The Good Samaritan Hospital
A Piece of Dallas History
By Vanessa Baker
Accompanied by a bear dog and his Indian guide Ned, pioneer John Neely Bryan wondered upon the meandering Trinity River in 1841, and the city of Dallas was realized. Bryan’s vision of a Trinity River settlement inspired another trinity. This manifestation came through three metaphorical voices. Each speaks from within the walls of a century-old structure, the South Dallas Good Samaritan Hospital at 4526 Leland Avenue. And like that river, which crawls over and sprawls the Dallas terrain, the South Dallas Good Samaritan trinity converges and meanders, twisting socio-political narratives in three seasons of the city’s history. This personified structure challenges the norms of racial exclusivity, and archives authentic Dallas chronicles 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 Trinity River is the backdrop in each season that Samaritan speaks.
MARTHA SCHULTZE
1910
Originally built in 1910, the structure that became the Good Samaritan Hospital was the home of German immigrants Ernest Schultze and Martha Horsch who immigrated to New York. They married, and then joined the mass migration, responding to the prosperity that the Trinity River offered young enthusiastic entrepreneurs. In the Dallas City Directory, 1911, Ernest was listed “Lard Maker” and grocer. Martha continued her career that began in Germany. She worked in private duty nursing and as a registered nurse in various Dallas hospitals.
1920
Martha ended her nursing career in the local hospitals in 1920 to begin an uncharted course that quietly challenged race relations in Dallas, and countered race practices around the world. This European German immigrant converted her two-story American Foursquare Prairie School-style home into a community-based hospital, instituting a practice that united two unlikely groups into communal harmony.
Situated near Dallas’ influential Jewish community where approximately ninety percent of the Jewish people lived, Martha’s Good Samaritan predominantly cared for this elite population, specializing in maternity-related cases. Her unique care spoke to two social ills: The racially aggressive Nazi hostilities that raged war against the European Jew, and the women across the globe who were marginalized as second-class citizens; thus, the genesis of Samaritan’s three voices.
1930
Though the German and the Jew were unlikely neighbors, Martha addressed a critical concern in early twentieth-century America. Unwed mothers were demonized because society labeled their condition a result of the woman’s uncontrollable sexual impulses. Occasionally, incarceration became a means to rehabilitate them. Some unwed Dallas mothers abandoned their babies in the streets.
Martha’s medical care wasn’t confined to one group. Good Samaritan had a history of caring for hundreds of charity patients; however, Martha used her facility to predominantly provide unwed Jewish mothers with refuge and anonymity.
Before their condition was apparent, they moved into one of Samaritan’s fourteen well-equipped private rooms, told friends and extended family that they were abroad, and wrote letters to loved ones. Martha bundled the letters and shipped them overseas. The letters were mailed back to the states as though the women were abroad. These expecting mothers lived quietly hidden at Good Samaritan until they gave birth, and the babies were placed in homes through Dallas adoption agencies, including the Hope Cottage Pregnancy and Adoption Center.
1945
Martha’s unique care for this community was compounded threefold. As she guarded women’s dignity, protected their privacy, and preserved lives, Good Samaritan became part of Dallas’ voice of cultural diversity. It exemplified the city’s practice of obscure race relations; and it chronicled a German and Jewish connection during a bitter and unequivocal season of hate. Good Samaritan aided and comforted the disenfranchised Jew, even though the worldview said it was “illegal” to do so. The hospital operated until 1945, ending as nurses were needed for the World War II effort. Good Samaritan then became a convalescence facility until 1951. That year, Martha closed her doors and posted the structure for sale. It was as though this personified Samaritan exhaled and closed her eyes, awaiting the birth of a new Samaritan voice, and as before, the Trinity River would be her backdrop.
BERTHA BAKER
The second of Good Samaritan’s three voices spoke in 1951, chronicling the Jim Crow mandate of law-and-order that segregated Dallas and most American cities, specifically across the South. Good Samaritan, in the heart of a segregated neighborhood, stood amid quietly kept conspiracies, methodically purposed to maintain a political system that hinged on apartheid. Then, the personified structure spoke through the voice of Bertha Baker, her second owner.
In a response to attacks against South Dallas’ black-owned homes and businesses, this African American woman was drawn to the violent community. In October 1951, she and her husband James purchased the Good Samaritan structure, and licensed it as the Baker Residential Hotel, Dallas’ first boarding house for blacks who migrated to the city for better employment, as there were few places that accepted them. In anonymity, Bertha also operated Mason’s Lullaby Nursery, a business she began in 1948, when she received a license for Dallas’ first African American nursery. Like Martha’s care for unwed mothers, Bertha was pressured to continue her nursery service in secrecy.
When the Bakers purchased the hospital structure, the city refused to extend her license to operate at the Good Samaritan location. It had been a challenge for her to get the first license, as the City representative commented that no “Negro” had applied for a license to operate a nursery. Most Negroes, the representative remarked, made application for a Beer License. So, for those few mothers who could not secure other means for childcare, Bertha and her staff cared for the infants until 1953. Bertha’s objective was to aid single mothers who sought employment, so that they could shed the federal welfare stigma.
1939
The first onslaught of the Dallas racial attacks began in late 1939 and continued into the early 1940s, when the black population surpassed 50,000 of its nearly 295,000 citizens. As some upwardly mobile blacks purchased homes and businesses in this segregated community, rock-throwing housewives, dynamite explosions, house fires, and hangings in effigy by white residents became commonplace. The City Council considered an ordinance specifying designated streets where blacks could walk. A well-known Baptist preacher proposed the construction of “an eight-foot concrete or brick wall to solidify the border between” the races.1
By late November 1941, eighteen bombs exploded in this South Dallas vicinity — Howell Street — Hatcher Street — Oakland Avenue . . . at black-owned homes — on vacant lots between black-owned homes — and even at the black-owned Oakland Funeral Home. City leaders squashed those stories by buying back property and then renting or selling it to whites, stipulating that they could not “sell to blacks for 50 years or until the block on which their home stood was . . . at least 50 percent black owned.”2 As the city boasted of profits generated from seized properties, housing for blacks was scarce; many families lived doubled-up.
1951
Limited housing became even more ominous for African Americans in the early 1950s with the city’s plan to develop a Trinity River industrial district. This project called for the segregation of areas that bordered the river. Relatively prosperous African Americans, desperate for better living conditions, ventured into South Dallas’ Fair Park and Exline Park neighborhoods.
In an eighteen-month period, February 1950 to July 1951, eleven bombings and six mysterious fires plagued South Dallas before the FBI and the Texas Rangers teamed with local authorities to investigate. Of the near dozen indictments, most pointed to Leland Avenue’s Claude Thomas Wright; he boasted of three bombings and numerous attempts. Two were on his block, including the home next door to the right of him. Wright even confessed to bombing houses wherein families slept.
His last attack was the night of July 12, 1951, when widow Birdie Mae Sharp — Crozier Street — sat in the dark on her back porch, anticipating his advance. Sharp heard the thud that hit her flowerbed, aimed her “pistol and fired a volley at a passing car.”3 Patrolling officers reached her home in time to pinch off the fuse. When Wright was arrested, he confessed his goal was “to protect his home from the encroachment of Negroes.”4 He identified those city leaders who worked in collusion with others for this purpose.
1965
James and Bertha Baker read news articles of Wright’s arrest, which included his home address. Curiosity spawned a drive to Wright’s community, where the Bakers spotted the Good Samaritan to the left of the bomber’s home. A ‘For Sale’ sign was posted in the hospital’s front yard. Undaunted by his assaults, the couple contacted the realtor and purchased the hospital. For the next year, before Wright moved away, he was neighbor to the Baker Residential Hotel for African Americans, and the clandestine Mason’s Lullaby Nursery. James deeded the structure to Bertha in 1965. Bertha operated her boarding house while she worked with children who faced physical challenges, first in the Dallas ISD, and then for the Easter Seal Society. The boarding house continued into the dawn of the twenty-first century.
VANESSA BAKER
Today
The third Good Samaritan voice, my voice, still speaks. I am Bertha and James Bakers’ youngest daughter. I learned of the hospital’s history from research and oral accounts told by my mother, descendants and relatives of Martha Schultze, and adults who were born in or connected to the hospital. I learned of the city’s hopes for a navigable Trinity River and its potential projects when I was a child, as my mother attended City Council meetings where river-plans were discussed.
My love for Good Samaritan and her history was why I returned to chronicle these stories. My voice harks back to Dallas’ beginning at the river and the valuable land that surrounds it. John Neely Bryan’s 1841 vision is today’s Trinity River Corridor Project – Dallas’ comprehensive program of renewal – and the Samaritan community falls within the circumference of the city’s boomtown projection.
My Samaritan story, as with Martha’s hospital and Bertha’s African American boarding house and nursery, challenges social conditions. I fight the residual effects of systemic demoralization, drug infestation, gang activity, and political silence that speaks disdain. I cry out to the authorities for protection.
After Samaritan’s restoration, the facility will become a repository to share her history with the public, will host workshops addressing health care, will facilitate programs that complement school curricula, and will continue to host scholarship programs for high school underserved students. The first scholarship: The James Lynn Baker II Coffee Bean Scholarship was awarded in March 2023.7 [Thank you, Damon West, for your generosity and steadfast support. You are not only a friend, but family.]
Importantly, the structure will stand as a beacon of the value in historical preservation, as Dallas is wonderfully blessed with ‘seasoned’ structures that can be revitalized and used. In support of the Arts and Humanities, Samaritan wants to host drama, dance, art, music and literary workshops and conferences for young people and youth from across the city; this continues the multiculturalism that began at the River. Significantly, Samaritan has already begun her mission of supporting programs that help feed and clothe the needy.
The forementioned goals may seem ambitious, but so were the hospital, the boarding house, and the nursery. Today, I am Samaritan’s voice. I fight for her right to speak; I plan for her strength to endure; I pray for her purpose to serve; and I campaign to include her omitted narratives of “multicultural community” into the greater Dallas archive. Dallas’ legacy only becomes richer and more authentic when such truths are included. Without inclusivity, one can be on the wrong side of integrity, says author Chinua Achebe: “someone has to write a different story”.8
In January 2012, Samaritan became the 140th Dallas City Landmark. This status positions her humble spirit for continued service and obligates her meek owners to serve. This status also speaks my mother’s belief in the worth of Samaritan, which explains the structure’s personified fight to survive. “Whatever you do,” my mother said, “never sell this house.” Dallas’ City Landmark hallmarks Bertha Baker’s wisdom, as Good Samaritan is now protected in perpetuity. Her stories belong with other stories woven into the city’s cultural fabric, and I am tasked with archiving the narratives that demand her place. Like a good Samaritan, she patiently awaits her next opportunities to serve, and the Trinity River is her backdrop.
Sources
1. Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis
2. Schutze, Jim. The Accommodation
3. “Bombs”, DMN: DallasNews.com Historical Archives – 1885-1977
4. “Suspect Tells Officers of Part in Bomb Plot”, DMN: DallasNews.com Historical Archives – 1885-1977
5. “Trinity River Audubon Center: About Us.”
6. Montgomery, Evelyn. “It Seemed like a Good Idea . . . Planning Dallas”
7. West, Damon. “The James Lynn Baker II Coffee Bean Scholarship”
8. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart
Contact Us
© 2023 The Good Samaritan at the Baker Estate
The Good Samaritan at the Baker Estate is recognized as a public charity under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3) and has 501(c)(3) status. Donations to The Good Samaritan are deductible. The Good Samaritan’s EIN is 45-5427219.
Header image courtesy of the Dallas Public Library, Archive Division