First Sundays at The Richmond Community Hospital

04.2024

On the first Sunday of every month now, in the early afternoon, there’s a service held at a building on the city’s Northside that embodies a spirit unlike any other structure in Virginia. It is testament to perseverance and justice.

“The Richmond Community Hospital was actually started as an idea by Dr. Sarah Garland Jones,” Viola Baskerville told me on the first Sunday of April in the shadow of this hospital. “Dr. Jones was the first woman to receive a medical degree from the Commonwealth of Virginia. She was also African-American. She realized that the African-American community needed a place where the patients could be treated with dignity and could be treated by Black physicians because Black physicians did not have hospital privileges in White institutions. So she rallied the community and it took about three decades to raise the money needed to erect the building.”

On Independence Day, 1934, Richmond Community Hospital admitted its first patient, and continued operating through the 1980s, according to Viola.  “African-American patients from across Virginia came here,” she says. “And the patients were treated with respect and dignity and provided the best medical care of the day.”

Virginia Union University purchased the building in the 1980s and has owned it ever since. 

“Earlier this year there was an announced plan by the university to actually have housing built here, but there was no indication that it wanted to save the building ,” Viola said. “In fact Virginia Union stated it wanted to demolish the building.” 

Viola responded to an editorial that ran in the Richmond Free Press. “There was a groundswell of support and Farid Schintzius contacted me and we began the First Sundays,” said Viola. 

During the First Sundays many have come forward with testimonials about their personal connections to the hospital. “People came into the world here; people left the world here,” said Viola Baskerville.

The day after I spoke with Viola I talked with Dr. Fergie Reid, Jr. who practices medicine in Sherman Oaks, California. His father, Dr. Fergie Reid, Sr., a civil rights activist and the first African-American elected to the Virginia General Assembly since Reconstruction, had privileges at Richmond Community. 
“He practiced medicine there, and I was born there,” Dr. Fergie, the younger, told me. And then he said this: “If Westhampton Elementary School, Miller & Roads Department. Store,, the Carillon War Memorial, the Byrd Theater, the Governor's Mansion, the Capitol Building, the Oliver Hill Building, the Reid's Row Buildings, the old Richmond Memorial Hospital, the old Armory Building, Jefferson Davis's House, the Hippodrome Theater, Maggie Walker High School, Maggie Walker's House, Ginter Park Elementary School, and a whole host of other Richmond, Virginia buildings are deemed worthy of refurbishment and adaptive reuse by Virginia's powerful decision makers, then the old Richmond Community Hospital building meets the criteria for being rehabilitated and adaptively reused as well.”