Title	Good Samaritan Hospital: Facade
Creator(s)	Humphreys, Elizabeth Moore, photographer
Date	2012-08-21
Property name	Good Samaritan Hospital
Date of construction	1964
Property type	Hospital
Community Name	Selma, Dallas County, AL
Description	Color photograph of the south-facing façade, photographer facing north. The hospital is a four-story, modern, brutalism-influenced building in brick in and concrete. The façade is divided into three bays. The central bay is clad in concrete panels. It is half a story taller than the bays on either side, and it projects forward slightly from the façade. The other two bays are red brick. Each concrete panel is twice as tall as it is wide, and the central bay is ten panels wide and 10.5 panels tall. A stylized cross made of greenish concrete sections that meet in peaks dominates the façade. It is four panels wide and four panels tall and starts two panels from the left/west edge and four panels from the bottom. The first level of the central bay features a concrete awning or porch that is eight panels wide, starting from the left/west. The roof of the awning follows a squared, geometric pattern. It is open to the front and split into three flat-roofed sections separated by flat vertical sections that join at the base with a thicker flat section, creating an almost sawtooth pattern with wide teeth and narrow spaces between them. A spotlight aimed at the cross is perched atop the middle portion. The awning is supported by flat, rectangular columns with the short side facing the façade. Access the building is through a glass and metal double door with a glazed transom and narrow sidelights that stretch from the floor to the top of the transom. The floor of the porch is two shallow steps higher than the sidewalk and is covered in terracotta-colored tiles. The brick bays are unadorned except for a concrete belt that divides the first floor from the upper floors. The west end features metal letters reading GOOD SAMARITAN HOSPITAL CENTER 1107 VOEGLIN AVENUE. A pair of large, lumpy boxwoods sits in front of either brick bay. The flat side pieces of the box-shaped concrete awnings surrounding the windows of the top three floors are visible from this angle. In the foreground, telephone and electric wires cross the image. On the east side of the building, a metal fence surrounds a parking lot. A campaign sign for Mayor George Evans is woven into part of the fence. Two houses and a shuttered laundromat are visible beyond the fence. The east side of the building includes a mowed yard surrounded by a metal railing. Portions of brick planters are just visible. A Church’s Chicken restaurant is also visible.
Historical Notes	The extant modernist Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma, Alabama was built in 1964 by the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Edmundites (Fathers of St. Edmund), two Catholic missions. Originally built in 1922, Good Samaritan (or Good Sam, as it is known locally) was the second black hospital in the city, after the Burwell Infirmary. The hospital was originally run by the Alabama Baptist Convention under the administration of Mamie Norris, a nurse from the Tuskegee Institute. The Catholics purchased the hospital in 1944, built a new facility in 1947, which was replaced by the modern facility that could house 111 patients in 1964. Good Samaritan was the only hospital in the six surrounding counties open to African Americans. Sister Louis Bertrand established Alabama’s first School of Practical Nursing at Good Samaritan to deal with the critical nursing shortage. This was an important source of employment and training to black women (though a handful of black men also completed the program), who had few other such opportunities under Jim Crow. The hospital was also an important source of employment for Selma’s black community. The Sisters of St. Joseph took part in the civil rights movement in Selma in a variety of ways, including boycotting grocery stores that only catered to whites, attending mass meetings at nearby Tabernacle Baptist Church, and attempting to visit black youth who were arrested for protesting. This did little to endear them to Selma’s white community, who referred to them as the “black sisters,” and earned the attention of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The building also functioned as a center of community, hosting the Selma Literacy Project, an effort of the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to prepare potential black voters for the literacy test required in order to register to vote. Good Samaritan was where victims of racially motivated violence and police shootings went for care. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a civil rights activist in nearby Marion (Perry County), Alabama was brought to Good Sam for treatment after being beaten by troopers and shot by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler. Jackson’s death from his injuries inspired James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to plan the Selma to Montgomery Marches that included both Bloody Sunday and the successful March to Montgomery in March 1965. Marchers injured in Bloody Sunday were also brought to Good Sam for treatment. Though the sisters could not march by order of the bishop, they opened the hospital and convent as meeting and rest places for the demonstrators who poured into Selma from across the country. After 1965, Good Samaritan began to struggle as white hospitals were forced to open their doors to black patients, and white doctors and black patients began seeking out care at the better-equipped (and better paying) formerly white facilities. In 1972, the Sisters of St. Joseph withdrew from Good Samaritan Hospital, citing worsening conditions, poor finances, and a lack of sufficient staff. African American leaders took over, with John Crear as administrator and Dr. Charles Lett as medical chief. They won a grant for research on rural health, which led to the establishment of the Rural Health Medical Program, which allowed Good Samaritan to play a key role in providing education and health care to the rural communities of Dallas, Perry, Wilcox, and Lowndes Counties. By 1983, however, the poverty of the surrounding areas overwhelmed the hospital’s precarious finances, and Good Samaritan was forced to close its doors. In 2016, Mayor George Evans announced an effort to reopen the hospital as a medical center with space for a museum to acknowledge the facility’s key role in the voting rights movement.
Collection Name	Southern History Documentary Projects
Subject-LCSH	Civil rights -- United States Clergy Historic buildings Women
Type	Still image
Genre	Photograph
Contributing Institution	Center for Historic Preservation, Middle Tennessee State University
Copyright status	Copyright of the Center for Historic Preservation, Middle Tennessee State University
Conditions for use	Reproduction permitted for non-profit educational and research purposes only.
Digital Publisher	Digital Initiatives, James E. Walker Library, Middle Tennessee State University

Good Samaritan Hospital: Facade

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