes Convention Center through federal revenue-sharing programs, at a cost of $34 million. In the years surrounding 1977, St. Louis funded a downtown shopping mall, a marketplace and hotel at Union Station, and a restored waterfront warehouse district.45 As a letter writer stated, regarding the funding necessary to



Kirouac-Fram 603

keep Phillips Hospital in full-care operation, “It is not enough to say we can’t afford it. Have we really tried?”46

Throughout the struggle to keep Phillips Hospital open, support from religious institutions and their collective message of morality in health care were key organizing, financial, and moti-vational components.47 Early in 1979, for example, a group of more than one hundred north side ministers organized as Ministers to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital and made their churches available for voter registration and voter education meetings, and a North Side Ministerial Alliance led more than three hundred people to gather at City Hall to protest the impending closure. In September 1979, more than two hundred black ministers appealed to their congrega-tions for financial support and involvement in the Phillips Hospital struggle.48

By encouraging churchgoers to see the political issue in moral terms by emphasizing the neces-sity to care for sick and poor people, inspiring a sense of group participation, assisting with the logistics of political involvement, and offering spiritual guidance, religious institutions in St. Louis mobilized passionate political activity. Letter writers invoked religion in ways ranging from threats to the mayor of a vengeful God (who will “shortly bring your rule to an end and destroy you as he has destroyed those before you”) to prayers for God to guide the mayor (“I am writing this letter in the name of (jesus christ) . . . praying that GOD will take a hand in this.”).49 A coalition of forty-eight ministers and bishops signed a resolution, sent to Mayor Conway, that warned, “God hears the cry of the poor and oppressed and takes action on their behalf against the oppressor.”50 In March 1979, Reverend Joseph Lowrey, president of the Southern Christian Lead-ership Conference, joined the ranks of Phillips Hospital supporters and brought national, ominous significance to the issue, suggesting that the struggle may be “the symbol, the handle, the turning point where black people see that God wants to use them as vessels to save this nation.”51

Although religious organizations organized and led early protest activities, the mid-April consolidation fulfillment and the announcement of concomitant plans to phase out the Phillips Hospital nursing school inspired a more aggressive protest leadership.52 By May 1979, the Committee to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital, a grassroots group of religious leaders, hospital employees, and neighborhood residents, had organized a boycott of City Hospital. Through the use of voluntary carpools to transport incoming patients from City Hospital to other area hospitals, boycotters would deprive the city of revenue from insured and Medicare/Medicaid patients, which made up 65 percent of the hospital’s $60 million budget. By means of daily pickets at City Hospital and a program of leaflets, phone banks, and church sermons on Sundays, they planned to educate north side residents regarding the mayor’s decision to consolidate.53 A work stoppage took place from May 7 through 9 for all downtown workers and city employees, and although it was not wholly successful due to many supporters’ tenuous hold on low-paying, high-turnover jobs, it received adequate attention in the press.54

For three days, protesters opposing the consolidation held a sit-in outside the mayor’s office door.55 On the first day, police arrested forty-seven protesters, carrying them out on stretchers; the remaining protesters pledged to return the next day. Many of the participants in this three-day sit-in were Phillips Hospital lab technicians; the lab at Phillips had been partially consolidated on the first day of the demonstration. Prosecutors charged arrested protestors with trespassing and resisting arrest; as police carried them out of City Hall, they sang “We Shall Overcome,” an anthem of labor union and civil rights activism.56

Although these activities received considerable coverage in the press, protesters’ arguments for halting hospital consolidation were not unified; press reports of protest actions often express con-fusion or antagonism toward what reporters perceived as loud, irrational protest. The confusion was furthered when, in July 1979, the Committee to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital fractured. A heterogeneous umbrella group, the committee was the largest secular opposition organization, comprising individuals with diverse motivations for saving the hospital; disorganization and lack




of a unified message resulted in factions within the group competing for priority and leadership. Along with allegations of misspent funds and secret negotiations emerged a new opposition group, the Ad Hoc Committee to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital, whose spokesman stated that the original committee had been “ignoring the rank and file.” A spokesman from the Committee to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital retorted in the press with a statement indicating that the new group had communist tendencies, referring to its members’ socially democratic rhetoric.

The Ad Hoc Committee, which would become the largest, loudest, and most durable oppo-sition group, had a large contingent of Phillips Hospital nurses and laborers. They attempted to clarify their position and rationale through a letter to the editor of the St. Louis American, which stated that they stood “for the people” and called for “unity of labor organizations, churches, com-munity organizations, concerned citizens—both black and white, senior citizens and our youth” to support their efforts to maintain Phillips Hospital as an acute care facility.57 In undated speech notes, Frank Chapman, the group’s co-chairman, emphasized, “the attack against poor people and working people always begins with Black people because racism is the route of least resis-tance.” The Ad Hoc Committee, he wrote, would wage a “mass education campaign to show people how and why Civic Progress, Inc. [a prominent, powerful alliance of St. Louis business leaders] controls our city economically and politically.”58 In a brochure soliciting support, co-chairperson Zenobia Thompson of the Ad Hoc Committee, a former Phillips Hospital nurse, summed up the group’s purpose: “In the final analysis, I am fighting for the most basic human right of the poor and indigent to adequate and accessible health care!”59

Working through an ideology of citizenship, the Ad Hoc Committee consistently positioned the closing of Phillips Hospital as a form of disenfranchisement and a violation of basic human rights. Proponents of closing Phillips Hospital countered that the opportunity to be treated at City Hospital #1 was readily available, but the majority-white physician and nurse workforce at City Hospital #1, the extra cross-town travel time for emergencies, and the long bus ride for mainte-nance and preventive care made that option difficult for many black north side residents to appre-ciate. Fears of death in transit, long waits, daylong round-trip bus rides, and mistreatment at the hands of white physicians and nurses inspired many black north side residents to regard the Phillips Hospital struggle as analogous to the civil rights protests twenty-five years earlier. Responding to these fears, the Ad Hoc Committee stressed the necessity for local government to recognize health care as a citizenship element as equivalently vital, universal, and valid as the struggle for voting rights that culminated in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

A 1980 Ad Hoc Committee poster, for example, features a rendering of Martin Luther King Jr. and the headline, “1980 Spirit—We Shall Overcome / Inspiration from the world’s greatest civil rights leader. Save Homer G. Phillips Hosp. NOW.” A hand at the top of the poster, labeled “The Equalizer,” holds a set of scales. One pan is hidden behind the portrait of King; the other pan, labeled “Faith and Truth,” contains a rendering of the Phillips Hospital complex. The buildings are glowing, shining like a beacon, under the heading, “To serve the community best. . . .”60 To the left of the hospital is the portrait of King against a starry background, with cross-shaped twinkles in his eyes. The quotation underneath his likeness reads, “For right, with god, all things are possible, so be it.” He is labeled, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Great Civil Rights and Spiritual Leader.” Spencer Thorton Banks, who typeset his name and the title, “Christian Master Artist,” added the adjective “American” to his title, perhaps emphasizing his pride in his citizenship and ownership of civil rights.

The use of King as a figure in this struggle is a choice that deserves examination beyond its utility to call forth the civil rights movement, especially in light of the fact that Phillips Hospital was a symbol of segregation; some middle-class blacks in St. Louis regarded the hospital as a “shrine to racism.”61 Although the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the United States signifies oppression, holiday observances rarely attribute political goals to King. Rather, they invoke



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values, such as equality and freedom, which function as commendations, what Richard Merleman calls “hurrah words,” rather than tangible political ideals such as empowerment. Moreover, King holiday ceremonies often depict King as a civil rights leader and gloss over his involvement as an antiwar activist and proponent of income redistribution; this simplification maintains the symbol of King as the great unifier, a symbol to which most black Americans can cleave. King also symbolizes nonviolent disobedience, eloquent oratory, and interracial coop-eration; the use of his likeness as a symbol may have contributed to a less threatening view of the activists who employed it.62 References to the civil rights movement in the press, however, alter-nately gave readers a sense of the activists’ commitment and sense of justice or parodied their efforts as insignificant in comparison to the “real” civil rights movement a decade earlier.63

Despite their best efforts, members of the Ad Hoc Committee were helpless to watch as the St. Louis Department of Health and Hospitals halted all in-patient admissions at Phillips Hospital at 4 p.m. on August 1, 1979. All patients seeking admission at Phillips Hospital were transported, via van or ambulance, to City Hospital #1.64 The night before, eight protesters began a weeks-long campout on the grounds of Phillips Hospital; they erected a barricade made of bed parts, chairs, and benches from inside the hospital and placed heavy chains on the hospital gates in an effort to keep city officials from removing furniture and equipment. Over several weeks, fellow demonstrators, varying in number from less than 5 per day to more than 150, joined them. On August 6, 1979, 250 of the 600 Phillips Hospital employees signed a resolution protesting the consolidation of acute services and stating that they would not accept employment transfer to City Hospital. “We reject and refuse to obey the unjust orders and rules from Mayor Conway and [Hospital Commissioner] R. Dean Wochner, who blatantly and criminally violate the constitu-tional and human rights of the citizens and taxpayers of this community,” they wrote. “Employees of Homer G. say hell no, we are not moving. We will not be moved.”65

On August 17, in a massive display of force, city officials sent 120 policemen in riot gear to Phillips Hospital to deal with approximately one hundred protesters during the final transfer of the remaining forty-seven Phillips acute-care patients to City Hospital. Police arrested seventeen pro-testers under charges of failure to obey a police officer when at least fifty people sat down in the main hospital driveway to prevent transfer vans from leaving. Pearlie Evans, aide to U.S. Repre-sentative William Clay, was present at the protest; her sentiments, quoted in the Post-Dispatch, captured the feeling of that day: “the squad was brought in to overpower poor, helpless people whose only concern was that they have some place to go near their homes when they get sick.” Missouri State Senator Gwen B. Giles, also quoted in the Post-Dispatch, took note: “Conway declared war on black St. Louis today.”66

Within the first week of the completed consolidation of acute care services, the number of daily emergency room visits fell 50 percent at Phillips Hospital. Many at the hospital feared a public perception of complete closure. Others felt that the decline ensued from an understanding of emergency services as the first step toward admission; potential emergency patients would be inclined to visit the hospital where admittance for acute care was possible.67

Although this decline suggested community apathy toward the Phillips Hospital cause, come-dian and social justice activist Dick Gregory, a St. Louis native, joined the Ad Hoc Committee and another group, Concerned Students to Save Homer G. Phillips, in a protest march from Phillips Hospital to City Hall on August 31, 1979. “Phillips should be a national monument,” he declared at the march. “It saved black minds when blacks couldn’t even walk on the streets where white hospitals were located.”68 That day, more than two hundred protesters sat down at the intersection of 12th Street and Market Street, a major intersection in downtown St. Louis in front of City Hall, blocking traffic for at least two hours (see Figure 6).69 Police arrested seventy-two people, includ-ing Gregory, and interoffice communications at City Hall suggest that the private employers of arrested individuals be “made aware of [their] obscene behavior.”70 That September, twenty-five




people completed a twenty-five-hour march around St. Louis to protest the consolidation, and a group led by the Ad Hoc Committee marched 137 miles in November to Jefferson City to present Governor Joseph Teasdale with petitions signed by hundreds of citizens opposed to the consolidation.

In his speech, Gregory was referring to the personal histories of being born, having children, or feeling uplifted at Phillips Hospital that generated a sense of heritage and a prominent rationale for maintaining a full range of services at the hospital. Letters, speeches, and posters throughout the years of struggle spoke to the need to preserve Phillips Hospital as a symbol of family, striving, and community potential. In April 1980, the Ad Hoc Committee held a one hundredth birthday celebration in honor of attorney Homer G. Phillips. A poster advertising birthday festivities fea-tures a number of activities, including a prayer service on the hospital grounds, a rally, a banquet to raise funds for legal efforts to reopen the hospital, a public hearing, an educational health care expo with displays for students in grade school through college, and a “State of the City” address. The committee invited everyone to the celebration; the guests of honor, however, were those who had been born at Homer G. Phillips Hospital.

On the poster, next to a rendering of attorney Phillips, the artist sketched a black family from an earlier age—dad is wearing a straw hat, son is wearing knickers, and there are warm wooden cabins with smoking chimneys drawn in the background. The family has been cared for, presum-ably by the first workers at Phillips Hospital in 1937: dad has a cast on his leg, son has a cast on

Figure 6.Note: Photo of Homer G. Phillips Hospital supporters at City Hall on August 31, 1979 (Photographer: Bill Kesler; St.LouisPost-Dispatch, September 2, 1979, 12G).



Kirouac-Fram 607

his arm. The family image emphasizes not only the heritage of the institution but also the important role Phillips Hospital played in the care of thousands of black families in St. Louis for more than forty years.71

With emotions running high in the north side communities, the Ad Hoc Committee was not able to channel the totality of resistance efforts into a unified front. While the protest actions of the Ad Hoc Committee received press attention as forms of extraordinary disobedience, there were many uncited instances of associated infrapolitical activity that illustrate a diverse movement much larger than the committee itself. For example, a physician at Phillips Hospital admitted patients to the hospital more than a week after admissions had been halted, and anonymous phone callers threatened proconsolidation aldermen. An anonymous group distributed flyers featuring a death skull and characterizing St. Louis as “rolling out the carpet for Murder and Genocide” at the convention center, urging conventioneers to boycott St. Louis as the host for future conventions. Hospital staff wrote anonymous letters to the mayor, and several Phillips Hospital employees did not report to their new assignments at City Hospital #1, risking termination, while others hid equipment slated for transfer to City Hospital #1.72

In addition to these covert resistance efforts, several prominent organizations also wrote to the mayor to openly express support of keeping Phillips Hospital open as an acute care facility, including the UAW, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the National Association of Black Social Workers, the Congress of Racial Equality, several neighborhood associations, and an interfaith coalition of eight denominations.73 Individuals wrote signed letters of opposition to Mayor Conway, expressing feelings of betrayal, heritage, history, and pride. One letter spoke of “the image of Homer G. Phillips and the motivation it provides to our Black youth, [which] has a value far in excess of the dollars projected to be saved,” of “creating an atmosphere of striving and becoming worthwhile, useful and working citizens.” Many letters expressed pride in Phillips Hospital, what one writer called “that noble and great institution that has meant so much, and indeed, has done so much good to so many.” Another deemed Phillips Hospital “a functioning landmark that is near sacred to the hearts and memories of racial minorities of the greater met-ropolitan area.” Others expressed sadness at the loss of full services at Phillips and at the loss of a history of births, training, and healing. One woman, signing her letter, “Tax-payer, voter, Black U.S. Citizen,” wrote that “to forget Homer G. Phillips is like forgetting to eat. It is a household word.” Many of the letters contained misspellings and nearly illegible handwriting, and several were addressed simply to, “Mayor. City Hall. St. Louis.”74

By January 3, 1980, the last of the acute- and long-term care equipment and furnishings had been moved from Phillips Hospital to City Hospital, and consolidation was complete. In June 1980, in partnership with the St. Louis Tenants Union and the local chapter of the National Alliance against Racist and Political Oppression, the Ad Hoc Committee issued a ten-point indictment of Mayor Conway and a “citizens’ subpoena” requesting his presence at a public meeting to defend his actions. The crimes in the indictment included “genocide against the black community,” “lying, fraud, arrogance, and deception.” A mayor’s aide answered a Post-Dispatch reporter’s question as to whether the mayor would attend the hearing: “I doubt it.”75 Indeed, the mayor did not attend the hearing; only about two dozen people attended, and few black leaders were in attendance.76 Although approximately seventy-five people participated in a march to City Hall to mark the first anniversary of the hospital’s closing in August 1980, it was clear that public support was waning; the Ad Hoc Committee was portrayed in the media as increasingly foolish in its efforts to carry on.

By September 1980, the out-patient clinic at Phillips Hospital was open only from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., making it difficult for shift workers to refill prescriptions or see a doctor without los-ing pay; anyone who was determined to need lab tests faced an entire day of riding the bus from Phillips to City Hospital and back. The emergency room by this time was equipped only to




stabilize patients for a trip to City Hospital; it lacked an operating room and a recovery room. Phillips Hospital no longer had a blood bank, precluding emergency blood transfusions. Aware of these limitations, ambulances rarely delivered patients to Phillips. A great sense of isolation and inferiority circulated among the staff; a Post-Dispatch reporter described Phillips as not hav-ing workers or patients in the clinic or emergency room “to negate Phillips’ general appearance as a kind of medical ghost town.” Plans to convert vacant floors into geriatric care facilities were not yet on a timeline due to a lack of funds for renovation.77

On November 6, an anonymous, unaffiliated activist threw animal blood on the door of Mayor Conway’s City Hall office; on November 20, a similar incident occurred at the door of a St. Louis circuit judge who had recently denied an injunction filed by the Ad Hoc Committee to reverse consolidation. A note left at the mayor’s door stated, “You got blood on your hands. Justice for Homer G. Phillips.” In an unrelated move, but perhaps to further emphasize its mission and distance itself from such acts, the committee changed its name to the Campaign for Human Dignity. Cochairperson Zenobia Thompson declared, “This is not a black-white issue—this is one of human dignity.”78

Despite the fragmentary nature of the resistance movement, the Homer G. Phillips Hospital issue retained the power to move the black working-class vote. In 1981, a young white alderman named Vincent Schoemehl ran for the Democratic mayoral nomination against white incumbent James F. Conway. In campaign speeches reported over several months, Schoemehl asserted that he favored reopening Phillips Hospital, but only if City Hospital were closed; he based his support for reopening on his belief that Phillips could be air-conditioned and renovated at a lower cost than that for similar necessary improvements at City Hospital. Few in the press thought that the Phillips issue would play a large role in the 1981 mayoral election, assuming both low turnout in the north-ern wards and a forward-looking attitude regarding health care for those who did turn out to vote. The St. Louis American, the largest black-owned newspaper in St. Louis, endorsed Conway in February as an “energetic, enthusiastic, and effective mayor” who had “not been perfect. . . . But on the balance sheet he has been one of the great Mayors in our town’s history.”79

On March 3, 1981, Vince Schoemehl defeated Conway, winning the Democratic nomination by a 2-to-1 margin as voters undid several black wards whose aldermen had promised their sup-port to Conway. Well aware of his mandate, Schoemehl pledged to reconsolidate the hospital system at Phillips Hospital within nine months, as a full-service hospital, if elected mayor in April. Referencing the budget crisis faced by St. Louis at that time, Schoemehl’s Republican opponent countered that reopening Phillips would not be financially possible, that “Schoemehl would need a printing press to print money to reopen it.” He was not alone; many in St. Louis immediately doubted Schoemehl’s ability to reconsolidate.80

Prior to the hospital’s closing in 1979, the state of Missouri exempted Phillips Hospital, through a grandfather clause, from state standards governing hospital building codes. Closing, however, effectively surrendered the hospital’s old license; reopening, the state determined just one week after Schoemehl’s pledge, would require more than $30 million in renovations and upgrades. Schoemehl backed down from his nine-month goal for reopening but reasserted that reopening remained his objective. His Republican opponent deemed Schoemehl’s plans for financing the hospital through a complicated combination of revenue bonds, tax shelters, nonprofit corpora-tions, private firm management, and quick investor depreciation “a tower of whipped cream.”81

In March, the Campaign for Human Dignity announced that it had obtained more than forty thousand signatures on a petition to reopen Phillips Hospital, more than enough to ensure inclu-sion of the initiative on the April 7 mayoral election ballot. Schoemehl easily won the election, but the ballot initiative failed by 3,931 votes, falling just four percentage points short of the goal of 60 percent approval. Acknowledging that a majority vote had been cast, Schoemehl again reaffirmed his dubious pledge to reopen the hospital (see Figure 7). In August 1981, he pushed



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forward a $250,000 study to determine the city’s hospital needs and establish the role the city should play in public health care. On August 17, the Campaign for Human Dignity and several supportive community groups held a rally on the grounds of Phillips Hospital to mark the second anniversary of the closing.82

By January 1982, Phillips supporters were beginning to lose faith in their new mayor. Nearly forty protesters marched from Phillips Hospital to Mayor Schoemehl’s home, carrying a coffin labeled, “Schoemehl Lies of 1981.” In April, however, the mayor proposed a $60 million bond issue to reopen Phillips and a city charter amendment that would allow the city to hire a private nonprofit group to run the hospital; reopening would require a two-thirds majority on each measure. Aldermen in both black- and white-dominated wards considered that both the bond issue and the amendment had little chance of passing, especially in the majority-white southern section of the city. Black aldermen decried the effort as insincere, paving the way for the admin-istration to lay the blame for the failure to reopen Phillips Hospital at voters’ feet. During a rally in support of the upcoming November ballot initiative, members of the Campaign for Human Dignity heckled the mayor, deploring his perceived insincerity and claiming that the plan would not provide an adequate number of beds for indigent patients. Stressing the right to quality health

Figure 7.Note: Editorial cartoon, March 12, 1981 (St.LouisAmerican, March 12, 1981, p. 6).




care over the need for budgetary practicalities, they wanted both City Hospital and Phillips Hospital to operate as full-service public hospitals.83

On November 2, 1982, although black residents of the city’s north side wards approved both measures by more than a 10 percent margin, both the bond issue and the amendment failed to pass. Mayor Schoemehl announced that he was abandoning his efforts to reopen Phillips Hospital.84 For the next three years, until the city of St. Louis officially closed Phillips Hospital completely in 1985, the Campaign for Human Dignity continued the fight.

By June 1983, most services at Phillips Hospital had been cut. In May 1984, the St. Louis Department of Health and Hospitals cut physicians’ salaries at Phillips by one-third, leaving thir-teen physicians to staff a twenty-four-hour emergency center and daytime out-patient clinic that served more than 250 people daily. A $32.8 million bond issue to reopen Phillips as a full-service hospital, initiated by the Campaign for Human Dignity, was defeated in November 1984; it received strong support from the city’s north side residents but was firmly opposed by majority-white south side voters. The campaign’s repeated efforts to place a $.01 sales tax on the ballot to raise funds to reopen the hospital were finally shut down in January 1985 with a refusal by the Board of Aldermen to allow it to move forward. In early 1985, Mayor Schoemehl entered into a deal with St. Louis County to build the public St. Louis Regional Medical Center, a city-county partnership project that closed both Phillips Hospital and City Hospital #1 for good.85 Through an effort initiated by the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, which stressed the building’s archi-tectural, educational, and historical significance, Homer G. Phillips Hospital was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.86 More than two decades later, after significant reno-vation financed through private sources, it reopened in June 2003 as Homer G. Phillips Dignity House, a 220-unit, skillfully restored low-income senior living facility.

The failure to reopen Phillips as a full-service hospital is the result of several factors, including a lack of support from black elite leadership, unsuccessful framing of the issue by opposition groups, repression, disorganization, and a lack of resources. However, the emphasis in this article is not causation but rather the substantial diversity of opinion and strategy that emerged from an ostensibly unified, homogeneous black community. The struggle to preserve Homer G. Phillips Hospital illustrates the lack of a single, unified “black agenda” and demonstrates an oversimplifi-cation in the predominant discourse of “black politics.” Moreover, it is a powerful illustration of how shared interests do not necessarily lead to, or stem from, the existence of shared ideology. St. Louis’s diverse black community approached a shared interest—full participation in a safer, more prosperous north side—through dichotomized ideologies regarding the means to that end. As working-class community members with countless and varied personal motivations lined the streets of downtown St. Louis in support of Homer G. Phillips Hospital in 1979, the unifying aspiration was that of renewal: of civic influence, of community cohesion, of municipal services. For black St. Louis middle- and upper-class leaders who had already departed, physically or emo-tionally, from the black north side neighborhoods of St. Louis, closure and renovated repurposing of Phillips Hospital, rather than preserving a relic of segregation, served their alternative renewal ideology.

Even the north side residents who remained to inherit the crumbling neighborhoods and fought to keep Homer G. Phillips Hospital open and in service were working from a variety of personal and community motivations. Individuals and groups working from a moral perspective viewed the closing as a violation of a mandate to care for sick and poor city residents. Others understood Homer G. Phillips Hospital as a part of family and community heritage, or as a symbol of striving and success. Still others considered health care to be an element of citizenship that was embodied in the tumultuous, uplifting history of Homer G. Phillips Hospital. The socially democratic rhetoric employed by the most significant opposition groups was heavily flavored with reference to class, demanding equal and unburdened access to health care for St. Louis’s



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low-income north side residents. For all of these reasons, the struggle to save Homer G. Phillips Hospital was a manifold struggle for enfranchisement. In many ways, it was the last stand of wounded hopes for community sustenance in an era of unrelenting economic decline, a struggle to remain visible in a vanishing city.

Acknowledgments

This article has benefited from the comments, suggestions, and thoughtfulness of several individuals. The original work emerged from a graduate seminar with Joseph Heathcott at Saint Louis University, whose guidance helped me shape and hone my initial argument. The audience at the conference, Who Claims the City: Thinking Race, Class, and Urban Space, at Marquette University in 2008 provided durable feedback. Finally, the anonymous reviewers provided precise, specific remarks that resulted in a tighter thesis and refined sociohistorical context.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. Sally Thran, “Predicts Defeat of Phillips Plan,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 5, 1976, 3A. 2. Bob Christman, “Save Hospitals, Panel Urges,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1976, 1C. 3. Frando Webb, “DePaul Closing Stirs ‘Health Desert’ Fears,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 19, 1976, 1C. 4. Homer G. Phillips: 25th Anniversary, unpaged program booklet, John D. Buckner Papers, Western

Historical Manuscript Collection (hereafter referred to as WHMC) 468, Box 1. 5. Preston Smith adopts a similar approach in his analysis of postwar housing struggles in Chicago. See

Preston H. Smith, “The Quest for Racial Democracy: Black Civic Ideology and Housing Interests in Postwar Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 26, no. 2 (2000): 132-33.

6. When describing unstable, deindustrialized labor markets such as St. Louis, I refer to low-income residents who are in and out of work, whether or not they are at times receiving assistance, as “working class.” As Robin Kelley writes, the black working class comprises “simply people whose very survival depends on work or some form of income.” See Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels (New York: Free Press, 1994), 13.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the urban environment has been “contested terrain” for disenfran-chised groups and individuals with a variety of motives, including social status, residence rights, and recreation, but rarely preservation. See Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 3.

7. In researching this article, I have relied heavily on newspaper accounts to reconstruct the narrative of events from 1976 through 1984, when the final bond issue to reopen the hospital failed. I have consulted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the city’s largest mainstream newspaper, and the St. Louis American, the city’s largest black-owned newspaper, to tease out multiple voices. Rather than relying on reporters’ interpretations of events, I have concentrated on quoted material to gauge reaction and response to events as they unfolded. I have also examined posters, flyers, brochures, memos, and unpublished inter-office reports as well as many of the hundreds of letters in support of, and against, the closing of Phillips Hospital.

8. Joseph Heathcott, “Black Archipelago: Politics and Civic Life in the Jim Crow City,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 3 (2005): 709-14.




9. Sandra Schoenberg, “Community Stability and Decay in St. Louis: The Ethnic Factor in Two Urban Neighborhoods,” Ethnicity 7, no. 3 (1980): 407-408.

10. Heathcott, “Black Archipelago,” 718.11. Ibid., 713-24.12. Ernest Calloway, “The Strange 50-Year Mystery of the Unsolved Murder of Homer Phillips,” St. Louis

American, February 5, 1981, 7.13. Dedicatory Program, Homer G. Phillips Hospital, February 22, 1937, Lowe Family Papers, WHMC 123,

Folder 2.14. National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form, March 31, 1982, St. Louis Vertical

File, WHMC 694, Box 16.15. Report to the League of Women Voters Civic Committee, April 30, 1943, League of Women Voters

Records, WHMC 530, Box 54; Letter from Mrs. Ralph W. Thayer to Mrs. Avery Alexander, May 5, 1943, League of Women Voters Records, WHMC 530, Box 54.

16. H. Phillip Venable, “The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital,” Journal of the National Medical Association 53, no. 6 (1961): 541-55.

17. Schoenberg, “Community Stability and Decay,” 416.18. Ibid, 416; Heathcott, “Black Archipelago,” 706.19. Mitchell F. Rice and Woodrow Jones Jr., Public Policy and the Black Hospital (Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 1994), 101.20. Harry F. Dowling, City Hospitals: The Undercare of the Underprivileged (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1982), 185.21. Dowling, City Hospitals, 185.22. According to historian Mitchell F. Rice, two prominent phenomena, when combined with decreasing

tax revenue, precipitated the closings of black hospitals: integration and the advent of Medicare and Medicaid. Municipalities built black hospitals, he writes, to serve black people in an era when they could not receive adequate health care at white-run facilities due to exclusion or limited admission. Integration lessened the use of black hospitals by both black physicians and black self-pay patients as both groups sought the larger facilities and better equipment found at private, historically white hospitals. Price controls instituted under Medicare and Medicaid led private hospitals to limit or exclude patients covered by those programs. As a result, the indigent patient load was relegated to pub-lic hospitals, which in turn suffered financial disadvantage. Black public hospitals also tend to carry a large load of nonpaying patients not covered by Medicare or Medicaid, further challenging the financial health of the hospitals. See Rice and Jones, Public Policy, 107-108.

23. “Hospital Warning,” editorial, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 18, 1977, 2E.24. Jo Mannies, “Surprise Said to Have Aided Phillips Move,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 16,

1979, 12A.25. Gerald M. Boyd, “Estimate Board Keeps All Four Hospitals,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 7, 1976, 1A.26. Leroy Pesch and Symuel Smith, Report of the Study on Hospital Needs under the Jurisdiction of

the City of St. Louis, Missouri, September 28, 1976, James F. Conway Papers, University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Washington University Libraries (hereafter referred to JFC Papers, WUSC), Series 2, Box 22.

27. Gerald M. Boyd, “Black Leaders Say Hospital Consultants Exceeded Mandate,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 22, 1976, 1A.

28. “Mr. Simon Sits,” editorial, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 29, 1976, 2B.29. Tommy Robertson, “Would Back Closing Hospital if Panel Urges It,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, June 25,

1977, 3A.30. Health Service System Task Force Report to Mayor James F. Conway, December 16, 1977, JFC Papers,

WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.



Kirouac-Fram 613

31. Philip Sutin, “City, Phillips Hospitals Merger Will Begin May 1,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 9, 1978, 3A; Philip Sutin, “Black Aldermen May Try to Block Budget over Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 23, 1978, 2C; Philip Sutin and David Fink, “Phillips Hospital Won’t Be Shut, Conway Tells Internes Group,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 2, 1978, 1C.

32. Steve Korris, “Mayor’s Hospital Plan Angers Black Politicians; Big Fight Promised,” St. Louis American, May 4, 1978, 1; Robert Kelly, “Racism behind Plan to Merge Hospitals, Detroit Mayor Says,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 4, 1978, 9A; Gregory Freeman, “New Plan by Hospital Task Force Draws Fire from Black Aldermen,” St. Louis American, January 5, 1978, 1.

33. Paul Friesema, “Black Control of Central Cities: The Hollow Prize,” American Institute of Planners Journal 35 (1969): 75-79; Neil Kraus and Todd Swanstrom, “Minority Mayors and the Hollow-prize Problem,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 1 (2001): 102.

34. Friesema, “Black Control of Central Cities,” 77.35. Lucius Barker, “Limits of Political Strategy: A Systemic View of the African American Experience,”

American Political Science Review 88, no. 1 (1994): 4-8.36. Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (London: Verso,

1995), 77.37. Adolph Reed Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-segregation Era (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5.38. Letter from William Douthit to James F. Conway, April 25, 1980, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 65.39. Report on Health Care Delivery, booklet, October 31, 1980, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.40. Letter from James F. Conway to Reverend Haymond Fortenberry, September 26, 1979, JFC Papers,

WUSC, Series 2, Box 22; Letter from James F. Conway to Reverend D. C. Fleary, September 20, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

41. Letter from Ridgeway A. Butler to Mayor James F. Conway, May 4, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23; Letter from Dumena Thompson to Mayor James F. Conway, May 22, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23.

42. Letter from James F. Conway to Reverend Haymond Fortenberry, September 26, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22; LaBertha Blair and James Whittico, “Task Force Members,” St. Louis American, 9; Clarice Murphy, “What Task Members Think,” St. Louis American, 3.

43. Resolution of the Ministers to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital, September 20, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

44. George E. Curry, “Angela Davis Assails Cutbacks at Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 29, 1979, 1C.

45. Heywood Sanders, Research Brief: The Realities of Convention Centers as Economic Development Strategy, (Brookings Institute, 2005), http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20050117_convention centers.pdf.

46. Letter from Lorraine Odum to Mayor James F. Conway, July 31, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

47. Religious institutions in America, as sources of self-empowerment and symbols of indigenous culture, have served as a locus of black resistance dating back to times of slavery. The black church provided the leadership, interaction, and communication networks necessary for effective collective action during the civil rights movement, and these roles have been preserved in the so-called post–civil rights era. See Fredrick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6; regarding the role of the black church in post–civil rights era politics; see Katherine Tate, From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

48. William C. Lhotka and Geof Dubson, “300 Rally for Phillips at City Hall,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 9, 1979, 1B; Robert Kelly, “Ministers Pushing to Keep Phillips as General Hospital,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26, 1979, 16B; “Black Ministers to Appeal for Phillips Donations,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1979, 1B.




49. Letter from Leroy Muhammad to James F. Conway, June 8, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23; Letter from Chevis Vaughn to James F. Conway, May 31, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

50. Resolution of the Ministers to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital, September 20, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

51. Daphne Walker, “Homer Phillips Closing Not Isolated Incident,” St. Louis American, March 1, 1979, 14.52. George E. Curry, “Group Withdraws Plan to Run Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 19, 1979, 1A.53. David Fink, “North Side Leaders Plan Hospital Boycott,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 8, 1979, 1C.54. Letter from Jacqueline Bell to James F. Conway, May 22, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23.55. Because the St. Louis print media did not often identify specific protest groups, often simply referring to

them as “the protesters,” I am not always able to specify which groups were responsible for the protest actions described in this article. To fully document the diversity of struggle involved in the Phillips Hospital closing, however, I include these uncredited activities.

56. David Fink and Robert Kelly, “Hospital Protesters Undaunted by 47 Arrests,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 1, 1979, 1A.

57. Letter to the editor from the Ad Hoc Committee to Save Homer G. Phillips Hospital, St. Louis American, July 26, 1979, 6.

58. Frank Chapman, Notes for a Report on Public Health Care and Homer G. Phillips, undated, Black History Project Collection, WHMC 201, Box 6.

59. Justice for Zenobia Thompson, brochure, undated, Black History Project Collection, WHMC 201, Box 6.60. “Save Homer G. Phillips Hosp. NOW,” 1980 Poster, no date, St. Louis Vertical File, WHMC 694, file 7.61. Steve Korris, “Middle Class Manipulates Black Poor, Calloway Charges,” St. Louis American, March 29,

1979, 1.62. Richard M. Merelman, Representing Black Culture: Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United

States (New York: Routledge, 1995), 79-88.63. Steve Korris, “Mayor’s Critics Growing Bolder,” St. Louis American, March 22, 1979, 1; Bennie Rodgers

and Daphne Walker, “Save Phillips Committee Has More Confusion Now than Ever Before,” St. Louis American, April 26, 1979, 14; “Poor Support; Plenty Standing Room at Phillips’ ‘Mass’ Rally,” St. Louis American, June 28, 1979, 1.

64. Interoffice memo from James H. Sullivan to all concerned, August 1, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23.

65. Jo Mannies and D. D. Obika, “Phillips Admissions Dwindle; Protesters Thrarted,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 3, 1979, 3A; Yvonne Samuel Major, “Phillips Struggle Intensifies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 6, 1979, 1B.

66. Robert L. Joiner, “120 Police Mass at Phillips for Transfer of Patients,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 17, 1979, 1A; “Massed Policemen Shield Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 17, 1979, 1A; Robert L. Joiner and Sally Bixby Defty, “Phillips Backers Threaten Boycott,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 18, 1979, 1A.

67. Linda Lockhart, “U.S. Judge Delays Action in Suit by Phillips Backers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 20, 1979, 3A.

68. Kevin Horrigan and Robert L. Joiner, “Gregory Links Speculators, Phillips Closing,” August 30, 1979, 3A.69. Metropolitan Police Department—City of St. Louis, Intradepartment Report and Correspondence

Sheet, August 31, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.70. Unsigned memo attached to arrest records for seventy-two individuals, August 31, 1979, JFC Papers,

WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.71. Homer G. Phillips birthday observance poster, no date, Black History Project Collection, WHMC 201,

file 6.72. Sally Bixby Defty, “Phillips Doctor Suspended: Violated Admittance Orders,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

August 12, 1979, 2B; David Fink, “FBI Is Looking into Alleged Threats against Hospital Committee Workers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 9, 1978, 3A; Rolling out the Carpet for Murder and Genocide, flyer, no date, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23; Letter from Save Homer G. Phillips and



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All Public Hospitals to Mayor James F. Conway, August 7, 1979, WHMC 582, file 4; Letter from John Noble to Homer G. Phillips Hospital Employees, no date, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22; Letter from Roger Waggermon to James F. Conway, August 22, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

73. “UAW Opposes Phillips Hospital Move,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 14, 1979, 3A; Letter from Cleo LaTessa (CLUW) to James F. Conway, April 3, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23; Telegram from Eugene Fowler (CORE) to James F. Conway, April 23, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23; News Release from the Interfaith Coalition, January 16, 1980, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22.

74. Letter from John Christmas and Paul Sanders to James F. Conway, August 9, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22; Letter from Reverend D. C. Fleary to James F. Conway, July 31, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22; Letter from Ridgeway A. Butler to James F. Conway, May 4, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23; Letter from Lorraine Odum to James F. Conway, July 31, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 22; Letter from Mrs. B. White to James F. Conway, September 17, 1979, JFC Papers, WUSC, Series 2, Box 23.

Much of the history of black working-class struggles remains undocumented due to the informal and infrapolitical nature of activities outside of recognized political institutions. As Robin Kelley writes, “those who frequented the places of rest, relaxation, recreation and restoration rarely maintained archives or recorded everyday conversations.” Infrapolitics, as defined by James C. Scott, is “the cir-cumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups . . . like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum.” The mix of institutionalized and protest participation has long been characteristic of black politics, stemming from the exclusion of blacks from civic and political avenues that prevailed from the collapse of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era. See Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” in The New African American Urban History, ed. Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); see also James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 183.

75. Courtney Barrett, “North Siders ‘Indict’ Mayor for Closing Phillips Hospital,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 29, 1980, 16A.

76. “Phillips Backers ‘Try’ Conway in Absentia,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 13, 1980, 11A.77. Roger Signor, “Expanded Services Urged by Phillips Center Staff,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 28,

1980, 1E.78. “Blood Is Spilled as Phillips Protest,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 20, 1980, 12D; “Phillips Backers

Claim Success in Petition Drive for April Vote,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 31, 1980, 8A.79. Roy Malone, “Schoemehl Says Voters Would Reopen Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 11,

1981, 1B; “Homer G. and the Campaign,” editorial, St. Louis American, February 12, 1981, 6; “The Choice for Mayor,” editorial, St. Louis American, February 19, 1981, 6.

80. LaVerne Vaughn, “Hospital Issue a Factor in Conway’s Defeat,” St. Louis American, March 5, 1981, 1; Jo Mannies, “No Household Word, but a Winner,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 4, 1981, 1B; Jo Mannies, “Schoemehl Pledges to Reopen Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 4, 1981, 1A; Evarts Graham, “The City’s Budget Crunch,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 1981, 1E.

81. Jo Mannies, “State Demands on Phillips May Cause Schoemehl Shift,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 10, 1981, 1A; Jo Mannies, “Schoemehl Team Backs Phillips Plan,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1981, 11A.

82. D. D. Obika, “Supporters Submit More Signatures,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 2, 1981, 7B; Kevin Horrigan, “Phillips Proposal Defeated,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 8, 1981, 1A; “Another Hospital Study?” editorial, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 2, 1981, 2B; “Rally Marks 2nd Anniversary of Phillips Hospital Closing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 17, 1981, 3A.

83. Gregory Freeman, “South Side Aldermen Say Bond Issue Has Little Chance of Passage,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1982, 3A; Gregory Freeman, “Mayor, Clay Jeered at Phillips Rally,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 10, 1982, 8B.




84. Gregory Freeman, “Both Measures Needed to Reopen Homer Phillips Hospital Defeated,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 3, 1982, 3D; Gregory Freeman, “Blacks Favored Hospital Plans,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 4, 1982, 2B.

85. Gregory Freeman, “City to Cut Services at Phillips Center,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 5, 1983, 12E; “Cut in Doctors at Phillips Center Assailed,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 14, 1984, 3A; “Effort Is Renewed to Reopen Homer G. Phillips as Full-service Hospital,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 14, 1984; E. S. Evans, “Vote on Phillips Bill Was Final, Zych Says,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1985; Gregory Freeman, “Regional’s Dying Spurs Barely a Whimper,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 26, 1997, 12A.

86. National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form, March 31, 1982, St. Louis Vertical File, WHMC 694, Box 16.

Bio

Jaclyn Kirouac-Fram is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis Univer-sity. Through an interdisciplinary approach that blends urban studies, visual culture studies, and critical race theory, her research explores how representations of the metropolis affect contemporary urban policy.



Documents

Journal of Urban History 2010 Kirouac Fram 594 616