Some Background On Harlem Hospital

"Conrad Vincent had been one of five Black doctors hired at Harlem Hospital in 1925, a move blessed by Tammany Hall, its eye always keenly on future elections. Harlem Hospital was the only hospital in New York City that catered to the medical needs of Blacks; the other hospitals were segregated. But as the years passed, Vincent, enthusiastic at the breakthrough in 1925, turned angry. The Black doctors were not given challenging assignments. As for the Black nurses, they were segregated within the confines of the hospital. Vincent, speaking on behalf of the Black staff and thereby taking the most risk, also complained that the care of Black patients at Harlem Hospital was abysmal. Having allowed vice to flourish in Harlem, from prostitution to bootlegging to numbers racketeering, New York officials could hardly have been surprised at the crimes that resulted. Murders, robberies, and crimes of passion were all played out in high, if sad, spirits in the Harlem newspapers. Crime and poverty deepened the community's health crisis. Syphilis rates in Harlem were nine times higher than in White Manhattan; the pneumonia and tuberculosis statistics were as alarming. Black babies had half the chance of surviving White babies.

Harlem Hospital, on the corner of 136th Street and Lenox Avenue, frightened many in the community. 'The butcher shop,' they sometimes called it; at other times, simply 'the morgue.' In the hospital during the Depression years, one saw patients sleeping in hallways, their groans eerily echoing down the corridors. For 200,000 Harlemites, there were 250 beds. 'When I take my life in my hands I want peace, quiet, and harmony,' one resident said. 'I don't want to be around the strife and turmoil of Harlem Hospital...'

In young Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Vincent found his ally- an uptown reformer, in fact a progressive, willing to march downtown and take on the opposition...

One day the doors to his office swung open and in walked young Adam Clayton Powell, coming to complain about conditions at Harlem Hospital. Ordinarily complaints from a Harlem minister- any Harlem minister- might not have rated so high on the Mayor's list of priorities, but this was an election year: Harlemites voted. O'Brien's tone toward Powell, however, was condescending. He treated the minister as a neophyte, as someone else who had come to extract promises from the Tammany table, and sent him on his way empty-handed. 'Go on back to Harlem, boy, and don't fan the flames,' he told him. It was all that Powell needed.

Back in Harlem, he swung the doors of his father's church wide open and waved in thousands of protesters, emotional protesters: the men and women who had been treated, who had relatives who had been treated, at Harlem Hospital; the men and women who had long criticized the service by the staff; the men and women who had long walked the corridors searching for a Black nurse, a Black doctor, and had been unable to find one; the men and women whose children has been born at the hospital. It was the only hospital there was. No matter what its administrators said, these people believed Conrad Vincent. They came to the Abyssinian church for a meeting- it was more protest than meeting- and they settled in the pews, and they listened to the young minister who had gone downtown to get answers and instead of getting answers had been treated condescendingly...

When Powell returned to City Hall the following month, he was not alone. There were fifteen hundred protesters with him." -From, "King Of The Cats" By: Wil Haygood