Mapping Care Project: The History of Black Nurses in Chicago

Michael Reese Hospital School of Nursing

The Jewish community of Chicago founded Michael Reese Hospital and the attached nursing school primarily to serve Jewish Chicagoans, but the institution’s location on the Southside facilitated a complex and significant relationship with Chicago’s Black community.

THE FOUNDING OF MICHAEL REESE HOSPITAL
In the 1870’s, Chicago’s Jewish community included two primary groups: middle- and upper-class German Jews living on the Southside and impoverished Jews living on the Westside who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Michael Reese, a wealthy German immigrant, left his fortune to his family to distribute to charity. Reese’s brother-in-law, Jacob Rosenberg, directed Reese’s wealth to establish a Jewish hospital in Chicago on two conditions: that the hospital be named after Michael Reese, and that it would treat all patients, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. The first condition was more readily achieved than the second.

Michael Reese hospital opened in 1881 on 29th Street and Ellis Ave, on the edge of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. In its early years the hospital served mostly immigrants from countries such as Germany, Russia, Poland, Sweden, and Ireland. By the end of the century, most patients were Russian Jewish immigrants. Many patients at Michael Reese suffered from diseases like tuberculosis and cholera and could not afford healthcare. The hospital thus filled a crucial role providing healthcare to many newly arrived immigrants to Chicago,1 yet largely excluded neighboring black Chicagoans who also needed care.

THE MICHAEL REESE SCHOOL OF NURSING
The Michael Reese School of Nursing opened in 1890 to “improve furthermore the comforts of the suffering and at the same time to open a new avenue of industry to intelligent and conscientious young ladies.”2 Like most hospital-based training programs at the time, student nurses provided much of the patient care and only received formal education in the evenings, after finishing their twelve-hour shifts. As one chronicler described it: “The student nurse of 1890 was an amalgam of nurse, cook, housekeeper, physician, anesthetist, clerk, and masseuse.”3 The school graduated about a dozen nurses each year, all of whom were white, and expanded to become a three-year program in 1895. It may be that, like many groups that immigrated to the U.S. in search of a better life, Jews understood that Black people were at the bottom of the American racial hierarchy. Perhaps the nursing school administrators felt that admitting Black students into a Jewish institution would hurt the hospital and school’s chances of gaining acceptance into white society.

EARLY DECADES: MICHAEL REESE & THE BLACK COMMUNITY
Few students at the nursing school were Jewish. Most were first- or second-generation working-class Christian European immigrants. It is unclear if the nursing school had a formal admissions policy excluding Black students, but none were accepted. Provident Hospital School of Nursing (include link), founded in 1891, was the only Chicago-area nursing school that admitted Black students for many decades. Applications to the Michael Reese School of Nursing did not ask about race until the late 1930’s, though students’ medical forms began to ask this question by the era of WWI.4 As was typical of most white-run nursing schools at the time, Michael Reese likely chose to exclude Black students from the opportunity to receive training and join the nursing profession.

While the nursing school easily barred Black students from its halls like many other Chicago-area nursing schools, the hospital’s attitude towards Black patients was more complicated and is quite difficult to trace in the historical record. Per the conditions of its founding, the hospital was committed to serving patients of all identities. Indeed, hospital administrators decided to maintain the kitchen as non-kosher (which violated traditional Jewish law) in order to keep the hospital non-sectarian.5 However, this desire to welcome all patients does not seem to have extended to Black Chicagoans. One of the first mentions of Michael Reese in the Chicago Defender, a black-run newspaper, appears in 1919, when a Black man injured during the Chicago race riots died at the hospital. Other examples from the 1920’s indicate that the hospital might have provided emergency care to Black patients who were brought from nearby locations, and then transferred them to Cook County Hospital, which was more willing to treat Black Chicagoans.6 In a 1922 column in the Chicago Defender, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams stated that Michael Reese informed him that they would not accept Black patients unless an influential attending doctor had a Black patient with a rare disease or in need of unique operation who they wanted to admit to the hospital for the purposes of clinical demonstration. This kind of treatment of Black patients was typical for white institutions at the time and created a deep mistrust of hospitals and medical research among Black Americans.

Dr. Williams observed the tragic irony of this situation considering that Michael Reese, in the center of the “Black Belt” of Chicago, “is patronized by…many of our recently persecuted Russian Jews, who just came over from the land of limited opportunity, racial discrimination and persecution.”7

By the late 1920’s, the near Southside was transforming, and Michael Reese was forced to face the reality of its neighborhood’s demographics. While the hospital had always served low-income patients, the neighborhood surrounding Michael Reese had historically been wealthy and predominantly white, with large, single-family homes. In the years after WWI, Bronzeville became more crowded, poor, and racially diverse. These changes were driven by Black migrants fleeing Southern racism for better opportunities in Chicago, while white Chicagoans left the city in droves in response to these Black newcomers. In addition, industrialization and the rise of automobiles made city life less desirable for those who could afford to leave. German Jews (along with other wealthy residents of the area) began to move to the Northside or the suburbs. As these more affluent Chicagoans left the area, they took their wealth with them, leaving less economic opportunity for the new arrivals. Simultaneously, the Great Depression disproportionately hurt Black Americans, forcing them to live in difficult conditions and struggle to find employment. (Learn more about Black Chicagoans & the Great Depression here).

Yet the hospital continued to operate and treat its changing community. Michael Reese hospital opened the Babette and Emanuel Mandel Clinic in 1928, which provided critical healthcare during the Depression for residents of the South and West Sides who could not otherwise afford healthcare. Much of this patient population was poor European immigrants, but they included increasing numbers of Black Chicagoans.8 Despite the financial difficulties of the Depression, the German Jewish community continued to support the hospital throughout the 1940’s, which allowed the hospital to keep functioning, even as the institution’s day-to-day operations became increasingly disconnected from the Jewish community.9

One can see the transforming relationship between Michael Reese and its surrounding communities in the records of the Mandel Clinic. In 1931, the records of patient visits to the clinic categorized patients based on religion and not race, specifically whether patients were Jewish or non-Jewish. By 1937, the clinic began tracking the number of “colored [sic]” patient visits and was no longer reporting on religious statistics.10

The Black community represented an increasing proportion of the hospital’s patients, yet Michael Reese staff were not immune from the racist attitudes common among white Chicagoans. A 1934 Defender article reported that a Black man had been rushed to Michael Reese after a car accident and lay on the hospital floor for an hour untreated because a medical intern reportedly stated that he would lose his job if he treated the man. The man, John Wharton, later died from his injuries at Cook County Hospital. The intern’s statement seems to suggest that hospital policy prohibited providing emergency care to Black patients, but this would contradict earlier evidence that the hospital did treat Black Chicagoans in such situations.11 Although these contrary accounts remain unclear, what is clear was that health care was inconsistent at best. The 1930’s Black residents of the Southside did not see Michael Reese as a dependable source of healthcare, and they continued to travel outside their communities to seek care elsewhere.

THE POSTWAR YEARS: MICHAEL REESE & THE BLACK COMMUNITY
Following some key policy changes passed during WWII and decades of activism by Black nurses and their allies, hospitals and nursing schools slowly started to remove discriminatory admissions policies. It is unclear when exactly the Michael Reese School of Nursing change its practices, but it seems to have done so ahead of many other schools. A 1948 Defender article mentioned Michael Reese, along with Provident and Cook County Hospital School of Nursing, as among the few schools of nursing in Illinois that did not discriminate based on race in their admissions policies.12 Clara Rice entered the nursing school in 1948 and became the first Black nursing student on record to graduate from Michael Reese in 1951.13 

Later that year, the Defender noted that “Negro [sic] graduate and student nurses are serving patients in all divisions of Michael Reese hospital.”14  The next year the hospital hired Marcus Walker, the first Black male registered nurse in the state of Illinois.15 And yet, class photos of the School of Nursing from the 1950’s show that out of graduating classes of forty or fifty students, only one or a handful of students were Black.16 This was a striking reality considering that Michael Reese was located in the heart of Chicago’s Black community.

Similarly, the hospital itself began to exhibit a greater commitment to engaging with and serving the Black community. In 1948, Michael Reese Hospital received an award from the Chicago Commission on Human Relations for “serving all people by providing hospital care without discrimination…”17 By 1951, the Defender praised the hospital as “an interracial medical center” that served over 25,000 Black patients each year. The article included photos and descriptions of a number of Black hospital staff, including doctors (both male and female), nurses, student nurses, medical technicians, pharmacists, secretaries, social workers, and members of the hospital’s board of directors. The newspaper also noted that:

“the fact that the population of the area [where Michael Reese is located] is almost wholly Negro [sic], and that there remains an unwritten policy of discrimination and segregation in the nation, has only strengthened the hospital’s position of fairness.”18

Members of the Black community saw Michael Reese as an institution that was unique in its time for its willingness to racially integrate the hospital staff and serve Black patients.

MICHAEL REESE & URBAN RENEWAL
Yet even as Michael Reese was receiving praise for racial tolerance, the institution would join a movement called “urban renewal” that had massive negative effects on Chicago’s communities of color. The hospital grappled with the realities many urban institutions faced after WWII: systemic racism had drained wealth from cities, as federal legislation and private real estate agents incentivized and pressured white families to leave for the suburbs. Black Chicagoans were left on the Southside with few economic opportunities and crumbling city infrastructure. Relocating the hospital to a wealthier part of Chicago was too expensive, and so Michael Reese’s largely white administrators partnered with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to “rehabilitate” the area in partnership with the Chicago Housing Authority. This movement led to the destruction and relocation of thousands of working-class families, mostly people of color, to pave the way for new government housing projects and for Michael Reese and IIT to create new sprawling campuses and housing for their staff.

The hospital justified its actions, believing that that the decaying neighborhood was a place “with some bad characteristics and some good, which was unable to take care of itself.” Michael Reese, according to the hospital’s public statements “took responsibility for the future of its own neighborhood,”19 despite local residents’ oppositions to their plans. These urban renewal plans led to the creation of the “second ghetto,” in which Black Chicagoans were pushed into government high-rises or into neighborhoods further south or west in Chicago.20
THE FINAL YEARS: 1960 - 1981
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Michael Reese increased the number of admitted Black nursing students and hired more Black nurses. Simultaneously, nurses and nursing students continued to grapple with the racial complexities of training and working at a predominantly white institution. In the 1960’s, there were still only a handful of Black nursing students in each graduating class.

In 1970 the hospital began a program called the Enrichment Studies Program (ESP), in which the hospital received funding from the federal government to recruit high school students (largely Black students) from underserved Chicago neighborhoods who wished to become nurses but were not academically prepared. The high-schoolers took an eight-week summer course at Michael Reese in which they improved their academic skills, participated in cultural activities, and took part in individual and group therapy, all while living in a nurses’ residence on the Michael Reese campus. Students who successfully completed the summer course were then accepted into the School of Nursing the following fall and received support throughout their time in the three-year program. The hospital also hired a cohort of Black faculty to recruit and support ESP students, including Barbara Norman, a participant in our Black Nurses in Chicago oral history project.21

Norman noted that the hospital was not originally enthusiastic about this program but agreed to carry it out under social and political pressure. This program relied not only on federal funding, but on support from the Black community. Soon after the program’s start, local Black women created an organization called XXI, whose focus was to raise money to support the program.22

The continued tensions between the hospital and the Black community escalated in June 1969, when twenty-six Black registered nurses and surgical technicians at Michael Reese Hospital walked off the job in protest of “discrimination in work responsibilities.” The staff asserted that hospital administrators frequently assigned housekeeping duties to technically trained Black staff, while never assigning cleaning or maintenance tasks to white staff in similar positions. The twenty-six workers had refused to mop floors, leading supervisors to suspend five of them. The striking workers demanded that the hospital hire additional housekeeping staff, change the rotation of duties to be fairer, and pay the suspended workers their lost income.23 The sick-out, in which the workers coordinating all calling in sick at the same time, apparently “virtually crippled the facility’s surgical operations,” leading hospital administrators to eventually meet with the workers and agree to most of their demands.24 Racial integration did not guarantee fair or equal treatment for Black nurses or other medical staff, and they had to find ways to force institutions to treat them fairly.


Racial prejudice did not just come from hospital administrators, but also from patients. As part of her work with the ESP program, Norman (include link) supervised a group of nursing students from a variety of racial backgrounds. She recounted one incident in which a patient grabbed the nursing cap off a Black student’s head and demanded to know why the student was wearing the cap, which had a Jewish Star of David on it. Norman noted that even though she knew that patients could be racist, she would never ask a patient for permission to assign them a Black student nurse. She saw herself as an advocate for the Black students assigned to her and refused to accept racial prejudice from administrators or patients.

Even as tensions continued, Michael Reese continued to serve as a prominent institution for training and employing Black nurses. In 1973, Frances Barge, who had been on faculty at the nursing school for ten years, was appointed the first Black director.25 The pages of The Mirror, the hospital’s employee newsletter, from the 1970’s are filled with stories of Black nurses and their years of dedicated service. A 1972 issue celebrated the milestone of 25 years of service for several Black employees, including Emma Harper, a licensed practical nurse, and Alice Pemberton, a nurse in obstetrics-gynecology.26 In 1973, Paz Ellington, a Black licensed practical nurse, was named the Employee of the Year and described as “the greatest public relations asset Michael Reese ever had” for her patient care work.27
 
The School of Nursing closed in 1981, as nurse training around the country shifted from hospitals to university-based degree programs. Michael Reese hospital closed almost thirty years later in 2008, after over one hundred years of providing healthcare services to the various residents of the Chicago Bronzeville community. Its story is unique in its impact on the community, but it is also representative of health institutions across Chicago and other cities. The hospital shows how institutions can cause harm to the same communities they claim to serve. Michael Reese in an example of the complex relationship and evolution of shifting demographics within communities, and the hospital followed the path of many white institutions that were resistant to integrate and support the communities of color that surrounded them. 

 

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