Mabel Keaton Staupers (left) is congratulated by the author Lillian Smith on winning the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1951. Library of Congress.
In July 1944 the U.S. Army, desperate for nurses, announced it would accept Black nurses "without regard to any quota". The telegram carrying the news went to Mabel Keaton Staupers, executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses — because she and the association had spent four years forcing the decision.
Who she was
| Born | 1890, Barbados; to Harlem with her family in 1903 |
| Trained | Freedmen's Hospital School of Nursing, Washington, D.C., with honours |
| Early work | fighting tuberculosis, a major threat to Black urban communities, through local health organisations including the Harlem Tuberculosis Association |
| 1934 | first paid executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), formed because the American Nurses Association would not admit all Black nurses or fight segregation |
| 1951 | the NAACP's Spingarn Medal |
| Died | 1989, Washington, D.C. |
The fight over the Nurse Corps
In the Second World War the armed forces excluded Black nurses or held them to tiny quotas, even while begging white nurses to enlist. Black nurses invited to a Red Cross recruiting meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1943 called it "simply heartbreaking" to hear the appeals while being barred by their colour. Staupers organised: she wrote opinion pieces, lobbied Congress, gathered nurses' testimony, and met public figures including Eleanor Roosevelt.
In July 1944 the Army gave way. Newspapers across the Black press credited Staupers, the association and the Black press itself; Staupers credited the allies who had helped, and called it "a significant and progressive step in race relations" that showed the War Department would respond to public pressure. She urged every qualified nurse to apply — 800 were ready in New York alone. The Navy, 1,800 nurses short of its quota, still wanted only white nurses; it followed in 1945.
By the end of the war Black nurses served in the military and in federal programmes such as the Cadet Nurse Corps. In 1948 the American Nurses Association fully integrated, and the NACGN, its work done, dissolved.
Ethel Washington and Louise Beleno pack surgical kits as volunteer nurse's aides, February 1943. Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information, Library of Congress.
What her example teaches
The Park Service built a classroom kit around her, with three ideas students can use:
- Who gets the credit. Compare how different papers reported the 1944 decision — where Staupers appears in each story, and how often — to see how the press assigns credit for change.
- Getting organised. Staupers worked through organisations, locally and nationally. Pick a cause and research a group working on it: its mission, who can join, its recent victories, its most pressing issue.
- Raising awareness. Write a short op-ed on a local issue: what is unfair, who is affected, who can fix it, and what readers should do — and, with a trusted adult, gather the testimony of people it affects, as Staupers gathered nurses'.
Sources
Written from "Learning from Mabel Keaton Staupers", a National Park Service Curiosity Kit, a work of the United States government in the public domain, which quotes the New York Age and the St. Paul Recorder of July 1944.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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