The G.T. Thomas Hospital

The building on Sunflower Avenue opened on 12 July 1916 as the Clarksdale Colored Hospital, was later the Ancient Order of Watchmen Hospital and then the G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital, and served Black patients of the Delta until 1942. On 26 September 1937 Bessie Smith, the highest paid Black entertainer in the country a decade earlier, was brought here after a road crash about sixteen miles north of Clarksdale on Highway 61, and died of her injuries. A story still widely repeated holds that she bled to death because a whites only hospital turned her away. It is false, and its origin is traceable: the record producer John Hammond wrote it up in Down Beat in November 1937 from hearsay, placing the accident in Memphis. He acknowledged thirty four years later that he had relied on second hand talk, and Down Beat itself reinvestigated and printed a correction. What happened is better documented than the myth. A Memphis physician, Hugh Smith, was driving to a fishing trip, was flagged down and gave first aid at the roadside, and an ambulance took her to the Black hospital, which as Smith later put it is the only place an ambulance would have taken her. Chris Albertson, whose biography demolished the refusal story, nonetheless faulted the delay before she reached any hospital, so the question of what race cost her that night is narrower than the legend and is not closed. In 1943 Z. L. Ratliff Hill leased the building and opened it in 1944 as the Riverside Hotel, buying it outright in 1957. Segregation left Black travellers few places to stay, and Sonny Boy Williamson, Ike Turner and Robert Nighthawk all did. Hill ran it until her death in 1997 and her family after her.