Hidden in the woods of Maryland stood Henryton State Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium built in 1922 exclusively for African Americans. While white patients were treated in well-funded facilities, Black patients were sent to Henryton—remote, underfunded, and neglected. Families often couldn’t visit, and the hospital’s creation was less about care than about segregation. By the 1960s, […]
From 1907 to the 1970s, over 60,000 people were sterilized under U.S. eugenics laws. But the burden wasn’t equal. Disabled women, especially those who were poor, were singled out. Black women in the South, Native women on reservations, and Latina women in cities like Los Angeles were targeted disproportionately. Eugenics treated poverty as a defect, […]
In 1902, Dr. Justina Ford applied for her medical license in Colorado. She became the first Black woman physician in the state—but her acceptance letter came with a warning: she would face “two barriers, sex and race.” Denied hospital privileges because she was both Black and a woman, Dr. Ford was forced to practice out […]
It was the first hospital in the United States built for formerly enslaved people. Its story? Both hope and inequality. Founded in 1862 during the Civil War, Freedmen’s Hospital was created in Washington, D.C. to treat newly emancipated Black patients who were turned away from white hospitals. Thousands sought care there, suffering from smallpox, tuberculosis, […]
Most people know Rebecca Crumpler as the first Black woman physician in the U.S. But almost no one knows Rebecca J. Cole — the second. Graduating in 1867, just after the Civil War, Dr. Cole fought her way into medicine at a time when both Black people and women were excluded from the profession. She […]