Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, General Research and Reference Division

Kelly Miller and Joseph R. Gay, Progress and Achievements of the Colored People (Washington, DC: A. Jenkins, 1917)

Southern migrants found segregation in the North as well. Separate facilities were a humiliation as well as a source of economic strength in the community, because they enabled black-owned stores and other services to flourish. Schools, hospitals, restaurants, and other places that catered exclusively to African Americans provided skilled and professional jobs that were barred to blacks in white facilities. These nurses at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia were able to work as professionals in a segregated hospital, whereas they would probably have found only domestic work in a white hospital.