The Good Samaritan Hospital in South Dallas began in a Prairie School-style foursquare home that was built in 1920. It served as a small community-centered hospital that was owned and operated by German immigrant Martha Schultze, functioning primarily as a birthing clinic. Many of the patients were unwed mothers, and their “condition” was kept secret. The hospital closed its doors in 1945 as nurses were recruited to help with the World War II effort.

In October 1951, Bertha Baker 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 at the time that accepted them. The Baker Residential Hotel survived decades through a time of racial attacks, bombings, and city segregation plans.

The more than 100-year history of 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.