Decades after historic Black hospital closes, former nurses fight to keep the memory alive

ST. LOUIS — Lois Collier Jackson was born at the revered Homer G. Phillips Hospital in 1941. Nearly two decades later, she would return, this time training to be a nurse.

If you were a graduate of the hospital’s medical program, people “knew that they were getting the best.” Jackson said, adding that the name “Homer G. Phillips” carried so much significance that hospitals across the country “would hire us almost on the spot.”

Many Black St. Louisans considered the facility a bedrock of the historic Ville neighborhood. But after Homer G. Phillips closed in 1979, no hospital was ever rebuilt in the Ville, which remains a predominantly Black neighborhood today.

Now, Phillips’ name is at the center of a lawsuit set to go to trial in May. Jackson, along with several other former employees of the shuttered hospital, sued a local developer for trademark infringement. Filed on behalf of the Homer G. Phillips Hospital Nurses’ Alumni, Inc., the lawsuit argues that the developer is using the name for a new facility to “profit from the name recognition and goodwill.”

Jackson remembers being at a 2019 alumni group meeting when one of her fellow nurses walked in with surprising news. She had seen a sign that said, “Coming soon, Homer G. Phillips Hospital.”

The group later learned that local developer Paul McKee Jr. planned to build a three-bed health facility under the name “Homer G. Phillips Memorial Hospital.” The new facility’s chosen name prompted strong reactions from Black community leaders and officials, including the alumni group, which felt the move was disrespectful.

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“We’re not so much against them having medical care in that community, but it’s just the name. You can’t just take the name,” Jackson told the PBS NewsHour.

The suit stated that the former Phillips nurses had been using the “Homer G. Phillips Nurses Alumni Inc.” name since 1922. They applied to trademark the name in 2021 with registration completing a year later.

Wanda Claxton Trotter, another member of the alumni group, said no one approached the nurses to ask permission to use the name.

“In my view, the name was utilized because it draws people to it because of its rich historical background,” she added.

M Property Services, a development company Paul McKee Jr. owns, did not respond to interview requests from the PBS NewsHour.

Both parties are currently in litigation, and McKee’s new medical facility has been built in north St. Louis, about two miles away from the site of the original Phillips hospital.

Homer G. Phillips’ storied legacy

Homer G. Phillips Hospital opened in 1937 in a still-segregated city in the heart of a racially divided country. At the time, the city’s Black residents were relegated to medical facilities in the basement of St. Louis’ City Hospital No. 1 or the Black-only services at City Hospital No. 2.

The hospital was operational at the same time the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on and denied treatment to hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama. That experiment, known as the “Tuskegee Study,” began in 1932 and lasted four decades. Researchers told 600 Black men they had “bad blood,” with hundreds of them unknowingly left untreated for syphilis so that the federal government could study the disease’s effects on the human body. The experiment underscored the inequalities — and injustices — in U.S. health care and greatly affected how Black patients viewed medical professionals in the country.

“The [Tuskegee] study’s methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical community,” Stanford University researchers noted in a 2017 study.

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For many, the existence of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, named after a Black lawyer who advocated for a Black-operated hospital in St. Louis, meant that Black people could receive quality health care and training to become medical professionals themselves.

“It was a sense of pride because when you walked in, you saw somebody who looked like you, that took care of you, that took care of you with excellence and with care and with compassion,” Trotter said.

Trotter graduated in 1969, at a time Homer G. Phillips’ medical program had been renamed Saint Louis Municipal School of Nursing. Ten years later, the hospital closed its doors.

Historian Cicely Hunter said the mere number of Black health professionals who came out of the institution was significant — the hospital educated Missouri residents, but also Black residents from elsewhere in the U.S.

By 1939, the hospital’s training school accepted more than 50 percent of Black graduates from the nation’s medical schools.

“It was also said that Homer G. Phillips had employed roughly about 52 physicians that were specifically Black physicians,” Hunter said.

These were among the reasons the hospital’s shuttering in 1979 was devastating, she added.

“The closure of Homer G. Phillips also had an impact on the Ville neighborhood as a thriving Black community,” Hunter said. “It certainly leaves an imprint on the neighborhood, on St. Louis as a whole, and I think that it’s the loss of it that was felt.”

Jackson would witness this feeling firsthand. Years later, when she saw her teenage sister in another hospital in the city, the effect of the hospital’s closure was clear.

She had pneumonia, and when Jackson arrived, she found her sister in a room on the lower level, and when “I looked up and I saw the pipes leaking water,” she said.

“If she has pneumonia, why is she down here in this moisture area with all the pipes leaking?” Jackson recalled thinking.

What happens to a neighborhood without a hospital

Access to health care should be a basic human right “and for that reason, health equity would speak to making sure all people have the opportunity to achieve their highest potential of health,” said Uchechi Mitchell, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago School of Public Health.

Even from an economic standpoint, she argues there is a burden to health inequities “due to the direct medical costs that sometimes are uncovered for those who aren’t able to finance their health care. There’s indirect costs to work in: time missed when you are sick and then cost … in terms of thinking about the contribution people can make when they’re in good health and live out their full potential.”

Still, the driving force for her is the moral reason.

The ways in which racism persists in health care systems is interlinked to so many other systems such as education, housing and socioeconomics, creating a layered and complex network of barriers, she said. When a hospital is removed from a neighborhood that’s already at risk, the impact raises many questions for the community.

“Now, where do they go? How do they go to their regular routine checkup? How do they go get specialized care if needed?” she said.

Due to transportation needs and other difficulties, people often aren’t able to get help until it’s too late, Mitchell said. In the 63113 ZIP code, which is where the former Homer G. Phillips Hospital was located, nearly 38 percent of the more than 4,500 people who live there lack access to a vehicle.

“Hospital closures directly affect patients because they are losing access to health care, but they also impact surrounding communities, especially in rural areas given that hospitals themselves are often large employers in such communities,” said Soroush Saghafian, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, in a 2022 analysis of hospital closures.

Inequities exist not only in care and access to it, but also in the demographics of providers. Fewer than 6 percent of the nation’s doctors are Black, which experts have repeatedly warned can be harmful in the long run.

“The loss of these clinics and loss of the physicians, the nurses, the physician assistants and the medical systems that are Black and brown and that represent the community is severe,” Mitchell said. “Having that representation helps address some of the issues that we see right now in predominantly white health centers where there’s this lack of cultural humility.”

This is something former employees at Homer G. Phillips understood, Trotter said.

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To Black people specifically, she said, the hospital was a source of pride, and “a source of feeling at home.”

“When you entered the doors, you felt the warmth, you felt the caring atmosphere, even though you might not have much when you came in to be taken care of,” Trotter said. “You were taking care with excellence, with care, with compassion. And I think the community felt that.”

The developer McKee’s decision drew criticism from the former nurses who worked there and also from members and leaders of the community. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen passed a resolution in 2021 addressing the matter. The board noted that while McKee’s proposal to bring medical access to the community was admirable, he moved forward “without meeting with or initiating conversation with the Ville Neighborhood, the Board of Aldermen, or other members of the African American community to allow them to weigh in on what many believe to be the inappropriate cultural appropriation of a name.”

The document also lists “massive financial incentives” McKee had received from the City of St. Louis. The board closed its resolution by suggesting he choose a new name.

The same day the resolution was passed, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and state Rep. Cori Bush released a joint statement on the matter calling it “an insult to Homer G. Phillips’ legacy and the Black community.”

For the former nurses of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the removal of the vital medical facility “felt like your heart was ripped out because it meant so much to us and the care that you get was excellent,” she said.

Still, she added, the hospital’s legacy lives on through the nurses and the community they served.