South Dallas’ Good Samaritan Hospital began operation in 1920. The small community-centered hospital, owned and operated by German immigrant Martha Schultze, opened from within her Prairie School-style home that was built in 1910. The hospital functioned primarily as a birthing clinic. Many of the expecting mothers were unwed, and their “condition” was kept secret. Their babies were adopted through various Dallas adoption agencies. Good Samaritan ended medical services in 1945, as nurses were recruited for the World War II effort.

The Good Samaritan structure stood in one of Dallas’ racially segregated neighborhoods where bombings and burnings of black-owned homes and businesses were common occurrences. Boldly, African American couple James and Bertha Baker purchased the Good Samaritan structure in October 1951, and licensed it as the Baker Residential Hotel, Dallas’ first apartment/boarding house for blacks who migrated to the city for better employment. There were few places that rented or sold to them. The Baker Residential Hotel continued into the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The Good Samaritan has a ‘personified’ voice. Standing for over a century and traditionally challenging the norms of racial exclusivity, she has chronicled Dallas’ history and archived authentic Dallas narratives that include some of the city’s well-kept accounts of how different cultures built separate communities, linked with unlike communities, and forged life-long bonds at inconceivable moments. The structure continues to speak today.