On November 7, 1931, Juliette Derricotte, a Black woman who was dean of women at Fisk University in Nashville, died after being refused care by a segregated Georgia hospital. The day before, Dean Derrivotte was driving three Black students to Athens, Georgia, when a white man driving a Model T car suddenly swerved and struck her car, overturning it into a ditch. The white driver stopped to yell at Dean Derricotte and her passengers for damaging his own vehicle, then left the scene without rendering any aid. Others tried to get care for the injured Black passengers, but the nearby Hamilton Memorial Hospital in Dalton, Georgia—a segregated facility—refused to admit African American patients. Instead, Dean Derricotte and the three students were treated by white doctors at their private offices in Dalton. Though Dean Derricotte and one of the students, Nina Johnson, were critically injured, following their treatment they were left to recuperate in the home of a local African American woman.

Six hours after the accident, the other students who sustained less serious injuries made arrangements to transport Dean Derricotte and Ms. Johnson to a Chattanooga hospital, which was 35 miles away. However, the delay proved fatal: Ms. Johnson died on her way to the hospital, and Dean Derricotte died the next day, November 7, at age 34.

The Committee on Interracial Cooperation opened an investigation into the incident, and Walter White, secretary of the New York-based NAACP, traveled south in December 1931 to learn more. He later concluded, “The barbarity of race segregation in the South is shown in all its brutal ugliness by the willingness to let cultured, respected, and leading colored women die for lack of hospital facilities which are available to any white person no matter how low in social scale.”