09/01/2026
Thanks for posting this, Melvin Todd!
🏥 At a time when most Alabama hospitals would not treat a Black patient, and no white nursing school would train a Black woman, Tuskegee built its own.
The John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital opened at Tuskegee Institute in 1913, and it became far more than a place to heal the sick. It was a school, a training ground, a proving house for Black doctors and nurses who had been shut out everywhere else. Young women came from all over the South to earn their caps there, learning their craft in wards run by and for their own people. They walked those halls knowing that every patient they touched was proof of what segregation swore was impossible. 👩🏾⚕️
The physicians who led it were pioneers. They performed surgeries, delivered babies, ran clinics for poor farm families who had never seen a doctor in their lives, and they trained the next generation to carry it forward. For decades this hospital was a beacon, drawing Black medical talent to the heart of Alabama and sending it back out into communities that desperately needed it.
This was Black Alabama building the very thing it was denied, brick by brick and nurse by nurse. Nobody handed it to them. They raised it up out of necessity and pride, and they staffed it with excellence.
Every Black nurse and doctor practicing in this state today stands on a foundation that steady hands laid at Tuskegee more than a century ago. 🤍
