Mapping Care Project: The History of Black Nurses in Chicago

Ethel Walton

Ethel Walton grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where she gained admission to a selective enrollment high school and later earned a number of academic scholarships to fund her post-secondary education. She received her nurse training at Goshen College in rural Indiana, a challenging and at times dangerous place to live as a Black woman in the 1970's.

Currently, she is the president of the Chicago Chapter of the National Black Nurses Association, and a case manager in the Advocate Hospital Healthcare system. Ethel has served in the Chicago metro area as a nurse for over three decades in a number of capacities, from med-surg units to psych ward nursing, both on the floor and in leadership positions. Discussion includes encountering racism and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, traveling to Haiti as a nursing student, defining blackness and the politics of respectability, and the importance of organizations like the National Black Nurses Association for representing nurses’ interests. Interviewer was Karen Flynn.

View interview & transcript here.

This page has paths: