After the Civil War, the Central Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Dayton, Ohio, and the Southern Branch in Hampton, Virginia, opened their doors to Union Veterans without regard to skin color. The men admitted to these branches found themselves living in two of the nation’s first racially integrated federal institutions.
By the turn of the century, however, the landmark Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson allowed institutionalized racism and segregation to prevail in American society. Many Veterans hospitals followed the policies adopted by the military and medical communities and made racial segregation the rule.
To accommodate the growing number of African American Veterans in the south following World War I, the Veterans Bureau opened a hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1923 reserved exclusively for their use. Originally called the “Hospital for Sick and Injured Colored World War Veterans,” the installation was staffed entirely by Black doctors and nurses. Joseph H. Ward, a prominent Indiana physician who served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War I and afterwards rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, became the hospital’s director. He was the first African American to hold this position in VA history. The Tuskegee facility operated as the VA’s only Black Veterans’ hospital for thirty-one years, providing care for more than 300,000 former servicemembers.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the VA allowed hospitals to choose their segregation status based on local and regional practices. As a result, many VA hospitals, primarily in the south, maintained separate wards for White and Black Veterans. If a hospital did not have segregated facilities, Black patients would only be admitted in emergency cases until they could be transferred to hospitals that did treat African Americans.
At the end of World War II, knowing that more than a million Black servicemembers would soon be returning to civilian life, the VA explored building another hospital for African American Veterans in Mississippi. However, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argued against establishing more racially segregated hospitals like Tuskegee. The NAACP urged VA to fully integrate all hospitals, arguing that “There is no reason whatever why colored and white Veterans should be treated in separate hospitals after having fought and bled together to make victory possible.”
President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 desegregating the U.S. Armed Forces in July 1948. While the order applied to VA medical installations in theory, forty-seven of the 166 VA hospitals remained segregated in some form through 1953. That same year, VA Administrator Harvey V. Higley assured NAACP officials that he supported their goals: “We find any semblance of segregation unsocial, uneconomical, and undesirable and we hope the day is not far removed when there will be no semblance of racial segregation in VA Hospitals.” True to his word, he directed VA facilities that still sanctioned some form of racial segregation to end the practice as quickly as possible. On July 28, 1954, the agency formally announced that segregation had been eliminated at all VA hospitals.
By Katie Rories
Historian, Veterans Health Administration
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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 84: Gettysburg Address Tablet
President Abraham Lincoln is one of the most revered figures in American history. Rankings of U.S. presidents routinely place him at or near the top of the list. Lincoln is also held in high esteem at VA. His stirring call during his second inaugural address in 1865 to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” embodies the nation’s promise to all who wear the uniform, a promise VA and its predecessor administrations have kept ever since the Civil War.
Ever since Lincoln first uttered those memorable words in November 1863, the Gettysburg Address has been linked to our national cemeteries. In 1908, Congress approved a plan to produce a standard Gettysburg Address tablet to be installed in all national cemeteries in time for the centennial of President Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1909.
