Provident Hospital
*On this date in 1938, Provident Hospital opened in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Located at 1409 Sixth Avenue, it was founded by two African American physicians, Von D. Mizell and James Sistrunk. During Jim Crow in the south, none of the existing hospitals in Fort Lauderdale would accept Black patients. In 1937, a young Black man named John McBride was shot in the stomach by a car full of white members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Hospitals in the area near the Pompano Beach shooting refused to admit him. A black physician, Dr. Von D. Mizell, ultimately persuaded one of them to take him in. But the hospital later insisted on moving McBride to a rundown sanitarium, where he soon died.
The city tore down the hospital after the city's hospitals were integrated after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Medicare refused to support segregated hospitals. The Mizell Center, a community center, replaced the building.
