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• 1 media/Phyllis Dailey swearing in.gif 2022-12-13T19:31:45+00:00 World War Two: The Fight to Integrate Military Nursing 34 image_header 2023-01-11T20:56:17+00:00 Above photo: Five new Navy nurses take the oath of service, March 8, 1945. Phyllis Mae Dailey, the Navy's first African American nurse, is second from the right.
  
  Beginning in the late 1930’s, the leaders of the NACGN focused on integrating the Army and Navy Nurse Corps. Historian Darlene Clark Hine has shown how Estelle Massey Riddle and Mabel Keaton Staupers turned the NACGN into a powerful political force with a large membership. The NACGN developed ties with other Black organizations, like the National Council of Negro Women, whose support would be important for their campaigns.
  
  At the beginning of WWII, the War Department announced that Black medical staff would only be enlisted to work on segregated Black wards, which would only be created if there were enough hospitalized Black soldiers to justify assembling segregated facilities. The Navy Nurse Corps refused to accept any Black nurses whatsoever. The War Department established a maximum quota of a maximum of 56 Black nurses, 120 doctors, and 44 dentists who could be enlisted in the Army. Government officials, following the doctrine of “separate but equal,” argued that segregation was not a form of racial discrimination. But Black leaders like Staupers understood that segregation almost always guaranteed unequal treatment, while also limiting Black staff’s possibilities for professional advancement. Staupers saw the quotas as a step forward from WWI, when Black nurses were completely excluded until after the war had ended. However, the quotas were a step forward in the fight for full integration.
  
  The Black nurses who were accepted into the Army Nurse Corps dealt with difficult conditions, because of both their race and gender. Black and white female nurses in the Army and Navy Nurse Corps faced discrimination: they were not allowed to be married and, despite technically being enlisted officers, they received less pay than male staff in equivalent positions or female nurses in civilian positions. But unlike white nurses, Black nurses were not allowed to treat white American soldiers (a change from WWI when Black nurses worked in racially integrated military camps). Some served Black soldiers on segregated bases. Some were assigned to care for German soldiers in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, which Black nurses found humiliating, considering that these soldiers had fought for a Nazi white supremacist ideology. Many of the POW camps were in the Jim Crow South and Southwest, where Black nurses were excluded from socializing with white officers and faced segregation and discrimination when they went into nearby towns. In fact, the Black nurses found that often white officers or civilians were friendlier towards the German POW's than they were towards the Black nurses.1 Dorothy Margaret Jenkins, who served in the Army Nurse Corps at a POW camp in Papago Park, Arizona recalled that the German POW's sometimes used the officers' club, while African American nurses, despite being enlisted officers, were barred from doing so.
  
  Meanwhile, throughout the war, Staupers and her allies worked tirelessly to try to achieve full integration. She eventually built up enough political pressure to get a meeting in 1944 with Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, who in turned tried to pressure the Secretary of War.
  
  The crucial turning point came in January 1945, when President Franklin Roosevelt announced his support for expanding the draft to include nurses, because the military was facing an extreme nursing shortage. This announcement drew an intense public backlash, in part because it went against accepted gender roles and in part because, thanks to Staupers’ organizing, the public knew that the military was refusing to enlist Black nurses. Staupers capitalized on this moment of public attention, rallying Black organizations, women’s groups, and white allies to protest.
  
  As historian Darlene Clark Hine described it:

  “The sheer hypocrisy of calling for a draft of nurses while excluding large numbers of black nurses willing to serve was too much for most Americans to swallow. Telegrams poured into the White House from the NAACP, the Catholic Interracial Council, the National Nursing Council for War Service, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the American Federation of Labor, the National YWCA Board, the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission, the New York Citizens’ Committee of the Upper West Side, the National Council of Negro Women, the United Council of Church Women, and the American Civil Liberties Union.”

  
  This coordinated campaign convinced President Roosevelt and his advisors that white Americans were ready to support the full integration of Black nurses into the military. Just two weeks after President Roosevelt’s speech, War Department officials announced the end of racial quotas in the Army Nurse Corps and the lifting of any racial restrictions. Officials from the Navy Nurse Corps made a similar policy change five days later. This victory marked an important success for Black nurses in a long and frustrating battle. It was also an important part of the larger movement among Black Americans for equal rights in American society, which had begun to gain momentum during the 1930’s and 1940’s.2
  
  
  Yet history is not always a story of obvious, straightforward progress. Historian Charissa J. Threat writes that the NACGN, in their struggle acceptance for Black nurses in the military, focused on nursing as a female profession, asserting that Black women were just as qualified as white women to nurse. According to Threat, this strategy reinforced gendered ideas about nursing in which women were naturally qualified to provide patient care, while men who wanted to serve as nurses were contradicting their natural masculine roles. The NACGN did not choose to ally with male nurses and push for the removal of all racial and gender distinctions. Thus by the end of WWII, male nurses had still not gained entry into the Army Nurse Corps.3
  
  THE CADET NURSE CORPS
  Black nurses gained new opportunities during WWII not only because of their efforts to integrate the Army and Navy Nurse Corps but also because of the creation of the Cadet Nursing Corps.
  
  Frances Payne Bolton, a white congresswoman and supporter of the NACGN, introduced the Bolton Act of 1943, which created the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, intended to train nurses as quickly as possible to meet wartime needs. According to the Act, if nursing students agreed to work in certain essential fields, the federal government would pay for their tuition and other expenses. NACGN activists rallied Black nurses across the country to pressure their representatives and senators to sign the antidiscrimination clause of the bill, which denied Bolton Act funding for any schools that discriminated against students based on gender, marital status, ethnicity, or race. This legislation created a paradigm shift in nursing, and was the first systemic shift toward integration within nursing education and training programs. 
  
  Funding from the act allowed Black nursing schools to significantly increase their enrollment and encouraged white schools to begin accepting Black students, thus beginning the slow process of the integration of nurse training programs. Additionally, many Black students who otherwise could not have afforded nursing school were able to enroll due to the funding from the Cadet Nursing program.4
  
  
   

   

  Bibliography
  Darlene Clark Hine, Black women in white: Racial conflict and cooperation in the nursing profession, 1890–1950. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.
  
  Charissa J. Threat, "‘The Hands That Might Save Them’: Gender, Race and the Politics of Nursing in the United States during the Second World War," Gender & History 24 No.2 (August 2012), pp. 456–474.