Dr. James F. Sistrunk: Among Fort Lauderdale's first Black doctors

Steamboat Everglades on the New River circa 1922

Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

James Franklin Sistrunk (1891-1966), a Fort Lauderdale pioneer and doctor is credited with delivering  5,000 babies. But his practice extended far beyond obstetrics. 

As the only Black physician in the city from about 1922 until the late 1930s and with strictly segregated medical care, Blacks came to him or were brought to him from as far away as Pompano or Boca Raton. He tended to a range of typical illnesses, as well as injuries sustained in car and industrial accidents and fights. He conducted house visits and often, to assist the poor, did not collect fees.

Dr. Sistrunk was born Midway, Florida, about 10 miles from Tallahassee. In 1919 he earned his medical degree at Meharry College in Nashville, TN.  In 1922, he came to a growing Fort Lauderdale. He filled a large medical void and served his community in many ways.

The doctor delivered services with scarce supplies and equipment. A hospital was needed. Sistrunk, in partnership with Dr. Von Mizell and Leona Collins, opened Provident Hospital in 1938, the “only hospital in Broward County exclusively” serving the Black community. Dedicated Sunday, May 1^st that year, the hospital (some called it a sanitorium) offered 12 beds and 24-hour nursing care at 14^th Avenue and 6^th Street. Supplies and equipment were provided through donations raised at teas, casino nights and an assortment of benefits regularly written up in the Fort Lauderdale News months before and years after Provident Hospital opened its doors.

The hospital filled a community service and often drew newspaper interest.  In 1938, Dr. Sistrunk and five other Black doctors completed a three-week intensive training in the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis. A month later, Black doctors from other parts of the state volunteered their services so Provident could provide free tonsil removal for Black children for one week.

Dr. Sistrunk was also busy in the community. During World War II, he, Dr. Mizell, Dr. J.L. Bass and Dr. E.G. Thomas ran a campaign to raise funds for a “soldier club” for service men returning home to Fort Lauderdale on furlough. Additionally, Dr. Sistrunk was active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Veteran’s Association and Sigma Fraternity.

In 1956 he and wife Daisy, parents of two daughters, held an open house at their new home at 724 N.W. 27 Ave. in Fort Lauderdale. It was the only house with a pool in the neighborhood located near the New River and was reported to have been built for about $65,000. 

Provident Hospital was torn down in 1964 after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when hospitals were integrated. Medicare could not serve segregated facilities.

Dr. Sistrunk died March 20, 1966, at 75. For his contributions to the community, the city rededicated the 6^th Street Bridge as the J. F. Sistrunk Bridge in 1968 and renamed parts of 6^th Street, Sistrunk Boulevard in 1971. 

The Sistrunk Festival with its parade is held each February to honor the doctor. The corridor was once core of the city’s African American community and today is a revived cultural area of Fort Lauderdale.

Copyright © 2021, 2022. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan

For other pioneer Fort Lauderdale doctors, search for Mizell or Kennedy.

Sources:

Fort Lauderdale News, Jan. 16, 1928

Fort Lauderdale News, Sept. 16, 1935

Fort Lauderdale News, May 3, 1938

Fort Lauderdale News, Dec. 23, 1938

Fort Lauderdale News, July 21, 1938

Fort Lauderdale News Oct. 28, 1942

Fort Lauderdale News Aug. 7, 1950

Fort Lauderdale News, Nov. 21, 1956

Fort Lauderdale News, March 21, 1966

Roots Web

Tags: African American history in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale pioneer doctors, Provident Hospital, Fort Lauderdale history

Rough start for Fort Lauderdale's first doctor

 

Thomas Simpson Kennedy (1859-1939), a North Carolinian, made his way to Florida after service with the U.S. Army during the Spanish American War.

“During my army experience … Florida was more talked about as a pioneer state for young men to go to than the old phrase ‘go west young man, go west,’ ” wrote Kennedy in his memoirs.

With army experience, two years of schooling in pharmacy and high hopes, he traveled south from Georgia by boat, rail and foot. After stopping in Titusville, then Jensen where pineapples were grown commercially, and Stuart, Kennedy couldn’t find work. The hard freezes of 1894 and 1895 had dealt farming an icy blow. His friend, John Mulligan, had purchased land south of Fort Lauderdale to grow citrus. He persuaded Kennedy to move to the outpost to try his hand at farming. Kennedy arrived in October 1899.

He began his life near the New River growing tomatoes (near current day Southwest 9th Street) but a yellow fever epidemic soon broke out, affecting all in the area, including Kennedy. He tended to patients – and his tomatoes – until the fever ran its course through “every man, woman and child … black and white.”

In 1900, before the epidemic ended, two doctors from the Federal Bureau of Health visited Kennedy to investigate his practicing medicine without a license. The tomato farmer told them there were no doctors there during the epidemic and that none had been allowed into the area, which was under quarantine. Satisfied after examining his patients, the federal agents arranged to pay Kennedy for his services. That money, plus proceeds from his farming efforts, provided the would-be doctor funds to complete his medical degree. He graduated from Sewanee Medical College in Tennessee January 1902.

With degree in hand, Kennedy resolved to “practice medicine full blast without a horse, without anything but my feet to walk on.” And that he did, from Miami to Stuart. If people couldn’t pick him up with horse and buggy, he’d take a train to visit patients. One steamy hot July day he took a train from Fort Lauderdale to Deerfield to tend to a family with typhoid. When finished, he began walking the 15 miles back to Fort Lauderdale and collapsed. A man with a hand car (small railroad car) came to his rescue. From that time on, if travelers were found ill, Dr. Kennedy was summoned. He eventually traveled with his own horse and buggy.

Successful tomato farmer and popular country doctor, Thomas S. Kennedy is counted among Fort Lauderdale’s colorful – and vital – early pioneers. 

Copyright© 2010. Jane Feehan. All rights reserved. 

Sources:

Broward Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 1-4. Thomas S. Kennedy: an autobiography of a country doctor.

http://fulltext10.fcla.edu/DLData/SN/SN01480340/0006_001/file71.pdf

Fort Lauderdale News, Jan. 28, 1979

Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, First doctor in Fort Lauderdale, Dr. Kennedy, Dr. Thomas S. Kennedy

 

Trailblazer Dr. Mizell served African Americans of Fort Lauderdale, Belle Glade

By Jane Feehan

Dr. Von Delaney Mizell (1910-1973), familiar to many in Fort Lauderdale for providing medical care to his African American community and establishing the Fort Lauderdale NAACP chapter in 1938, also served as a voice for minorities in Belle Glade, near Lake Okeechobee.

Son of Dania pioneers, Mizell lived in Belle Glade (span unknown to this writer) where his wife, Ida, operated a nursing home. Dr. Mizell served as the home’s physician but also commuted to Fort Lauderdale to practice medicine.

In 1971, reporter Janice Gould of the Palm Beach Post, wrote of a funding controversy swirling about two hospitals - Everglades Memorial and Glades General – in Belle Glade. She interviewed Mizell about the hospitals. He claimed care for the poor there was inferior and substandard to that “received almost anywhere in the U.S.”                                                                                     

Mizell had applied to practice at Glades General once a year from 1962 until he was accepted as staff in 1970 – but not allowed to perform surgery, his specialty. Gould wrote that Mizell's background included studies at the University of Pennsylvania with a residency at Howard University. Other records indicate he also attended Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Decades before - 1938 - in Fort Lauderdale, Mizell, with Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk, founded Provident Hospital. The facility served the Black community until desegregation of Broward General Hospital and other facilities in 1964. Even so, neither doctor is mentioned in the first written history of Fort Lauderdale, Checkered Sunshine (1966). Mizell, according to news accounts (if not the city's first history book) never stopped speaking for those who needed the most help in Fort Lauderdale, or Belle Glade.

_____

Sources:

Palm Beach Post, Feb. 28, 1971

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~flgsbc/resources/biographies_q-s.html

Gillis, Susan. Fort Lauderdale: The Venice of America. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2004.

Great Floridians 2000




Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, Fort Lauderdale African-American history, history of blacks in Fort Lauderdale