General Hospital No. 2

General Hospital No. 2 was Kansas City’s segregated municipal hospital for Black patients, operating from 1908 until its consolidation with General Hospital No. 1 in 1959. From 1911 it admitted Black physicians and staff, and it is described as the first hospital in the United States staffed entirely by African Americans. Its 1930 building at 600 East 22nd Street was praised by The Call as “as good as money could buy,” yet the hospital operated under the control of the Pendergast machine and suffered chronic diversion of equipment and supplies to the white hospital. It was demolished; nothing of either building survives, though the district it anchored is still called Hospital Hill.

Origins (1873–1911)

Kansas City opened its first municipal hospital in 1873.¹ After the devastating flood of 1903, Dr. Thomas C. Unthank — a Howard University-trained physician — began campaigning for a municipal hospital that would serve Black residents and employ Black medical staff.¹² When white patients moved to a new General Hospital building in 1908, Unthank’s lobbying persuaded the city to designate the old hospital as the “colored division,” and it became known as General Hospital No. 2.¹²³

For its first three years the hospital had an all-white staff. That changed in 1911, when four Black physicians, Unthank among them, joined it; the hospital thereafter admitted Black physicians, interns, and nursing staff.¹²

Dr. William J. Thompkins served as superintendent from 1915 to 1922 — the first African American to hold the post — and the hospital rose from a Class D to a Class A rating during his tenure.³ In 1922 it attained Class A accreditation from the American Medical Association, the National Medical Association, and the American College of Surgeons.¹

The 1930 building

By 1923 a committee that included philanthropist William Volker was pressing for a new building, describing the existing structure as deteriorating and “infested with rats and vermin.”¹ A city bond issue of $1.2 million passed in 1925, the same year Kansas City adopted the new charter that created the city-manager government the Pendergast organization would capture.¹ A 1927 fire that caused $30,000 in damage and endangered 60 patients pushed construction approval through in 1928.¹

The new eight-story hospital opened on March 2, 1930, at 600 East 22nd Street, with 179 beds — well above the 110 a survey had recommended.¹ Its staff of 292 was entirely Black, including 72 professionals and 35 physicians, representing about 70 percent of Kansas City’s Black doctors; by one account the hospital employed more than 90 percent of the city’s professionalized Black municipal workforce.¹⁴ Chester A. Franklin’s Call called it “as good as money could buy.”¹ In 1931–32 the National Negro Health Contest rated Kansas City the top city in the country for Black health.¹

Sources disagree on the building’s cost: the Pendergast Years account gives $300,000 against the $1.2 million bond issue, and the African American Heritage Trail describes Thompkins as having secured $300,000 through political connections.¹⁴

Machine control and chronic shortage

The hospital’s fortunes were tied to the Pendergast machine. Staffing decisions ran through city-manager appointments under Henry F. McElroy, and superintendents were machine choices; political instability in 1930–32 under Cas Welch’s influence, and the troubled tenure of Dr. D. M. Miller, ended with Pendergast reasserting control in late 1932.¹ Employees took mandatory salary reductions of 25 to 50 percent and paid monthly “lugs” of 20 percent to the organization.¹ Dr. Arthur E. Wells, a candidate who opposed machine control, was beaten on election day.¹

Behind the modern facade, the hospital ran short. Equipment was transferred to the white hospital; needles and syringes ran out; morgue ventilation was inadequate; and the building’s design created its own problems. Patients sometimes had to be taken through underground steam tunnels to General Hospital No. 1 for advanced procedures.¹

When the machine collapsed in 1939, the American Medical Association revoked the hospital’s internship accreditation, and only one intern remained.¹ A bipartisan governing body was established in 1942.¹ In 1946–47 Black physicians protested supply shortages and refused elective surgeries; the AMA renewed accreditation in several areas afterward.¹

Consolidation and demolition

The city council voted in 1957 to consolidate the two hospitals, and in 1959 Black patients and staff moved into General Hospital No. 1 — the end of Kansas City’s formally segregated public hospital.¹⁴ Management passed to a nonprofit in 1962 and the institution was renamed General Hospital and Medical Center; in the early 1970s it was replaced by Truman Medical Center, today University Health.¹⁴

Neither of the original buildings still stands.⁴

One consequence of consolidation was not liberating: as the machine fell and the hospitals merged, white doctors increasingly took leadership positions that Black physicians had held, and Kansas City’s Black medical community lost the institutional base General Hospital No. 2 had given it.¹

Significance to Kansas City

General Hospital No. 2 is the clearest case in Kansas City of an institution that was simultaneously an instrument of segregation and a base of Black professional power. It existed because the city would not treat Black patients alongside white ones, and it mattered because Black physicians, nurses, and administrators ran it — in numbers and with authority available almost nowhere else in the United States. Its history is inseparable from the Pendergast era that funded and exploited it, and its 1959 closure marks both a desegregation milestone and the loss of a Black institution.