For Negroes Only

Georgia's Governor Herman Talmadge stood on a platform outside Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital this week to dedicate a new wing. Around him, admiring the creamy brick and the green marble trim of the Hughes Spalding Pavilion, was a mixed audience of whites and Negroes. With pride, the governor pointed to the excellence of the $1,850,000 building --as good as any of its kind in the U.S. Then Dixiecrat Talmadge, apostle of white supremacy, handed the building over to Dr. Benjamin Mays in behalf of his 200,000 fellow Negro citizens in the area. The Spalding Pavilion is for Negroes only.

In Atlanta, as in many another southern city, Negroes with moderate incomes had been taking a beating on hospital care. Ineligible for charity hospitals, barred from beds alongside whites in general hospitals, they had to put up with third-rate facilities or go elsewhere. (The few who could afford it went as far as Washington or New Orleans.) One who concerned himself with the problem was Hughes Spalding, prominent lawyer and Roman Catholic layman, who is a director of the Coca-Cola Co. and head of the local hospital authority. One he consulted early was Dr. Mays, president of Morehouse College.

Sixty percent of the money for the pavilion came from the U.S. Treasury under the Hill-Burton Act; 20% came from the state of Georgia, and 10% each from Fulton and DeKalb counties. With the fund, Spalding and his colleagues have built a five-story hospital with 116 beds (no more than four to a room) and 33 bassinets, with modern refinements such as a central oxygen supply and a lot of airconditioning. Private rooms will cost $15 a day with bath, $12.50 without; semiprivate $11, and a bed in a four-bed ward $9. The staff will include both white and Negro doctors.

Some Negroes complained that the Spalding Pavilion perpetuated the segregation which they hate--besides a separate kitchen and laundry, it even has its own morgue. The majority were satisfied to have the physical plant, as good as anything Atlanta has for whites, and to let the segregation issue work itself out. To sage Dr. Mays, the important thing was that, for the first time, Negroes had taken a part in the planning from the start--it was "not just something done for the Negro by the white people."

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