By Stacey Patton

What happened in Savannah, Georgia in 1897 wasn’t really a riot if you compare it to other mass racial uprisings that took place in the United States between 1891 and 1899.

The last decade of the 19th century witnessed full-scale race riots in Omaha, Nebraska, Wilmington, North Carolina, Lake City and Greenwood County, South Carolina, and Newburgh, New York. These incidents involved beatings, lynching, labor disputes, a political coup d’etat, rumors of black men raping white females, and widespread property destruction.

But the St. James Dispensary Riot of 1897 has been given no attention in the history books and most people have probably never heard anything about it.

In mid-December of 1897, eleven white doctors at the St. James Dispensary in Savannah, Georgia , found themselves surrounded by 2,000 Negroes “gesticulating and talking wildly.” The next day, a front-page Savannah Press headline blazed – “NEGROES WERE RIOTOUS.” The paper said “the ignorant darkies” had gotten “a foolish idea” in their heads that children were being “cut to pieces” inside the dispensary. A noted southern medical journal later fingered “a mischievous liar” for causing the ruckus and the Washington Post blamed a small group of black schoolchildren for spreading the “silly story.”

For six days, angry blacks kept assembling in front of the building at West Broad and Harris Streets. Lieutenant Owen Reilly and his police squad restored calm by wading into the crowd and hitting dozens of protestors with billy clubs. Five ringleaders – John Middleton, Henry Freeman, John Signor, Sam Harris, and William Phillips – were arrested, fined, and given short jail stays for disorderly conduct. The last dispatch on the incident from the Savannah Press said, “NEGROES ARE QUIET” and seemed to “realize the absurdity of the report which was circulated and have once more settled down.”

St. James had only been open for two months before it was besieged by the black community. When it began providing medical services to Savannah’s poor whites in late October, city officials hailed the new dispensary as “a welcome enterprise” meeting a “long-felt want.” In the last decades of the 19th century, Savannah suffered vicious waves of typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases endemic to urban areas. A combination of heavy rains, flooded ponds, mosquitoes, open privies filled with human waste, unpaved streets, poor drainage, and unclean water contributed to soaring rates of disease and mortality among blacks and whites.

St. James’s head physician Eugene Corson promised that his medical staff “will leave no stone unturned to assure its success.” Corson also assured the public that “every effort will be made to avoid dispensary abuses, and to keep it well within professional lines.” But word of grotesque child abuse inflamed the black community and underscored its fears about the arrival of a modern, white-run medical institution placed in their midst.

Details are unclear about how or why a group of black schoolchildren was near a segregated dispensary for sick whites. At the time, the crowded and underfunded Charity Hospital and the Georgia Infirmary were the only institutions that provided segregated medical care at the city’s expense. Savannah’s 24,000 black residents lived in congested “hotbeds of crime, misery, and death,” with access to less than a handful of black doctors. Rows of tiny shacks less than 15 feet wide, with four rooms and poor ventilation, provided shelter for two or three families at a time.

“These people have no fair fight for health,” Savannah’s Health Officer reported to the American Public Health Association. “Here, children are filthy; sleep in filthy houses; eat filthy food.” This report provides a sense of the day-to-day backdrop of the realities facing black children’s lives. In addition to poverty and hunger, black children were all too familiar with the specter of death, of which many occurred in white-run charity hospitals for the poor.

Records from the Chatham County Health Department reveal that the same year St. James opened its doors, 736 blacks and 577 whites died in Savannah. Of those totals, 270 black and 210 white deaths were children under age 12. As the city continued to improve sanitary conditions and provide better access to whites, mortality rates for white children steadily declined as they worsened for black youth, whose mortality rates were consistently double that of white youth. A 1903 Atlanta University investigation of black mortality in large cities found that blacks comprised 31 percent of Savannah’s mortality rate, and 60 percent were children of age 10. By 1914, there were 123 deaths among white children 330 deaths among black children under age 10.

These alarming numbers must be considered as part of the context of the St. James Dispensary riot. Those schoolchildren may have been wandering by, playing, or perhaps spying through the windows when two of them, a boy and a girl, were “caught” by doctors. Perhaps those black youth had very real fears about how black bodies were touched by white hands in medical facilities. They likely knew that sick black children entered such places and did not come out alive. After witnessing the abduction of their peers, the schoolchildren reported to others in the community that they climbed a tree near the dispensary window and saw “the bodies of two children on a table, and that white men were standing around them cutting them up.”

Were two black children murdered in the name of science?

Though tensions swelled, local authorities launched no investigation, nor did the local press interview black protestors to ask for possible names or descriptions of any missing children. Instead, authorities asked black teachers and pastors to “use their influence to disabuse the minds of the Negroes of their beliefs in the vivisection (human dissection) practices of the dispensary doctors.” Doctors’s and scientific researchers’ vivisection of humans was common – and covert – practice in turn-of-the-century America. Stories, and fears, about it circulated widely throughout the society. They intensified the distrust blacks, subjected to the murderous raids of the Ku Klux Klan and other white “nightriders,” and aware of folktales about “night doctors” and body snatchers, felt about white science and medicine.

In its spring 1898 issue, the North Carolina Medical Journal ran a brief paragraph about the December riot. The writer joked, “It will probably be a long time before a pickaninny ventures to pass the door of St. James Dispensary after nightfall.”

There are no surviving police reports of the kidnap and murders of the two Savannah children, as was most often the case with lynching, rapes, and other types of racial crimes against blacks. The absence of legal documentation does not mean that the crimes did not occur. In fact, the repeated protests indicates that the incident was not just a rumor to a black community familiar with stories of “night doctors” who kidnapped vulnerable victims and body snatchers who spirited black cadavers from their graves to support a widespread clandestine traffic in bodies for dissection.

There was likely some truth to the school children’s story if hundreds of residents rallied and risked their own safety to retrieve the bodies of two young children who had fallen prey to the hands of white doctors engaged in a eugenic atrocity. The black residents could have stayed silent or hidden or accepted that local authorities would not investigate allegations against the dispensary. But the community’s actions speak to the intrinsic value they attached to black children. Their persistent rallies also speak to their anxieties about the grotesque value that white science and medical communities placed on the bodies of black youth.

The Savannah incident raises larger questions about the link between childhood and the construction of race during the late 19th and early 20th century. If children were murdered in the dispensary, how could doctors trained to heal and sworn to “never do harm to anyone,” steal and kill children? Why did they choose black children for such ventures?

What the incident suggests is how science and medicine colluded in the process of constructing black children as racially inferior even as their high rates of mortality begged for medical attention. During this time in American history, controversial human dissection was practiced on whites and so the Savannah story must be seen in this context – both for the possibility that the children’s allegations against the St. James Dispensary were true, and to understand blacks’ outrage. As human vivisection became increasingly unpopular by the early 20th century, less cruel and sinister uses of black children’s bodies took place under the veil of scientific respectability and in service to white supremacy.

Stacey Patton is a writer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.