For nearly seven decades, Hale Infirmary stood on this site as one of twenty-five hospitals in Alabama and the first in Montgomery established during the Black Hospital Movement, which sought to overcome healthcare inequities for African American patients in an era when most American hospitals excluded Black nurses and doctors or confined Black patients to segregated, substandard wards. Its founder, Cornelius Nathaniel Dorsette, M.D., born in 1852? and died in 1897, was a graduate of Hampton Institute and the University of Buffalo medical school who came to Montgomery in 1883 at the urging of Booker T. Washington, became among the first Black physicians licensed in Alabama, served for a time as Washington's personal physician, and also owned a pharmacy and a Dexter Avenue office building. Dorsette opened Hale Infirmary in 1890 on land donated by his father-in-law James Hale, and with fundraising help from a white women's social club it grew into a two-story structure with sixty hospital beds, an isolation ward, and an operating room. Black physician Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson, who in 1891 became the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Alabama, was tutored there by Dorsette, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. later gave a speech to raise funds for the facility before it closed in 1958. On September 30, 1919, Willie Temple, born in 1894 and the eldest of four children of Montgomery County farmers Lewis and Ella Shorter Temple, was killed there after police had taken him to the infirmary for treatment. Temple, a dining car cook for the L&N Railroad, had been returning from a social event with a friend on the night of September 29, 1919, when a third person approached them and an altercation followed. Patrolman J. J. Barbaree encountered the three and tried to arrest them; during the struggle Temple and Barbaree exchanged gunfire, and Barbaree soon died of his wounds. Temple, who was also wounded, was arrested later at a coworker's home on Cedar Street. In the early hours of September 30, a mob of white assailants entered Hale Infirmary, overpowered the two police officers on guard, and shot Temple to death. His killing came during the Red Summer, a period of racial terror across America that included at least sixty documented attacks by white mobs and hundreds of individual violent acts, and it occurred one day after the lynching in Montgomery of Miles Phifer and Robert Croskey, who were taken from police custody while being transported to Wetumpka. A grand jury empaneled to investigate the three September lynchings returned no indictments.

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Montgomery, Alabama · USA