Places of Mabel Keaton Staupers, the Nurse Who Desegregated the Military Nurse Corps

Mabel Keaton Staupers spent her career fighting for equal opportunity for African American nurses — and won.

Born in Barbados in 1890, she moved to Harlem, in New York City, at thirteen. She graduated with honors from the Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing in Washington, D.C., in 1917, and returned to Harlem, where she helped the Black physicians Louis T. Wright and James Wilson found the Booker T. Washington Sanitarium, one of the few hospitals in the mostly African American neighborhood to treat Black patients.

In 1934 she became executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) — the first person paid to hold the job. For more than a decade she pressed white-led organizations such as the American Nurses Association (ANA), which neither welcomed nor protected Black nurses, to change. During World War II she led the campaign to integrate the Army Nurse Corps, meeting Eleanor Roosevelt and organizing a national letter-writing drive, and in 1943 she testified to Congress in support of the Cadet Nurse Corps, urging protections for minority nurses.

It worked. In January 1945 the Army and Navy opened their nurse corps to all qualified nurses regardless of race, and in 1948 the ANA integrated. The NAACP awarded Staupers its Spingarn Medal in 1951 for desegregating nursing, and in 1961 she published a history of the movement, No Time for Prejudice. She died in Washington in 1989.

1. Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing, Washington, D.C.

Staupers enrolled in 1914, in one of the first classes to study in the school’s new building on Bryant Street. Freedmen’s Hospital, run by prominent Black doctors, had been founded in 1863 to serve the growing free African American population; its nurse training program began in 1894 and took its first official class in 1896.

The course lasted 36 months. Young Black women studied biology, infectious disease, diet and sanitation, and worked in the hospital as they trained. There Staupers learned to believe in what Black nurses could do and in the importance of caring for the African American community. She earned her RN in 1917.

Howard University’s medical school has since moved, but the 1909 building on Bryant Street now houses Howard’s Cathy Hughes School of Communication and stands on Cultural Tourism DC’s African American Heritage Trail. Nearby parts of the campus form the Howard University Historic District, a National Historic Landmark since 2001.

2. The Henry Phipps Institute, Philadelphia

Early in her career Staupers worked for better care for Black tuberculosis patients. TB was a major cause of death in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the late 1800s doctors treated it in sanatoriums that isolated patients in cleaner surroundings thought to aid recovery — but segregation and the cost of travel put them out of reach for many urban African Americans. That was the gap the Booker T. Washington Sanitarium set out to fill.

In 1922 Staupers went to Philadelphia on a fellowship at the Henry Phipps Institute, founded in 1903 by the philanthropist Henry Phipps Jr. and one of the first research centers to use X-rays to diagnose TB. The institute ran a hospital that trained Black doctors and nurses to curb TB in African American communities. After two years she returned to New York, to community nursing and to the Harlem committee of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, which worked to copy the Phipps methods.

The University of Pennsylvania took over the institute in 1910 and moved it to Seventh and Lombard Streets, across from Mother Bethel AME Church — a pillar of Black Philadelphia, on the National Register of Historic Places — placing it, like the Harlem sanitarium, in the heart of a Black community.

3. St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem

The NACGN was founded in 1908 in answer to Black nurses’ segregated training and working conditions, and to their exclusion from the ANA, which admitted Black nurses on paper but did not support them in its segregated state chapters. Led by Martha Minerva Franklin of Connecticut, 53 Black nurses met at St. Mark’s in Harlem to set its goals. Membership stayed low through the 1910s and 1920s.

After the ANA integrated, Staupers and the association’s president, Estelle Massey Riddle Osborne, moved to dissolve the NACGN, and its last meeting, in 1949, was held ceremonially at St. Mark’s. The church is still open, a block from the St. Nicholas Historic District, known as “Strivers’ Row.”

4. 50 West 50th Street, Rockefeller Center, New York City

In 1934, with backing from other Black organizations and philanthropists, the NACGN set out to grow. It elected Osborne president, hired Staupers, and moved into new offices in the expanding Rockefeller Center complex, helped by a Rockefeller Foundation donation. The building housed several health organizations in the 1930s, among them the National Tuberculosis Association, the National Health Circle for Colored People and the National Organization for Public Health Nursing. Rockefeller Center is on the National Register of Historic Places.

From here Staupers organized locally and nationally. The Bolton Act, which created the Cadet Nurse Corps, protected nurses of every race and ethnicity.

Black Army nurses among the first to serve in the European Theater of Operations, photographed on arrival in England. Library of Congress.

5. Eleanor Roosevelt’s apartment, Washington Square, New York City

The wartime military faced nursing shortages, yet Black nurses were turned away by quotas and other discrimination. Staupers testified, wrote to newspapers from Virginia to New York, and went to public recruiting meetings — at one, at the Hotel Pierre, she interrupted Surgeon General Kirk to declare it a disgrace to call for volunteers while hundreds of Black nurses were being refused.

In 1944 she met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at the Roosevelts’ apartment on Washington Square, having first sent her letters from Black nurses describing segregation and discrimination. They talked for half an hour about the Army’s refusal to use Black nurses’ skills. Roosevelt promised nothing, Staupers later recalled, but asked sharp, understanding questions, and Staupers left feeling that Black nurses had found an ally. As conditions improved for Black nurses at prisoner-of-war camps and other posts, she credited Roosevelt’s influence.

Roosevelt kept the apartment through the war and after her husband’s death in 1945; it was her home in 1948, the year she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and the year Staupers saw the ANA integrate. The building, between Washington Square West and Waverly Place, is in the Greenwich Village Historic District.

Sources

Based on "Places of Mabel Keaton Staupers," by Alison Russell, educator and consulting historian with the National Park Service’s Cultural Resource Office of Interpretation and Education, funded through the National Council on Public History’s cooperative agreement with the NPS; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. Its sources include Staupers’ No Time for Prejudice (1961) and Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in White (1989). The source calls the association the “National Association of Graduate Colored Nurses” in one place, dates the ANA’s integration to “1848” in another, and misspells Lombard Street and Rockefeller; these are corrected here.