June 2021 Newsletter

WWW.MHCE.US Monthly Newsletter | 15
were often “overlooked” in Army, Navy and
Red Cross recruiting drives until early 1945.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mable
Keaton Staupers, Executive Secretary of the
National Association of Colored Graduate
Nurses were among the most vocal critics of
the implicit “ban” on black nurses. A longtime
advocate for racial equality in the nursing
profession, Staupers wrote that military
service was the responsibility for all citizens
of the United States, especially during a time
of war.
On March 8, 1945, the longstanding barrier
in the Navy was finally broken when a
25-year old New York-born nurse named
Phyllis Mae Daley received a commission
in the U.S. Navy Reserve. A graduate of
Lincoln School of Nursing in New York and
student of public health at Teachers College,
Columbia University, Daley had previously
been rejected from entering the Army Air
Force. Determined to serve, Daley stated
that she “knew the barriers were going to be
broken down eventually and…felt the more
applicants the better the chances would be for
each person.”
Daley’s path would be soon after followed
by Edith Mazie Devoe, of Washington, D.C.,
on 18 April 18th, Helen Fredericka Turner, of
Augusta, Ga., on April 20th, and Eula Loucille
Stimley, of Centreville, Miss., on May 8th,
1945.
Following the war all but Devoe would leave
active duty. Devoe would later make history
as the first black nurse in the Regular Navy on
January 6, 1948. In 1950 she would become
the first African-American Navy nurse to
serve outside the continental United States
(Triple General Hospital, Hawaii).
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