What do
you think?
Email us at
editor@
nurseweek.com

Related
site

National
Black Nurses Assocation

By Diane Sussman
December 27, 1999
Photo Courtesy of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology

Like their counterparts in other professions, blacks in nursing have a history distinguished by a struggle for recognition in the face of quotas, prejudice, and institutionalized discrimination-obstacles that weren't officially censured until 1954, when the Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine in Brown vs. the Board of Education.

"The history of black women in the nursing profession mirrors the larger struggle for freedom for black people in the United States," said Dolores Clark Hine, author of Black Women in White: Racial Conflict in the Nursing Profession and John R. Hannah professor of American History at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "If you want to gauge how well blacks did at achieving certain liberties, the experience of black nurses is a good indicator."

In schools and the military, separate and unequal was the norm. As late as 1924, only 58 accredited schools of nursing admitted black students, and most of those schools were attached to black hospitals or were in a department for the care of black patients in public hospitals. Twenty-eight states were found to offer no opportunity, according to the American Conference on Hospital Service.

Black nurses weren't admitted into the military until World War II, and only after a struggle. Before Pearl Harbor, Surgeon General James C. Magee of the U.S. Army Medical Corps stated that black nurses would not be used in the Army Nurse Corps, despite a national plea for nurses and talk of a possible draft. The announcement prompted the Red Cross and other leading nursing associations to protest-and eventually persuade the government to relent. Among those voices was that of Mabel Staupers, executive director of the now-defunct National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), who has come to be regarded as the woman "who led the successful battle to integrate black nurses," Hine said.

Acceptance didn't guarantee full privileges. Although the Army Nurse Corps eventually accepted 217 black nurses, all but one were restricted to working in segregated areas of the South or hospital stations.

The American Nurses Association did not champion black nurses either. Until after World War II, black nurses could join the ANA only through membership in state organizations, which many states did not allow. In 1908, partly as a result of discrimination, black nurses banded together to form the NACGN.

Legal and social barriers began to crumble after the war, and lost their legal teeth after Brown vs. the Board of Education. Hospitals began dismantling "blacks only" wings and in 1951, the 42-year-old NACGN dissolved and merged with the ANA. At long last, black nurses could work in virtually all U.S. healthcare settings. "It should be recognized that black nurses were in many ways the most important providers of health care for the black community. Indeed, the community would hardly have survived without them," Hine said.