impacted their lives strongly and led by example. She showed them the importance of advancing their education, striking a balance between work and family life, and finding ways to get involved with their local communities.
4. Mable Keaton Staupers
Mabel Keaton Staupers (1890–1989), originally from Barbados, became a U.S. citizen in 1917 and studied nursing at Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing in Washington, D.C. Like Scales, a major focus of her early career was on battling tuberculosis, which had hit the Black community especially hard. She helped establish the inpatient tuberculosis clinic at the Booker T. Washington Sanatorium and later became executive secretary of the Harlem Tuberculosis Committee.
Staupers also worked hard to improve the status of African-American nurses. During World War II, she led the campaign to integrate Black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps, meeting with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to explain the folly of the president’s plan to draft white nurses while Black nurses were either unemployed or allowed to treat only POWs and Black soldiers. Thanks to that effort, President Franklin Roosevelt ended racial enlistment restrictions for Army nurses in 1945.
Staupers became president of the NACGN in 1949 and orchestrated the organization’s merger with the ANA two years later. In 1961, she published a memoir, “No Time for Prejudice: A Story of the Integration of Negroes in Nursing in the United States”.
3. Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was an all-around inspirational figure who risked her life countless times to free others from the same slavery into which she had been born. But the 300 or so slaves she led to freedom weren’t the only people’s lives she changed. Tubman served as a nurse during the American Civil War and used her knowledge of herbal medicine to treat wounded soldiers on the island of Port Royal off the coast of South Carolina.
Using traditional remedies, Tubman cured many soldiers of dysentery and smallpox. And because she didn’t contract smallpox herself, stories spread that she had been blessed by God.
Tubman’s work was so outstanding that one Union general pushed for Congress to give her a pension for her efforts. After the war was over, Tubman continued to nurse others and helped found a home for the elderly.
2. Brig. Gen. Hazel Johnson Brown, RN, Ph.D.
When Hazel W. Johnson-Brown tried to gain admission to a local hospital, she was told, “We’ve never had a