The committee’s letter even detailed the financial straits low wages put Black hospital workers in: “The average maid has to spend $2.00 per week for room rent, $2.50 for food, $1.40 for transportation, 25 cents for uniforms, $1.70 for shoes and clothing. 35 cents for industrial insurance, 25 cents for church dues, 50 cents for recreation, and 35 cents for miscellaneous items, or a total of $9.30 for the basic necessities of life. … It is becoming more difficult each day to stretch their pay check to cover these essentials.”4
Newcomb declined to meet the citizen’s committee.5 Instead, he spoke with each of the women individually and offered to raise their salaries to $9.00 a week because the hospital needed the women back at work. Lentz could only temporarily rely on volunteers to do the work of the ward maids, and in wartime Virginia’s tight labor market, the superintendent would have difficulty hiring other women on a permanent basis to do the job at such low wages.6 If UVA went much longer without the ward maids and their essential contributions, Lentz and Newcomb would need to close whole wings of the hospital. Thus, they offered the raises in a bid to keep the hospital open and also in hopes of ending future work stoppages through a refusal to engage in any sort of collective bargaining. The new wages offered to the ward maids were still 30 cents less than a living weekly wage. Nonetheless, many of the women accepted the offer to resume their work at UVA Hospital.7
That walkout was part of a broader campaign during the 1940s and 1950s that the hospital’s Black employees waged for fair compensation and equal opportunities. Their victories were rarely complete, but through this fight, Black men and women made meaningful progress toward dismantling the racism embedded in UVA Hospital at its founding.
Nineteenth-century faculty at the University of Virginia dehumanized African Americans and contributed to the development, locally and nationally, of a discriminatory medical culture. When, in the early 20th century, the University decided to build its own hospital for clinical training, it created an institution that reflected and reinforced this culture.
UVA opened the hospital in 1901 to support the University’s medical education program and provide subsidized health care to Virginians who could not afford it. It was also an institution that was designed to uphold white supremacy. In this foundational period, medical racism flourished at the University, and prominent members of the medical faculty promoted race science as critical to understanding the high prevalence of illness and death among African Americans.