Provident Hospital was founded in 1891 by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams after Emma Reynolds, a Chicago woman, was denied admission to Cook County School of Nursing because she was Black.

Blackstone, and George Pullman, to open a twelve bed hospital on Chicago’s south side that would train Black nurses.

[3] Despite the best attempts of Dr. Williams to maintain the integration of Provident’s medical staff and patient population, the hospital became a primarily Black institution by 1914.

For the university, affiliation was seen as a way to provide care to Black patients in Chicago without integrating their clinics or building a new wing of the existing Billings Hospital.

[4] Additionally, it gave a facility for the university to train their Black medical school graduates, who would not otherwise have had a place to complete their residency in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

[4] The affiliation officially began in 1930 with the financial backing of philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and the General Education Board, however these investors did not support full integration.

[4] By 1939, talks of dissolving the affiliation contract began and in 1944 the University of Chicago officially cut ties with Provident Hospital.

[8] Currently, the rebuilding project is on an indefinite pause, but Cook County officials have expressed hope to move forward in the future.