The Dixie 3: Three Black Nurses Who Changed a Hospital

Author~Educator~Life Coach~Veteran

November 28, 2025

Hampton Virginia’s Own.

For some, it calls up a song, word nostalgia for an Old South that never really existed. But for others—especially Black folks in the South—that word carries the weight of Jim Crow, lost histories, and the quiet courage it took to survive and resist within that system.

So when I came across Dixie Hospital in Hampton, Virginia, I had to pause. The name alone carried contradictions: a hospital on the campus of Hampton Institute, one of the most important historically Black universities in the country, yet still operating under the rules and routines of segregation.

A little history: Dixie Hospital and the “Dixie” legacy

Let’s start there.
Dixie Hospital was born in the late 1800s out of the Hampton Institute’s mission to train Black nurses and provide health care for Black communities in Tidewater Virginia.

It opened in 1891 and, by 1913, had a new brick building on campus. For generations, it was both a place of healing and a place of learning—the Hampton Training School for Nurses, one of the earliest programs in the nation to train Black nurses.

But even within its noble purpose, the shadow of segregation never lifted. Funded in part by federal programs like the Hill-Burton Act, Dixie Hospital was required to be nondiscriminatory. Yet in the early 1960s, the cafeteria told another story: white nurses and doctors ate upstairs in bright dining rooms, while Black nurses were sent to a converted classroom in basement spaces. “Separate but equal” was still the law of the land—and in practice, that meant “separate and lesser.”

August 1963: The day three nurses said no more!

Enter Mildred Smith, Patricia Taylor McKenzie, and Agnes Stokes Chisman—three Black nurses at Dixie Hospital who simply decided one day to eat their lunch in the main cafeteria instead of the cramped room set aside for them. They sat down. They ate. They were polite. And they were immediately fired.

It was August 1963—the same month Dr. King delivered “I Have a Dream” in Washington, D.C. While the world was watching the grand stage of the Civil Rights Movement, these three women staged their own local sit-in, right inside the walls of a segregated hospital.

The press didn’t call them heroes at first. They were dismissed, literally and figuratively. But they filed suit—Smith v. Hampton Training School for Nurses—and after three long years, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in their favor in 1966. The court found that because the hospital received federal funds, it could not lawfully segregate its employees or fire them for challenging that system. The decision forced the hospital to integrate its facilities.

The larger picture

Their story is often called “The Dixie 3.”
And it matters because it exposes the everyday battles of the Civil Rights Movement—fought not just in streets and buses but in cafeterias, hospitals, and break rooms.

It also makes me think about the name “Dixie” itself—a word threaded through the geography of the South: Dixie Highway, Dixie Hospital, Dixie Beer, Dixie Cups. That name was once meant to romanticize the antebellum South, but there in Hampton, those same six letters became something else entirely. The “Dixie 3” turned the word into a symbol of defiance.

What’s left behind

The old Dixie Hospital building is gone now—torn down decades ago, its name changed to Hampton General before disappearing altogether. But in 2025, the City of Hampton finally unveiled a historical marker to honor these three women and their quiet courage.

Standing there, you can still feel the tension in that word, “Dixie.” But you can also feel the triumph. Because every time we say their names—Mildred Smith, Patricia Taylor McKenzie, and Agnes Stokes Chisman—we reclaim that word, that space, and that history.

They didn’t just change a hospital. They changed what it meant to live with dignity in a land that once refused to see you as such.

References

1. Smith v. Hampton Training School for Nurses, 360 F.2d 577 (4th Cir. 1966).

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. Decided April 28, 1966.

Full opinion available at Justia Law