NUR 6130 Module 5 Black Nurses History Paper: Exclusion, Parallel Institutions and the Campaign for Integration Example

No Time for Prejudice: Black Nurses and the Long Campaign for Professional Equality

Student Name

M.S. in Nursing, Thomas Edison State University

NUR-6130: History of American Nursing

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

No Time for Prejudice: Black Nurses and the Long Campaign for Professional Equality

Introduction

In my diploma program, Black nurses appeared in a single paragraph about Mary Mahoney. Only in graduate study did I learn that Black women spent nearly a century building their own schools, hospitals and associations because the profession would not admit them, and that their campaign for equal standing shaped the profession all nurses now share. This paper follows that history from Mahoney's graduation to the merger of the national association of Black nurses with the American Nurses Association.

Mary Mahoney and Early Exclusion

Carnegie (2000) records that Mary Eliza Mahoney graduated in 1879 from the training school of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, becoming the first Black woman in the United States to complete professional nurse training. Most training schools of the period, North and South, refused Black applicants or admitted only a token few. Mahoney worked for decades as a private duty nurse and later became active in the national association that Black nurses founded, which today honors her with an award in her name.

Building Parallel Institutions

Hine (1989) shows that exclusion led Black communities to create their own institutions. From the 1880s and 1890s, Black physicians, churches, colleges and philanthropists founded hospitals and training schools, including schools at Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Provident Hospital in Chicago, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Freedmen's Hospital in Washington. These schools prepared generations of Black nurses who served communities white hospitals neglected. Hine argues that the schools were sources of pride and opportunity but often operated with fewer resources than white schools, and their graduates faced barriers to licensure, employment and pay.

Licensure and Employment

Graduating was only the first barrier. Hine shows that Black nurses faced licensing boards that sometimes refused to examine them, hospitals that would not hire them except on segregated wards and pay well below that of white nurses. Many worked in private duty for Black families or in the hospitals their own communities had built. Public health agencies in Southern cities and rural areas offered some of the steadiest employment, though usually under white supervisors and with separate caseloads.

A National Association

In 1908 Black nurses led by Martha Franklin founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Hine and Carnegie describe its purposes: to raise professional standards, to fight discrimination and to win Black nurses membership in the American Nurses Association, which admitted nurses through state associations, several of which in the South barred Black members. The association held annual meetings, supported nurses seeking licensure and employment and built relationships with white nursing leaders, some supportive and others indifferent.

The First World War

When the United States entered the First World War, Black nurses who volunteered through the Red Cross found that the Army Nurse Corps would not accept them. Only after the armistice, as influenza swept the training camps in late 1918, were a small number of Black nurses appointed to the corps and assigned to camps in the United States, where they cared for Black soldiers. Their service was brief, but it gave the association evidence that Black nurses could serve, an argument Staupers would use a generation later.

The War and the Quotas

Staupers (1961) tells how she became executive secretary of the association in 1934 and led its campaign in the years around World War II. When the Army Nurse Corps began accepting Black nurses in 1941, it set a small quota and assigned them mainly to care for Black troops and prisoners of war; the Navy accepted none. Staupers enlisted the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, allied organizations and the press. In January 1945, when officials proposed drafting nurses to meet a shortage while Black nurses were still being turned away, public protest grew. Within weeks the Army ended its quota, and the Navy soon admitted its first Black nurse.

Integration and Its Costs

After the war, the American Nurses Association opened individual membership in 1948, allowing Black nurses barred by their state associations to join directly. Having reached its main goal, the national association of Black graduate nurses voted to dissolve in 1951 and joined the ANA. Hine notes that integration brought gains in access but also losses, as Black-led institutions closed and Black nurses became a minority within organizations led by white nurses. In 1971 Black nurses founded the National Black Nurses Association, reflecting a continued need for their own voice.

Why the History Matters Now

Black nurses remain underrepresented in nursing faculty and leadership. Knowing that their absence was produced by deliberate exclusion, and that their presence was won by organized effort, changes how I think about recruitment and mentoring in my own workplace. It also complicates the story of nursing as a profession that always cared for everyone; for decades, its institutions decided who could care and for whom.

Lessons for Nursing Leaders

For leaders, the history offers practical lessons. Exclusion was enforced through ordinary rules, such as membership through state associations, so equity today requires attention to routine policies as well as to open prejudice. Change came when Black nurses organized, built alliances and used public pressure at a moment of national need.

Limits

This paper relies on secondary sources and one memoir, which reflects its author's perspective. It cannot cover the experiences of other excluded groups, such as Asian American, Latina and Native American nurses, whose histories deserve their own study. The narrator is invented.

Conclusion

Carnegie documents Mary Mahoney and generations of Black nurses whose names were missing from standard histories, Hine shows how exclusion produced parallel schools, hospitals and an association that fought for equality and Staupers recounts the campaign that ended military quotas in 1945. Their history shows that the profession's boundaries were made and remade by people, and that advocacy changed them.

References

Carnegie, M. E. (2000). The path we tread: Blacks in nursing worldwide, 1854-1994 (3rd ed.). Jones and Bartlett.

Hine, D. C. (1989). Black women in white: Racial conflict and cooperation in the nursing profession, 1890-1950. Indiana University Press.

Staupers, M. K. (1961). No time for prejudice: A story of the integration of Negroes in nursing in the United States. Macmillan.