African American Red Cross nurses, c. 1917-1919, Library of Congress
1 media/unidentified world war one nurses_thumb.jpg 2022-12-13T20:55:14+00:00 Leora Mincer c7fb2a48912f3577c64c28e4e6663a94d04c8c84 1 2 Clemson A. Shubart, Photograph shows group portrait of thirteen World War I era unidentified African American women in nurses uniforms and two unidentified African American men in front of Red Cross flag, American flags, and portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Library of Congress, 2021643426, https://lccn.loc.gov/2021643426 plain 2022-12-13T20:56:27+00:00 Leora Mincer c7fb2a48912f3577c64c28e4e6663a94d04c8c84This page is referenced by:
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Black Nurses During World War One
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After the Spanish-American War, the military excluded Black nurses from serving until the outbreak of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic after WWI. Many Black Americans served during the war, including as officers, infantry soldiers, medical officers, and clerks. But Black nurses were not accepted into service, even as the military and white nurse leaders created a school to train white nurses to fill wartime needs.[1] The American Red Cross, which recruited nurses for the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, refused to enroll Black nurses until 1918, when the activism of the NACGN and other prominent Black organizations forced the organization to change its policy.
Yet even once the Red Cross began enrolling Black nurses, they were not assigned to any military duties. Jane Delano, Director for the Department of Nursing for the Red Cross, mandated that Black nurses’ applications be filed separately under “colored nurses,” so that their race would be considered in giving them assignments. Black nurses were further branded by the requirement that their badges be marked with the letter “A” after their enrollment number to indicate that they were Black. The Red Cross’s policies combined with the Army and Navy’s racism meant that Black nurses were not given military assignments.
Historians Marian Moser Jones and Matilda Saines argue that white Americans saw military nurses as symbols of “wholesome womanhood in the masculine war zone,” but racial ideologies of the time held that only white women could personify “wholesome womanhood.”[2] Racism led the military to refuse to enlist Black nurses, even as increasing numbers of American soldiers died from the flu, in part due to lack of adequate care.
But as the influenza spread through military camps in the U.S. after the end of the war, while many white doctors and nurses were still stationed abroad, the military began to call up Black nurses. Between December 1918 and August 1919, eighteen Black nurses served in the Army Nurse Corps. They enlisted as officers but not receive officer-grade pay.
Nine nurses were assigned to Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, including two graduate nurses from Provident Hospital, Willie Edna DePriest Cary and Virginia Richardson Steele Guy. De Priest was the 20th African American nurse to enroll with the American Red Cross on August 3, 1918, her pin read 20-A. Steele's pin read 72-A; she enrolled on October 11, 1918. The nurses lived in segregated quarters, but they served both Black and white soldiers. As the pandemic slowed down, the nurses cared for wounded and disabled soldiers returning from hospitals overseas. The nurses were never promoted to become supervisors, because white nurse leaders were unwilling to allow them to manage integrated wards.
In 1922, Anne Williamson, former Chief Nurse at Camp Grant, commented in a report that the Black nurses:“were serious minded, quiet, business like women, well qualified to take charge of wards, had our colored [sic] patients been segregated...they gave several dinners and dances...[as] the need for nurses at the Camp became less acute...by the middle of July, their services in this Camp had terminated.”[3]
Because these Black nurses were not enlisted during wartime, they did not receive veterans’ benefits from the military and the Red Cross. Yet Black Americans were proud of these nurses’ service, and their work caring for Black and white soldiers would set an example that the NACGN would use in its fight to integrate military nursing during World War Two.[1] Gwyneth Milbrath, "A New Approach to Preparing Nurses for War: The Army School of Nursing" OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing 24, No. 3, Manuscript 4 (September 30, 2019), https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol24No03Man04.[2] Marian Moser Jones and Matilda Saines, “The Eighteen of 1918-1919: Black Nurses and the Great Flu Pandemic in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 109, no. 6 (2019), 879. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2019.305003.[3] Quoted in Moser Jones and Saines, “The Eighteen of 1918-1919,” page 881.
