Mapping Care Project: The History of Black Nurses in Chicago

Black Nurses During the Spanish-American War

The racialized belief about the natural immunity of Black people to certain disease led to the recruitment of Black contract nurses during the Spanish-American War. The yellow fever epidemic was having a brutal effect on American soldiers, leading the military to lift its usual gender and racial restrictions on enlistment. The Surgeon General of the Army asked Namahyoke Sockum Curtis to recruit Southern nurses, particularly Black nurses, because they supposedly had immunity from serving patients during previous yellow fever outbreaks in the South. Curtis was a Black and Native American woman and a prominent member of Black society in Chicago and Washington D.C. She traveled across the South and recruited over one hundred nurses, including at least thirty-two Black women, who traveled to Cuba and cared for soldiers on the frontlines.

These Black women and their service are almost invisible in military and archival records, but they tell an important story about the complication position that Black nurses faced in carrying out military service. Many Black nurses in the South had firsthand experience with yellow fever and might have developed an immunity. Yet the belief in Black people’s natural immunity to tropical diseases was historically tied to justifications for slavery. Enslavers claimed that Black people were naturally stronger and more suited to the hard conditions of Southern plantation labor. In this sense, the recruitment of Black nurses to serve in Cuba was anchored ino racist ideology. But Black nurses saw this open recruitment call as a unique opportunity to prove their professional skills and show their patriotism. At a time when Black nurses faced extremely limited opportunities, wartime had given them federal job openings and a chance to travel to a foreign country. These Black nurse recruits may also have hoped that their service would aid in their ongoing struggle to expand their professional opportunities in the United States.

These nurses were trailblazers, but they were working in the Jim Crow era of segregation. The nurses operated in treacherous conditions in military field hospitals, sometimes just out of range of gunfire. Their ability to provide critical care in battle conditions would help convince Congress to create a permanent female Army Nurse Corps in 1901. But the Army Nurse Corps refused to admit Black nurses until World War Two. Meanwhile the Black nurses who served in Cuba lived in segregated field tents and were transported in crowded, unhygienic, segregated conditions on their trips to and from Cuba. One of these women, Nurse Toddy reported that:

“The nurses did not go to Cuba for money alone, but had some patriotism and were
very much worn out by hard work and the rough sea voyage. They thought that better accommodations were due them en route home.”1 


Nurse Toddy clearly felt that, as veterans who had served their country, the nurses deserved better treatment. This would be a recurring experience for African Americans, one which would play a significant role in their struggle for civil rights: Black people who served their country in wartime and returned home to be treated as second-class citizens.
 

Bibliography

Khary Oronde Polk,“Negro Heroines: Gender, Race, and Immunity in the Spanish-Cuban-American War,” in Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898–1948, 48–76, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469655529_polk.7.

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