Mapping Care Project: The History of Black Nurses in Chicago

Black Nurses During the Wars in Korea and Vietnam

After the end of legal racial restrictions on military nurses, Black nurses sought out the opportunity to serve their country and advance their careers.


Yet as in many other avenues of American life and society, formal integration did not mean that Black Americans secured equal treatment or opportunities overnight.


Even after the integration of the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, most nurses in the military were white, in part because many nurse training programs continued to limit or exclude Black students. A 1962 study by the National League for Nursing, which surveyed 5,456 nursing students across various types of programs, found that 96% of nursing students were white.


Elizabeth Allen’s service during the Vietnam War provides a useful illustration of the experiences of Black nurses in the military after formal integration. Allen enlisted in the military in 1966 (shortly after her brothers) and insisted on being deployed to Vietnam, despite the military attempting to assign her to duty in the United States. She worried that the Black soldiers overseas did not have Black healthcare staff caring for them. Having just completed her master’s in nursing, Allen had a keen understanding of the unequal treatment Black patients often received from white medical practitioners.

The lack of Black officers and the rules against officers socializing with enlisted soldiers meant Allen, who was commissioned as a Captain, experienced loneliness and isolation. She did not receive the same treatment from white officers as the white nurses stationed on her base. Yet she did manage to build connections with Black enlisted men, who were not used to seeing Black nurses in a war zone and were thus eager to speak with her. Allen’s focus on racial solidarity also extended beyond the Black community. While many white nurses displayed racist attitudes towards Vietnamese people, Allen refused to prioritize American patients over Vietnamese patients, seeing parallels between racial healthcare inequalities in Vietnam and the United States. "I touched them just as I would touch anybody," she noted, "I tried to understand their food patterns, their religious patterns, because that's intrinsic to them. And I do that in my practice now."

She was also proud of the work that she did doing public health work treating disease in local Vietnamese communities as part of her service.1 

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Dr. Barbara Norman also served in the military during the Vietnam War. Dr. Norman enlisted alongside a few of her family members after completing her master’s degree. She saw the military as a positive pathway for young Black men with few opportunities after graduating high school. As a Captain in the Army, Dr. Norman served at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where she treated injured soldiers returning home from the war and trained incoming soldiers. Norman felt proud of her service, though she noted that it was difficult to be the only Black female officer in her unit and to be known as “that colored [sic] captain.” She expressed the hope that one day Black women in such positions will not stand out for their race.

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