08/26/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19RjA8pwLr/ Some Ft Huachuca history:
The Army built two hospitals on one desert post so the races would never share a ward. Then the white patients started walking into the Black one. Midian Bousfield commanded that hospital at Fort Huachuca, and the traffic on that road destroyed every excuse the Army had ever given for building it. Read this one, then go look at who was standing behind him in the photograph.
Two hospitals went up in the Arizona desert in 1942, close enough that a person could walk from one to the other without hurrying.
Same building season, same contractors, same government lumber. One was for white patients and the other was for everybody else.
The Army numbered them Station Hospital No. 1 and Station Hospital No. 2. No. 1 was the bigger one, and it would become the largest all-Black hospital the United States Army ever built.
The man sent out to command it was a fifty-six-year-old Chicago insurance executive named Midian Othello Bousfield, who had never worn a uniform in his life. He was going to Fort Huachuca.
Fort Huachuca sat about fifteen miles above the Mexican border, seventy-five thousand acres of Sonoran desert under the Huachuca Mountains. The Army put up more than fourteen hundred buildings there in a single year.
Local papers started calling it the third largest city in Arizona.
Almost everything on it was built twice. Two officers' clubs, the Lakeside for white officers and the Mountain View for the Black ones.
Two sets of civilian quarters, and two hospitals.
The War Department would not integrate Black medical officers with white ones, and Black Army nurses were assigned to Black patients.
So the Army built the post twice and handed Bousfield half of it. He had come to it from a barbershop.
His father Willard cut hair in Tipton, Missouri, then in Kansas City, and Bousfield learned the trade young.
He took a degree from the University of Kansas in 1907 and an M.D. from Northwestern two years after that, interned at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, and in 1911 went down to Brazil looking for a fortune that was not there.
He came home in 1912 with no money at all. So he went back to the razor.
Bousfield paid for his own medical practice by working the railroads, cutting hair and portering, shaving white men's necks in a moving car for tips.
A white passenger would hand him a razor and tip his chin back. No hospital in Kansas City would hand him a ward.
By 1942 he was a long way from that job. He was vice president and medical director of Supreme Liberty Life, president of the Chicago Urban League, and the first Black person ever seated on the Chicago Board of Education.
He had run the National Medical Association, the professional body of Black physicians in America, as its president. The year he was elected to it, the white public health establishment handed him a microphone.
In October 1933 he stood in front of the American Public Health Association, the first Black speaker they had ever put on that program, and told a room of white health officers what he thought of them. He said they had reviewed the death rates of one tenth of the population year after year and done nothing about it, and that if they did not plan a New Deal of equal facilities they should expect to be called stupid in plain words.
Then he gave them his answer to the question of what could be done. "The best way to begin, is to begin."
Nine years later the Army called, and he began.
The Kansas City Call carried the news on the twenty-ninth of May, 1942, still identifying him to its readers as a former Kansas Citian. Two weeks later Black Chicago threw him a public tribute and the Defender put it in the paper, a city sending one of its own out to the desert with its blessing.
The nurses reached that desert before the wards were fully broken in. One of them, a second lieutenant named Olive Lucas, came out of New York on a bus in August 1942 with five other women and stepped down into brown dust that covered her shoes before she had finished walking.
Basic training ran six weeks and they did it in their own civilian clothes, drilling at midday in August, because the Army had not yet settled what to put Black nurses in.
Map reading, tent pitching, an obstacle course and an infiltration course, all of it done in the skirts and shoes they had packed for a train ride. Then they went to work in the building.
The hospital was enormous. It covered several acres, and the wards were strung together by covered corridors running better than half a mile, roofed so the staff could cross between buildings without being sandblasted.
Inside were three dental clinics, a library, a soda fountain, a barber shop, and tennis courts.
The Chicago Defender sent a description of it home to Black Chicago in May 1944. Black readers were being shown a state of the art American hospital where every doctor, every nurse, and every orderly looked like them, and where the commanding officer's eagles were on a Black man's shoulders.
Those eagles covered fourteen thousand Black soldiers on that post. Over the war more than thirty thousand passed through, including both of the Army's Black infantry divisions, the 92nd and the 93rd.
Bousfield's people took care of all of them.
Off the post, none of it counted. The businesses in the towns around Fort Huachuca would not serve a Black soldier in a United States Army uniform, and the men knew it before they finished unpacking.
The doctors saving those men's lives could not get a sandwich.
On the post, the traffic ran the other way. White officers began coming to Station Hospital No. 1.
Not because they were ordered to. Because the care was better, and because word gets around a small desert town fast.
Then their wives came. In an Army that had deliberately housed Black and white officers apart so that nobody would mistake equal rank for equal standing, white women walked into the Black hospital and let Black physicians examine them.
The rule that a Black man does not put his hands on a white woman's body was the most violently enforced rule in American life in 1943, and men had been killed on the accusation alone.
On that post the rule was being broken every week, on purpose, by the women themselves, because they wanted the better doctor.
Then civilians started driving in from the surrounding country, people with no connection to the Army at all, because there was nothing else within reach that was as good.
And the white hospital, No. 2, thin on qualified doctors and losing more of them to the front every month, had to start borrowing Bousfield's.
The historian Pauline Peretz went through the records of that post and named what was happening, an experiment in integration running quietly inside the most rigidly segregated post in the country. The Surgeon General's office knew and let it run.
Every argument the Army had made for building two hospitals was disproved by traffic on a dirt road.
None of that saved him.
Chicago had sent him off with a tribute. The National Medical Association, the same organization that had made Bousfield its president, formally censured him for taking the job.
Their position was that a magnificent Black hospital inside a segregated Army was still a segregated Army, and that by making Jim Crow work well he was making it permanent.
They were not wrong. Historians would later give the arrangement a name, deluxe Jim Crow, a phrase Thurgood Marshall used for the practice of spending real money on separate Black facilities in order to keep them separate.
Bousfield's reply was that his hospital gave Black physicians professional opportunities that existed nowhere else in the United States.
He had spent his working life on that argument. Start with the door that opens, get people through it, count the ones who make it.
He was not wrong either. A Chicago doctor named Leonidas Berry, later one of the country's leading gastroenterologists, tried to get a place at Fort Huachuca and could not, and wrote about the disappointment for the rest of his life.
Berry's options were countable.
Two hospitals in the whole United States Army were run and staffed by Black people. Fort Huachuca was the larger, and the other was the station hospital at Tuskegee Army Air Field, which DeHaven Hinkson had opened the year before.
Two. At the end of 1944 the entire Army Medical Department counted 342 Black officers.
Fort Huachuca had a waiting list.
Bousfield and the association that censured him were arguing about the same door. One of them was saying it was too narrow and the other was saying it was the only one open.
Bousfield served until 1945. The retirement papers describe a difficult tenure and do not go into what made it difficult, and the man himself left no memoir.
In April 1946 a white brigadier general named John A. Rogers pinned the Legion of Merit on him. A photographer from the government was there, and the picture went into the National Archives.
Twenty-two months later, on the morning of February 16, 1948, his heart stopped at his house at 9323 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. He was sixty-two.
The Tribune obituary the next day listed the insurance company, the Urban League, Provident Hospital, the school board, and the Army. It identified his widow by her own job, principal of Wendell Phillips High School, because Maudelle Bousfield had been the first Black high school principal in the city.
Nothing in that obituary mentioned the four men who had run the hospital with him. Sometime during the war, somebody had set up a photograph of the executive staff of Station Hospital No. 1.
Five officers. Major Maurice W. Shaw seated on the left, Lieutenant Colonel M. O. Bousfield in the center, Major John B. West beside him, and standing behind them Major Ralph B. Teabeau and Major Arthur H. Simmons.
Five Black men in United States Army uniform, running the biggest hospital in the country that would have them.
That photograph is at Howard University now, in the Campbell C. Johnson Collection at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. It carries the catalog number ccJ_073.
It is filed under Army, and then, inside that, under Anti Aircraft Artillery.
Four doctors and a colonel, sorted into a folder about guns, because whoever was doing the sorting had nowhere else to put a hospital.
You can find that photograph in about thirty seconds, and the caption hands you all five names for free.
Four of them are Shaw, West, Teabeau and Simmons.
Go find out what happened to those four. Almost nobody has bothered.
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