It’s fitting that the final day of Black History Month this year will feature a noon rally at SUNY Downstate in East Flatbush, where a group of political, labor, and religious leaders organized by Senator Zellnor Myrie are protesting against the planned closure of the hospital. History will not be kind to New York’s army of high-ranking Black pols if they lose the state-run complex, which includes schools of nursing, medicine, and public health, along with a web of community clinics and Brooklyn’s only kidney-transplant center.
Downstate has long been a lifeline to a low-income, medically underserved community where obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are out of control. Built to handle 60,000 visits a year, Downstate typically gets more than 200,000. Funding, never adequate, reached crisis levels during the pandemic, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo designated Downstate a COVID-only facility. News organizations reported how years of underfunding led desperate medical staff to start a GoFundMe page to scrounge up protective gear. Heartbreaking stories chronicled the heroism of Dr. James “Charlie” Mahoney, a legendary pulmonary and critical-care physician and professor who’d spent nearly 40 years at Downstate and died battling the epidemic.
“This is not a hypothetical. This is an actual fight for people’s lives, and it is a problem that we are all aware of. No one can claim ignorance,” says Myrie, who has been sounding the alarm at rallies and through social media and robocalls. “The people that have elected us expect us to step up for them in the most critical moment. And we are at one of those critical junctures right now.”
The crisis began a few weeks ago, when SUNY Chancellor John King Jr. abruptly announced that the administration of Governor Kathy Hochul wants to close or merge most of Downstate, moving patient beds to nearby Kings County Hospital, a city facility. The move was so sudden that key stakeholders were caught off guard: The state health commissioner, James McDonald, admitted at a government hearing that he learned of the planned closure from media reports.
“The challenges at Downstate have been long-standing for two decades. In particular, we have a $100 million operating deficit and a building that is in disrepair, nearing the end of its life. And so we need action in this budget cycle,” King told me earlier this month. While Hochul is prepared to invest $300 million in a new, smaller facility, he said, “if we don’t have that $100 million, we’ll run out of cash by the summer. The biggest risk of closure here is the status quo.”
Fred Kowal, the president of United University Professions, the union that represents over 2,300 workers at Downstate — nearly all of the medical professionals except nurses — says closing the facility after years of underfunding would be a betrayal. Cuomo “provided no resources to support the hospital” during the pandemic, Kowal told me. “We had members who did not have personal protective equipment; unions like our own had to go out and buy that equipment during the depths of COVID. We did lose members who died because of COVID while they were protecting the rest of us. It is really disturbing that now the decision is being made to close the hospital that literally was there when the state was most desperate.”
These were not supposed to be desperate times for Black New Yorkers, who have spent decades electing and reelecting power players like Mayor Eric Adams (whose former Senate district includes Downstate), along with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, State Attorney General Letitia James, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader who is poised to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Four of the city’s five Democratic county chairs are Black, as are the state’s chief judge, lieutenant governor, assembly Speaker, and Senate majority leader. King himself is the son of John King Sr., who in 1946 became Brooklyn’s first Black public-school principal.
But what’s the point of all this clout — all the history-making breakthroughs — if it can’t be used to save a badly needed hospital?
I recently put a version of this question to Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado at a Black History Month event and got a thoughtful response. “I think we’re well past that point of just breaking barriers and making history. That part was necessary and needed. But now I think we’re on to the next phase, which requires some intentionality,” he told me. “We need our leaders to think comprehensively about how to marshal our resources in a way that can remake and bring home to many of our broken communities. This has to be the agenda.”
Myrie agrees and predicts the fight to save Downstate will put Black political power to its most serious test yet. “I don’t think that there is a true appreciation for the moment that we are in. And like in most things in life, you don’t appreciate it until it’s gone,” he said. “Over the coming weeks, we hope to make it very clear to this administration and to the chancellor that we are not going to go easily into the night. What on earth did the people send us to do but to fight for their lives?”
