Taborian Hospital opened at Mound Bayou in February 1942, forty two beds, paid for by the Knights and Daughters of Tabor out of an assessment on its twenty five thousand members. Every doctor and nurse was Black, which in Mississippi in 1942 was close to unrepeatable, and the surgeon in chief was Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, then thirty three. Howard was a physician, a planter and an insurance man, and he made the town a base for something larger. In 1951 he founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, Mississippi's pre-eminent civil rights organisation of the 1950s, and its annual rallies drew ten thousand people and more to a town of about thirteen hundred, with Thurgood Marshall and Mahalia Jackson among the speakers. The people who passed through are why the name matters. Medgar Evers sold insurance for Howard's Magnolia Mutual before the NAACP made him its Mississippi field secretary in 1954, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore and Aaron Henry came through too. In 1955 Howard sheltered witnesses in the Emmett Till murder case: Willie Reed slept in Howard's own house under armed guard the night before he testified, and there was already a thousand dollar bounty on Howard's head before any of it began. After the acquittal he toured the country describing it, and in November spoke at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery at Martin Luther King's invitation, with Rosa Parks in the audience four days before her arrest. He left Mississippi for Chicago in 1956, and Operation PUSH was founded in his living room there in 1971. The hospital merged with a rival clinic in 1967 to become the Mound Bayou Community Hospital, which closed in 1983.
Getting there
33.8782, -90.7267
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