Hospital Desegregation and Hospital Holdouts

• In Event: Medical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 9. Racialized Experiences of Health and Healthcare

Abstract

In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare Act to establish federally funded insurance for people over the age of 65. The Medicare Act, alongside the Civil Rights Act of 1964, became one of the federal government’s most effective tools for dismantling racial segregation in publicly funded hospitals. While this rapidly and uniformly desegregated nearly all hospitals across the nation, several hundred hospitals resisted this desegregation tactic. This paper describes the pace and onset of hospital desegregation in Mississippi between 1965 and 1970. In doing so, the second aim of this paper is to analyze organizational and county characteristics that facilitated the compliance or resistance to desegregation. Hospitals were a main site of contestation or support for the civil rights movement and these findings highlight the forms of capital that that contributed to successful desegregation or prolonged segregation.

Author

• Courtney Allen, University of Washington