The Black Nurse Who Drove Integration of the U.S. Nurse Corps

As the United States entered the final year of World War II, Surgeon General of the Army Norman T. Kirk told an emergency recruitment meeting of 300 people in New York City that, to fully meet the needs of the Army, the time had perhaps come to institute a draft for nurses. For Mabel Keaton Staupers, executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, this was too much to bear. According to the historian Darlene Clark Hine, Staupers stood up and challenged Kirk: “If nurses are needed so desperately, why isn’t the Army using colored nurses?”  Read more.