Abstract Trained schools for students who wanted to pursue a career in nursing came about in the 1800s when Florence Nightingale advocated the idea. The only students that were accepted into these programs where white students, blacks were not allowed any education during this time. Blacks were not given equal rights as the white people, and were denied the right to have an education. There were many black young women who were very interested in nursing, and were dedicated to pursue their dream, and wouldn't stop trying until they were given equal rights and accepted into these nursing programs. Some black women would follow along with the black soldiers in the Civil War and provide care to these wounded soldiers, as well as
In 1902, Susie King Taylor published her autobiography, Reminiscneces of my Life in Camp: A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs, (MacLean, 2007). In 1902, Susie received a letter from the commanding officer in the First South Carolina volunteers stating, “I most sincerely regret that through a technicality you are barred from having your name placed on the roll of pensioners, as an Army nurse; for among all the number of heroic women whom the government is now rewarding, I know of no one more deserving than yourself,” (MacLean, 2007). Adah Thoms was born in 1870 in Richmond, Virginia. Before she pursued a nursing career, she attended school studying elocution and speech at Cooper Union. Shorty after, she attended the Women’s Infirmary and School of Therapeutic Massage and graduated in 1900. She was the only black woman of thirty students, (White, 2010). She also attended the Lincoln Hospital and Home School of Nursing. After graduating she became assistant superintendent of nurses at the Lincoln Hospital and Home School of Nursing for eighteen years. During her years there, she added another course to the nursing curriculum, public health, and made public health a recognized field of nursing, (White, 2010). Adah Thoms helped with Martha Franklin, and Mary Mahoney to organize the National Association for Colored Graduate Nurses, and was appointed as its first treasurer, and was later president of the