Portraits of Katie B.

Film Photography by Anthony Patterson

When you talk to any of the hundreds of Kate Bitting Reynolds Memorial Hospital School of Nursing alumni, it's a good bet you'll hear one word consistently: family. The hospital, which opened in 1938 with help from William Neal Reynolds and Kate Bitting Reynolds, served Black residents of East Winston until its closing in 1970. "Hospital closings are traumatic events for the communities they serve," writes David Burton Smith in The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America's Health Care System. "A community's hospital provides geographic convenience and a sense of ownership and safety." The dozens of alumni interviewed for this project feel strongly that Katie B. was not only a Black institution that shaped the community it served, but also one that shaped them in their service to patients.

Artist Anthony Patterson captures images of "Katie B." alumni using Kodak T-Max P-3200 film, embracing the grain of the film to showcase the photo subject's character and grit, fitting descriptions of the instructors and alumni from Katie B. Such images, as Frederick Douglass noted in 1861, "exert a powerful though silent influence upon the ideas and sentiment of present and future generations."

The Portraits:

Katie B. portraits from this project were taken at The Hawthorne Inn & Conference Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the 2024 and 2025 Katie B. reunions.

The Interviews:

Watch interviews with Katie B. alumni as they discuss their nursing school experiences and how the institution prepared them to work in the field of nursing.