We Must Preserve Black History: Saving the Old Richmond Community Hospital
Below is my public statement shared on Sunday, March 3rd, 2024 during the first Sunday rally to save the Old Richmond Community Hospital. I want to express my sincerest gratitude to the organizers of this event, Delegate Viola Baskerville and Farid Alan Schintzius—two people who have waged and won numerous fights to preserve Richmond’s history—and to all the community members who are helping make this happen. If you are interested in learning more or helping with the campaign, you can find more information in their facebook group here.
There are so many stories that define Richmond, but the stories that enshrine our place in America’s history are stories of Black struggle, Black perseverance, and Black achievement. This place, the Old Community Hospital, is one of those prized stories.
Despite all our triumphs, the struggle to ensure those stories aren’t erased continues today.
The shameful legacy of this city is the undying tale of public and private dollars nearly exclusively spent on the veneration of the plantation south and the lost cause. Innumerable monuments and artifacts from Richmond’s real history have been lost forever in this process.
Very recently, William Fox Elementary burnt down. It was not a question that that building would be restored, as it should; it is an anchor for the Fan neighborhood, rooting us in its history. Yet, four years earlier, the historic George Mason school in the East End — a school that served Black students since its founding and was built by the exact same architect as William Fox — was torn down with little debate or public discussion.
But today, I’m overjoyed that there has been a swell of community members who refuse to allow that to happen again.
It is unfathomable that Richmond’s Old Community Hospital — the city’s first Black Hospital, founded by Sarah Garland Jones, the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Virginia — is slated for demolition.
Because let’s be clear here, Richmond’s Black medical history is fraught. Just a few miles away, stands a highly regarded medical institution where Black bodies were robbed from their graves and experimented upon. Community Hospital tells the other story — one in which dispossessed people survived despite the odds.
Richmond Community Hospital is still in service to this day in the East End of the city. It moved there in 1980 and was bought by Bon Scours in 1995. And in a twisted irony, it is the same hospital from which Bon Secours is accused of siphoning federal healthcare subsidies to hospitals in wealthier neighborhoods.
Somehow, the city’s leadership always finds the money to preserve history when the wealthiest ask for it, but when they’re asked to preserve the working class history, the Black history of this city, they can only provide objections — we are told that efficiency is our only guide and that we just couldn’t possibly afford it.
Yet, at the same time, we seemingly have unlimited public dollars to push into the hands of private development and to subsidize unaffordable housing, all while our city’s infrastructure and institutions crumble.
I do not think it is an aberration that Black history is ignored while the displacement of long-term residents in this city accelerates.
At this very moment, folks are having to decide between keeping the house they, their parents, and grandparents grew up in or putting food on the table. The monuments to their own lives are in jeopardy.
Preservation of this history is necessary. We must build monuments that tell our shared history, a history that reaches across racial and economic barriers, a history that tells us that we have a right to live in our chosen communities, a history that tells us that we deserve to live in a free society. This can be our guide to liberty as a city.
