When its doors opened seven years after the 1965 Watts riots, the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center was a symbol of pride and achievement in the largely segregated black enclaves of South L.A., galvanized by a thirst for more jobs, education and healthcare.
Today there is still a strong commitment to the troubled institution, which faces a best-case scenario of becoming a smaller hospital under the management of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. But the crisis has exposed fissures among the black leadership of South L.A., King/Drew's historical backers, highlighting a lack of cohesiveness among politicians, including the regions' three African American congresswomen.
The crisis has also raised questions about whether this leadership can deal with a hospital whose mission has evolved: Initially it was a black institution serving a largely black population; now it serves a region that is increasingly populated by Latino immigrants.
The current political leadership has been criticized for not being up to the task and for regarding King/Drew as a legacy, rather than a hospital.
"King is a monument to race-based politics, and race-based politics is dying and King is dying," said J. Eugene Grigsby, an urban planner who heads the National Health Foundation, an organization dedicated to finding innovative approaches to healthcare in underserved areas.
"We are a community looking for direction," he said. "Until we recognize that the black community can't survive unless it becomes interdependent with other communities, we will be increasingly marginalized."
An L.A. renaissance
Black Los Angeles experienced a renaissance during the post-civil rights 1970s, a period of economic prosperity and political accomplishments, a period when some racial barriers were overcome.
South Los Angeles was still largely segregated, but more blacks were being elected to political office, among them Tom Bradley, who was elected to his first term as mayor of Los Angeles a year after King/Drew opened. The start of the massive influx of Latino immigrants was a decade away.
King/Drew, in Willowbrook just south of Watts, was part of that black renaissance, but almost from the beginning, the hospital was beset with problems, its medical accomplishments tarnished by a pattern of neglect and incompetence that over time earned the hospital the nickname "Killer King." In 2005, the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for a five-part series exposing conditions at the hospital, which was rated among the worst in the nation.
Many people assessing the hospital's failings point to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, whose district includes King/Drew, has been singled out for not having a plan to handle the various crises at the medical center.
"She repeatedly dropped the ball," said Larry Aubry, a columnist at the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-owned newspaper. "I don't think she has made enough noise and hired enough people on her staff who could have made a difference at that hospital."
Burke, who was elected to the board in 1992, succeeding Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, has heard the criticism, but she says she doesn't believe it's her role to micromanage the hospital. "I don't tell them who to hire and fire," she said. "I'm not qualified to make those decisions. I have passed along my concerns."
Reluctant to hold public meetings over the King/Drew crisis, Burke says that she has kept up communications with other elected officials and that her office is open to anyone who has a concern.
"I'm not interested in having a big town hall meeting for venting," she said. "There will be enough opportunity for venting."
Different approaches
When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that King/Drew had failed a make-or-break federal inspection in September, failing nine out of 23 government conditions for federal funding, Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, (D-Carson), whose district includes the hospital, quickly contacted federal officials and held a packed town hall meeting at King/Drew to communicate with her constituents.
Not to be outdone, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) dashed off a letter to the head of the agency. Signed by more than 20 California members of Congress, it asked for a 90-day extension for King/Drew. She also called her own town hall meeting a week later, inviting a large array of community leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Millender-McDonald didn't attend Waters' town hall meeting and refused to sign the letter.
"I couldn't sign that letter," Millender-McDonald explained, adding that she has been in direct communication with federal health officials. "It would go against my integrity, my credibility. I'm trying to get our hospital. I'm the one trying to keep those lines of communications open."
