by Alexis Clark
Elinor was patriotic, but there was so much more to her enlistment in the Army Nurse Corps. With her beloved father gone, she needed a fresh start far away from Milton—and after nursing school, far from New York too, where social unrest and deep racial tensions were simmering. Although New York had the appearance of being progressive, the city overtly condoned Jim Crow discrimination in the form of segregated hotels, restaurants, performance halls, and movie theaters.
Before her arrival in Arizona, Elinor was living in Harlem, at 508 West 142nd Street. Central Harlem had been overcrowded since the first wave of the Great Migration began during World War I, when blacks from the South sought better living conditions in the North, hoping to escape the persistent racism and domestic terrorism of their daily lives.2 In New York, they discovered a different form of discrimination that could be just as oppressive and degrading. The neighborhood had undergone a serious demographic transformation by the time Elinor arrived in the 1940s. In 1910, the black population in Central Harlem hovered around 10 percent, while the white population was 90 percent. By 1940 the numbers had reversed and African Americans accounted for 89 percent of Harlem’s residents, with whites only 10 percent of the neighborhood’s population.3 When World War II began, Central Harlem alone—which loosely spans from 155th Street to 110th Street north to south, and from Fifth Avenue to St. Nicholas Avenue east to west—was home to 221,900 residents, a small city squeezed into forty-five blocks.
Just a few months after Elinor graduated from nursing school, one particular incident between a white rookie cop and a black veteran triggered riots across Harlem. The episode involved a black woman named Marjorie Polite, who had checked into the Hotel Braddock on 126th Street and Eighth Avenue, not far from the Apollo Theater. A popular destination for black celebrities and musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, the hotel had since declined in stature and in the 1940s was better known for prostitution and was regularly patrolled.
On August 1, 1943, Polite allegedly requested a different room after she found the first one unsatisfactory. After the second one failed to meet her standards, she asked for a refund. As she was leaving, she asked the porter for the $1 tip she claimed to have given him upon checking in. He denied receiving a tip, and the two began to argue. A white police officer named James Collins reportedly intervened and grabbed Polite by the arm. As they struggled in the lobby, a black veteran named Robert Bandy, a guest at the hotel along with his mother, came downstairs and witnessed the altercation. One account of the incident described Bandy striking the officer and Collins shooting Bandy in the shoulder as he tried to flee.
Word quickly spread about the confrontation, infuriating Harlem residents. Some erroneous accounts were of Bandy lying shot and dying. Angry crowds of African Americans—who had been seething with resentment after their veteran sons, husbands, and brothers served in the United States military and returned to a country that still discriminated against them and denied them employment—took to the streets. By the next morning, Harlem looked like a war zone. Multiple shops had been looted and vandalized, and stones had been thrown through storefronts and apartment windows. Thousands of law enforcement officers were deployed to stop the rioting, including 6,600 cops, 8,000 state guardsmen, and some volunteers. It was reported that five African Americans were killed by the police and four hundred blacks sustained injuries. Approximately five hundred black men and women were arrested. Damages in Harlem ran upward of $5 million, which would be the equivalent of $71.4 million today.4 Elinor’s whereabouts during the riots or her opinion of them isn’t known. But the display of racial animosity would have been the first time she witnessed racial strife to that degree.
A public health crisis also raged in the neighborhood at the time. Tuberculosis reached epidemic levels in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, fueled by overcrowding and fanned by inadequate medical facilities. Harlem residents teamed up with African American newspapers to demand better health care. Black physicians, nurses, and social workers also joined the cause by initiating an active health education campaign. Health officials typically didn’t make an epidemic in the black community a public issue unless it had the potential to impact the health of whites. The tuberculosis crisis perpetuated negative stereotypes of racial inferiority. African Americans were seen as susceptible to disease at higher rates because of their “genetic” deficits. It took the persistent efforts of African American activists to counter the stereotypes by explaining and revealing the links between poverty, segregation, and disease that undermined the health of blacks, rather than any connection to genetics or character.5
If Elinor had stayed in New York, she’d be living in an environment that was as volatile as it was thrilling. A career in the military, even for black women, came with the hope that in return for an outward display of patriotism, one would be treated as a full citizen of the United States—something that had been denied to the majority of African Americans whose families had been in the country for generations. For Elinor, whose privileged background positioned her to expect a certain standard of treatment from society, the idea of serving in the Nurse Corps carried even greater expectations. In her eyes, she imagined it would be equivalent to having a prestigious job—one that was far more rewarding and lucrative than that of a regular working nurse.
But when she reported for active duty at Fort Huachuca, seventy miles outside of Tucson, Elinor was greeted by a much harsher reality.
The entire base was surrounded by the Huachuca Mountains, just a twenty-minute drive from the Mexican border. The desert dust was a stark contrast to the topography of the urban Northeast that Elinor had grown accustomed to navigating. Everything looked dry and desolate, and walking even a few feet covered her shoes in reddish-brown dirt. The sunsets, however, were stunning, and like nothing she’d seen before. The pink, orange, and lavender hues illuminating the vast sky were a much-needed reminder of the natural beauty that existed in the world.
Nothing in her past could have prepared Elinor for Arizona. It was as though she’d traveled to another planet. According to 1940 census data, there were 23,679 blacks in Boston.6 In New York City, they totaled 445,844.7 In Tucson there were 1,678.8
Experiencing Jim Crow for the first time was also a shock. The minuscule population of blacks who lived in Arizona was forced to attend segregated schools, and multiple restaurants and hotels refused their patronage, even for blacks in uniform. And the defense plants throughout the state would not hire African Americans, who were also turned away at the polls if they could not read passages from the Constitution, a requirement that white residents did not have to meet in order to vote.9
Fort Huachuca consisted of numerous variously sized buildings, some wooden, some brick, some stone, sprawled over miles of wide-open desert. What stood out immediately were the separate facilities for blacks and whites. Many blacks who migrated from the South discovered that the West was just as inhospitable as the regions they had fled. While Boston was certainly not a racial utopia, Milton was progressive enough that Elinor’s family was able to interact with whites peacefully, attending the same schools, working at the same jobs, and shopping at the same stores. Now, in the military, she suddenly wasn’t fit to be in the same barracks and eating establishments as white people.
The forced separation felt like a punishment. Serving in the U.S. military was supposed to make her feel dignified. Instead, Elinor felt humiliated.
Nowhere on her application to the United States Army Nurse Corps did it describe the segregated facilities she would be expected to inhabit. It also never mentioned anything about being treated like a second-class citizen. Scores of black women like Elinor eagerly arrived at Fort Huachuca with the best of intentions, only to be severely disappointed by their own government.
Between 1943 and 1945 Fort Huachuca was the largest training post for Negro troops, as they were called then, in the United States. The only whites left at Huachuca when Elinor arrived in 1944 were the officers in charge of the blacks in uniform.10
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The relationship between black enlisted men and white officers was notoriously acrimonious. There were many reported instances of verbal abuse and condescending behavior from white officers toward black soldiers. One particular high-ranking white officer at Fort Huachuca, Major General Edward “Ned” Almond, was known for humiliating black enlisted men. Almond was vocal in his opinion that blacks didn’t make strong leaders and that troops of black men were successful only if white men led them. Under no circumstances would he allow any white military men to be under the command of a black officer.11 Almond was known to openly disparage the quality and performance of black soldiers, called them “boys,” and unapologetically stated that blacks were inferior to whites.
Many of the black soldiers were from urban areas such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and New York. They were drafted at higher numbers than southern black men, who could be given exemptions from military service if plantation owners convinced local draft boards that they were needed to pick cotton, a staple in the war effort, since it was used in airplane tires and also to make military uniforms.12
For African Americans raised in the bustling cities of the North, Arizona was bleak, unaccommodating, and depressing. Even if their urban neighborhoods were overpopulated and impoverished, there were businesses they could patronize, including mom-and-pop stores, hotels, barbershops, hair salons, soda counters, and nightclubs. But Fort Huachuca and the surrounding small towns respected Jim Crow, excluding African Americans by means of segregation. Even on base, there were two separate hospitals for blacks and whites, two sets of civilian quarters for the local residents who lived and worked there, two service clubs for military personnel of any rank, and, most glaringly, two separate officers’ clubs.13
An inspector general’s report in August 1942 highlighted the problems with the segregated facilities at Fort Huachuca and the morale issues they caused. The report noted that Jim Crow policies directly impacted the performance of black enlisted men.
The morale of the black soldiers set the tone for the black nurses who were stationed at the base. African Americans were accustomed to being treated differently because of their skin color, but it was nonetheless surprising to black nurses that their own military would isolate them, particularly when nursing shortages would be an ongoing dilemma throughout the war.
Black women wanted to be nurses long before World War II. Aside from teaching, nursing was the only professional career available to African American women after the Civil War. The first black woman to work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States was Mary Eliza Mahoney, who earned a diploma from the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1879. The hospital was founded in 1862 and stipulated in its charter that only “one Negro and one Jew” would be accepted as students each year. Given this school was located in the Northeast and considered progressive in its policies, the situation for southern African American women who wanted to be nurses was almost hopeless.14
The dire health care conditions for southern blacks caught the attention of white philanthropists. In particular, John D. Rockefeller and his wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, whose family had deep roots in the antislavery movement, decided to finance a southern institution for black women, the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, founded in 1881 and later renamed Spelman College. The Rockefellers funded a nurse-training department in 1886, but the program was dissolved in 1927 given the limited resources of the small campus hospital, MacVicar, and because Spelman had since become a liberal arts institution.15 But a string of nursing programs at black hospitals and historically black colleges and universities were subsequently created, including the Dixie Hospital Training School in Hampton, Virginia, in 1891, the Tuskegee Institute nursing training course in 1892, and the Freedmen’s Hospital Nursing School in Washington D.C. in 1894. By the mid-1920s, more than twenty-five new nursing schools had been established, along with two hundred black hospitals, in the South, Midwest, and Northeast. Most of these institutions were privately owned and were funded by white philanthropists.16
Despite the emergence of black nursing schools, access to health care for African Americans in the South remained quite limited. The 1896 landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized the doctrine of separate but equal, had a devastating effect on blacks. Although the Supreme Court mandated equal facilities, states rarely cooperated. Blacks were excluded from publicly supported municipal hospitals, and black doctors were denied access to internships, residencies, and hospital staff appointments. The consequences of these segregationist policies included high morbidity and mortality rates in black communities.17
As more black women became nurses in the early 1900s, there was a growing interest among them in joining the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. But they were not successful because they lacked the necessary medical affiliations the military required, which were granted solely by the American Nursing Association, an organization that mostly excluded black women. In response, a black nurse named Adah Thoms cofounded with Mary Eliza Mahoney the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) in 1908. Their main purpose was to provide black registered nurses (RNs) with an accredited organization that would advocate on their behalf for hospital staff jobs, professional nursing associations, and military enlistments.
After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, African American nurses tried to enroll in the Red Cross, since that was the procurement agency for the Army Nurse Corps. They were all rejected because they weren’t members of the American Nursing Association, which wouldn’t admit them. Every door seemed to be closed. Thoms began a lively correspondence with Jane Delano, chair of the Red Cross, to explain the impossible position black nurses were in: all of the army’s required memberships involved organizations that discriminated against African Americans. After a back-and-forth about the challenges that black nurses faced despite their qualifications, Delano approached the surgeon general of the U.S. Army about the situation. The army had the final say on the enrollment of African American nurses, and the answer given was no.
A health crisis in 1918 inadvertently opened the door. The flu pandemic that year required a constant supply of replacement nurses, which persuaded the surgeon general to finally authorize the use of a handful of black nurses in World War I. That seemed like a major accomplishment to African American nurses at the time, and the NACGN assumed they had made official inroads into the military.18
A year after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 the United States began an aggressive war preparedness program. The U.S. Army Nurse Corps knew the war would require more nurses, and they set out to expand their recruiting services. Black nurses became energized by the urgent calls from Congress, local leaders, and media outlets encouraging nurses to join the army. The NACGN alerted its membership to enroll in the Red Cross, still a required affiliation for enlistment in the nurse corps, but once again black nurses faced a serious problem.19 African American nurses from fifteen southern states still could not join the American Nurses Association, which was a qualification to enroll in the Red Cross. Nothing had changed in twenty years. The U.S. Army still did not want black nurses to serve. Even black nurses in the North who were able to join the Red Cross were rejected, receiving a letter that read: “Your application for appointment to the Army Nurse Corps cannot be given favorable consideration as there are no provisions in Army regulations for the appointment of colored nurses in the Corps.”20
Elinor would not have been able to enlist when she did if someone hadn’t challenged the army, and the NACGN couldn’t have chosen a better leader to take on the task than a stout, bespectacled West Indian woman named Mabel Staupers.
Born in Barbados in 1890, Mabel Keaton Staupers received her nursing degree from the Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing in Washington, D.C. Although she started off as a private nurse, Staupers would establish herself as a leading medical professional specializing in the recruitment of black nurses for various hospital staffing and teaching positions across the c
ountry. She was so diligent at her job that African American physicians contacted her directly to request nurses for various employment opportunities.
She was a mastermind at networking and coalition building, and her efforts were especially noticed by the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, and after working fifteen years in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, Staupers headed to New York to be the NACGN’s new executive secretary in 1934.21
Staupers was well aware of the American Nurses Association’s refusal to admit black nurses in their southern chapters. But she helped pressure the Red Cross to make an exception for southern black nurses who were members of the NACGN and who met all the other qualifications. Her real goal was to make sure black nurses received the same opportunities as white nurses, particularly in serving the military.
The rejection letters from the U.S. Army Nurse Corps enraged Staupers. The curriculum at black nursing schools was comparable to the curriculum at nursing schools that admitted only whites, so it was clear that racism was driving the military’s decision. The fact that the American government would try to fight a war against fascism while subjecting its own citizens to racism was not lost on Staupers, who had a solid relationship with the top civil rights organizations, including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women. She decided that African American nurses deserved to be treated far better, and in 1940 she decided to directly confront the powers that be, Surgeon General of the Army James Magee.
Staupers mobilized an army of supporters, including the NAACP, civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, black newspapers, white philanthropists, Congresswoman Frances Bolton, who was a longtime supporter of nurses, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Staupers even sent telegrams to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which she would do until his death, urging him to allow black nurses to serve their country and “give Negro nurses the opportunity for full service as American citizens.”22 There wasn’t a door she didn’t knock on in an attempt to gain support and momentum for her cause.