By Jay Sowers
The Selma Times-Journal

The halls of Selma’s Good Samaritan Hospital have been quiet for years, but a number of former employees of the historic hospital are working to hear the voices and laughter of their old coworkers in the very near future.
“We’ve been trying to get this reunion together for over a year,” former Good Samaritan nurse Dorothy Chatmon said. “We are doing some polling to see if people would rather have this reunion on Dec. 7, or in early March.”
Chatmon, who attended the school of nursing at Good Samaritan and worked as a nursing assistant at the hospital, said the hospital’s role in the history of both Selma and the nation itself, are reasons enough for the staff to gather and remember their time there.
“It was the only place that black folks could go for years, and that’s a story we want to tell,” Chatmon said.
Good Samaritan was opened in 1965, only a month before Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old who attended a voting rights rally in Marion, was shot and severely beaten. Jackson was taken to Good Samaritan and died there days later. Three days after his funeral, March 7, 1965, is when the events of what would become known as Bloody Sunday occurred in Selma.
The hospital served those injured when mounted and unmounted law enforcement officers pushed into 600 marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the 52-mile walk to Montgomery
Mary McCord, who held various positions at the hospital while working there between 1973 and 1981, said the exact details of the reunion would come together after she and other organizers hear back from those interested in attending the event.
“That plan will probably come along later after we have any idea of how many people are coming and after we have a location in mind for the reunion,” McCord said. “We want to see who is interested and if they are willing to pay a reunion fee.”
Anyone interested in attending the reunion is invited to call McCord at 872-8787 or Chatmon at 875-9942.