Named event or history
Durham’s Lincoln Hospital, separate clinics and hospital floors, and the steps to the desegregation of North Carolina Memorial Hospital in 1965.
1 indexed record is connected with this event.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Dated events connected with this event, earliest first. See the whole chronology →
Dr. Aaron Moore and John Merrick won Duke family funding for a separate hospital where Black physicians and nurses treated Black patients, after Watts Hospital had excluded them. It opened in 1901 as a 50-bed frame building.
The Burden Bearers' Circle of the King's Daughters and Sons of Chapel Hill reported that it had taken a man to Lincoln Hospital in Durham for an operation and driven him back weekly for two months of treatment. The circle also made gowns for the hospital.
The Junior Service League and the district health department held two well-baby clinics each month in Hillsborough, one for Black babies and one for white babies, focused on preventive care.
UNC mailed Edward O. Diggs of Winston-Salem, a pre-medical student at A&T College in Greensboro, his letter of admission to the School of Medicine under the trustees' April 4, 1951 policy. He enrolled in the fall of 1951.
People: W. Reece Berryhill · Gordon Gray
A State Medical Care Commission spokesman said the $1,100,000 tuberculosis hospital under construction at Chapel Hill would treat Black and white patients. He noted that federal rules barred discrimination in federally aided hospitals but still allowed patients to be segregated.
The School of Dentistry's new building opened with what a university memo called separate, complete facilities for white and Black patients. Publicity photographs showed separate waiting rooms for each race.
Edward O. Diggs graduated from the UNC School of Medicine in 1955, the first African American to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree from the university. James Slade, the school's second Black student, had enrolled in 1953.
At a Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee meeting, Esther Atwater said the district health department needed a Black nurse on its staff. Chairman Dr. William Joyner said he would take the request to District Health Officer Dr. O. D. Garvin.
A Daily Tar Heel survey of Chapel Hill accommodations listed North Carolina Memorial Hospital among places keeping segregation, with director E. B. Crawford Jr. saying the hospital had two floors of mostly Black patients and did not generally integrate patient rooms.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, leaving in place the Fourth Circuit's November 1, 1963 ruling that Greensboro hospitals built with Hill-Burton money could not segregate doctors or patients. The Daily Tar Heel carried the decision on its front page.
Ruth Anderson Stephens completed the School of Nursing's master's program in nursing education and administration in 1965, the school's first African American graduate.
After a federal inspection team found the hospital out of compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chancellor Paul F. Sharp announced it would take immediate steps to obey the law. The hospital had assigned patients to rooms by what it called cultural background, and room assignments now had to be made without regard to race.
Part of Segregation and access to medical care
People: Paul F. Sharp
Other catalogs, databases, and guides worth searching
Other catalogs to search and local organizations that can help.
Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this event; they may not discuss the Orange County event directly.
More to discover
The Friends connects people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
