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• 1 media/unidentified world war one nurses.jpg 2022-12-13T18:56:25+00:00 Black Nurses During World War One 31 image_header 2023-02-05T22:02:54+00:00 Above: African American Red Cross nurses, c. 1917-1919, via Library of Congress.
  
  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 desperation of the influenza epidemic collided with the activism of the NACGN and other prominent Black organizations, forcing the organization to make an exception to 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.
  
  As influenza spread through military camps after the end of the war, many white doctors and nurses were still stationed abroad. Desperate and out of options, the military began to call up Black nurses. Between December 1918 and August 1919, eighteen Black nurses served in the Army Nurse Corps. They enrolled as officers but did 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, the nurses cared for wounded and disabled soldiers returning from hospitals overseas. The nurses were never promoted to supervisor, because white nurses 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 WWII.
  
  Bibliography

  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.

  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.