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Mapping Care Project: The History of Black Nurses in Chicago

Poem about Nurses in Spanish-American War

Down in history we find it and in grandest works of art,
How the men on fields of battle
play so well the soldier’s part,
But I come to tell the story of relief from care and pain
Rendered them by Negro women
in the Cuban War with Spain...

Mrs. Curtis and her nurses have been valiant in the strife,
May such heroines be favored with a long and happy life;
In the face of such achievements on the nation’s battle field,
Prejudice is made to tremble, partly too, his lips are sealed.

— Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, “Negro Heroines” 1

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Black Nurses During the Spanish-American War
During the Spanish-American War (1898), more soldiers died from disease than from battlefield injuries. The yellow fever epidemic was devastating to American soldiers, however it caused the military to lift its usual gender and racial restrictions on participation. The Surgeon General of the Army asked Namahyoke Sockum Curtis to recruit Southern nurses, particularly Black nurses, to serve as contract nurses in the Army. Curtis was a Black and Native American woman and a prominent member of Black society in Chicago and Washington D.C. She traveled across the South and recruited over one hundred nurses, including at least thirty-two Black women, who traveled to Cuba and cared for soldiers on the frontlines.

These Black women and their service are almost invisible in military and archival records, but they tell an important story about the complicated position that Black nurses faced in carrying out military service. The military preferred Black nurses because they believed that these women had immunity from caring for patients during previous yellow fever outbreaks in the South. Many Black nurses in the South did have firsthand experience with yellow fever and might have developed an immunity. However, the belief in Black people’s natural immunity to tropical diseases was historically tied to justifications for slavery. Enslavers claimed that Black people were naturally stronger and more suited to the harsh conditions and diseases of Southern plantation labor. In this sense, the recruitment of Black nurses to serve in Cuba was anchored to racist ideology. But Black nurses saw this open recruitment call as a unique opportunity to prove their professional skills and show their patriotism. At a time when Black nurses faced extremely limited opportunities, wartime had given them job openings and a chance to travel internationally. These Black nurse recruits may also have hoped that their service would aid in their ongoing battle to expand their professional opportunities as nurses in the United States.

These nurses were trailblazers, but they were working in the Jim Crow era of segregation. The nurses operated in treacherous conditions in military field hospitals, sometimes just out of range of gunfire. The Black nurses who served in Cuba lived in segregated field tents and were transported in crowded, unhygienic, segregated conditions on their trips to and from Cuba. One of these women, Nurse Toddy, reported that:
“The nurses did not go to Cuba for money alone, but had some patriotism and were very much worn out by hard work and the rough sea voyage. They thought that better accommodations were due them en route home.”1

Nurse Toddy clearly felt that, as veterans who had served their country, the nurses deserved better treatment. This would be a recurring experience for African Americans, one which would play a significant role in their struggle for civil rights: Black people who served their country in wartime and returned home to be treated as second-class citizens.

The quality care provided by trained nurses during the Spanish-American War would help convince Congress to create a permanent female Army Nurse Corps in 1901. But the Army Nurse Corps refused to admit Black nurses until WWII.

Despite the prejudice they faced, these Black nurses were a source of pride for the Black community, proof that Black Americans could and would serve their country with courage and skill, if given the chance.

Bibliography
Khary Oronde Polk,“Negro Heroines: Gender, Race, and Immunity in the Spanish-Cuban-American War,” in Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898–1948, 48–76, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469655529_polk.7.

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, "Negro Heroines," in Prejudice Unveiled: and other poems (Boston: Roxburgh Publishing Company, 1907), accessed via the American Verses Project, University of Michigan, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/BAR7158.0001.001.

This page references:

Negro Heroines poem