20 Nurse Leaders Past And Present To Honor For Black History Month

Black History Month is a chance to put nursing's present into context by honoring the Black leaders who shaped the profession, medicine, and patient care. These 20 nurses, past and present, built schools and clinics, broke racial barriers, and forced open doors that had been closed to them. Their work permanently improved nursing practice.

1. Adah Belle Thoms

Born in Virginia in 1870, Adah Belle Samuel Thoms moved to New York in the 1890s and graduated from the Lincoln Hospital and Home School of Nursing, where she was named acting director a year later. She held that role for 17 years but, because of racist policies, was never officially named director. She fought for the right of Black women to serve in the military, helping lead to the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, and she helped found the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. The organization disbanded in 1950 after Thoms won the fight to integrate Black nurses into the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the U.S. Armed Forces.

2. Bernardine Lacey

Bernardine Lacey, Ed.D., was the first Black student to graduate from Georgetown University's RN-to-BSN program, in 1969. She became the founding dean of Western Michigan University School of Nursing in 1994 and served five years. In 2014 the American Academy of Nursing named her one of four Living Legends. Her oral history, published in the American Journal of Nursing in August 2020, documented the mark racism left on her career and her growth through many leadership roles. Lacey died on March 26, 2021.

3. Beverly Malone

Beverly Malone, Ph.D., is CEO of the National League for Nursing and a past president of the ANA. She has pushed hard for culturally competent care for diverse patients and has worked in education, administration, policy, and psychiatric clinical practice. She served as deputy assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and became the first Black general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, the United Kingdom's largest professional nursing union. She sat on the U.K. delegation to the World Health Assembly and has her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

4. Edwidge J. Thomas

Edwidge Thomas, DNP, is an adult nurse practitioner who trained at Rutgers and Columbia before treating patients at Mount Sinai Hospital. Early on, she helped start the first nationally recognized nurse practitioner primary care practice at Columbia University School of Nursing. She went on to lead clinical practice as clinical assistant professor and director of clinical practice affairs at New York University College of Nursing, and she has served on the board of the Nurses Educational Funds since 2017. Her focus has been preparing nurses for the future of healthcare and integrating advanced practice nurses across acute and ambulatory settings.

5. Estelle Massey Osborne

Estelle Massey Osborne spent her career changing the face of nursing and defending the rights of Black nurses. She was the first Black nurse to earn a master's degree and the first Black instructor at New York University, in 1945, at a time when Black women rarely held top positions anywhere. She was also the first Black instructor at the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing and the first Black superintendent of nurses at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, and she helped Black nurses benefit from a bill funding nursing education during a severe shortage. As the first Black member of the ANA board of directors, she died in 1981 and was inducted into the ANA Hall of Fame in 1984.

6. Ernest J. Grant

Ernest Grant, Ph.D., is an internationally known burn-care and fire-safety expert with more than 30 years of nursing experience. He delivered burn-care education for U.S. military personnel preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan and volunteered at the Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital after September 11, 2001. Inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2014, he became the first man to serve as president of the ANA. He started as a licensed practical nurse and earned his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2015.

7. Goldie D. Brangman

Goldie Brangman was a certified registered nurse anesthetist, the first Black president of the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology, and a founder of the Harlem Hospital School of Nurse Anesthesia, which she directed for 38 years until retiring in 1985. At Harlem Hospital she was on the team that treated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after the 1958 assassination attempt. The New York State Association of Nurse Anesthetists offers a scholarship in her name. She died in 2020 at age 102.

8. Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman is best known for helping free enslaved people in the Southern U.S., but during the Civil War she also served the Union Army as a scout, spy, soldier, and nurse, making her the first Black woman recognized as serving in the military. Born into enslavement, she escaped in 1849 with two of her brothers and returned to the South many times to free others. She was wanted enough that her enslaver's family posted a reward for her capture, documented at $100 in 1849. After the war she worked alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony for women's suffrage, cared for her aging parents, and founded the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, where she spent her final years. She was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.

9. Hazel W. Johnson-Brown

General Hazel Johnson-Brown wanted to be a nurse since childhood. After the West Chester School of Nursing rejected her because of her race, she enrolled at the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing, joined the Army in 1955, and earned her BSN in 1959. She qualified as an operating room nurse, worked at Walter Reed from 1960 to 1962, and later evaluated a transportable surgical hospital that became the 45th surgical hospital in Vietnam. Nominated as the 16th chief of the Army Nurse Corps and promoted to brigadier general, she launched several programs and pushed quality assurance in treatment facilities. In 1983 she became an assistant professor at Georgetown University School of Nursing. She died in 2011.

10. Jacqueline Herd

Jacqueline Herd, DNP, is executive vice president and chief nursing officer at Grady Health System in Atlanta, where she started as chief nursing officer in 2009. She has more than 20 years in nursing administration and leadership and has held several roles at the Georgia Organization of Nurse Leaders, including president. She started on a premed track, then earned an MSN and family nurse practitioner certification in the mid-1990s. Responsible for about 1,400 nurses at Grady, she is known as a servant-leader who builds from the bottom up.

11. Katie Hall Underwood

Katie Hall Underwood was born on Sapelo Island in 1884, the daughter of formerly enslaved people. Years of on-the-job training with other midwives led her to become one herself on the last intact Gullah-Geechee community on the Georgia coast. She delivered nearly everyone on the island whose parent or grandparent was born between 1920 and 1968. She carried a black bag of medicine and natural remedies and a book recording the names of the children she delivered, and she cared for new mothers for weeks afterward. It is said she never lost a child during a delivery. She died in 1977, and her legacy lives on through "Katie's babies."

12. Lauranne Sams

Lauranne Sams, Psy.D., earned a BSN from Butler University and an MSN in maternal-infant nursing from Indiana University, where she joined the faculty in 1958 and earned a doctorate in educational psychology in 1968. In 1971 she organized the National Black Nurses Association and became its first president. The organization lobbied for equal rights and pay and rallied other groups to push for change in nursing.

13. Lauren Underwood

Lauren Underwood was sworn into the 116th U.S. Congress on January 3, 2019, as the first woman and person of color to represent Illinois' 14th district and the youngest Black woman in the House of Representatives. She serves on the House Committees on Veterans Affairs and Appropriations and cofounded and cochairs the Black Maternal Health Caucus, working to improve maternal outcomes and close health disparities. Before Congress, she was a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and taught future nurse practitioners in Georgetown University's online master's program.

14. Lillian Holland Harvey

Lillian Holland Harvey started the first bachelor's degree in nursing at Tuskegee Institute and helped transform nursing education. As dean of Tuskegee University School of Nursing from 1948 to 1973, she built hands-on hospital experience for students both locally and out of state and mentored students closely. She earned her doctorate at age 54, nearly 20 years after her master's. A civil rights activist, she oversaw the training of Black nurses for military service during World War II and worked to desegregate the Alabama Nurses' Association. After retiring she served on the National League for Nursing Board of Directors. She died in 1994.

15. Linda Burnes Bolton

Linda Burnes Bolton, DrPH, started in labor and delivery at Cedars of Lebanon before it merged into Cedars-Sinai, where she became the first senior vice president and chief health equity officer and was appointed vice president of nursing in 1991. She served until retiring in 2019 to become a principal investigator at the Burns and Allen Research Institute. She is a past president of both the American Academy of Nursing and the National Black Nurses Association and has served with the American Public Health Association, the American Organization for Nurse Executives, and the Association of California Nurse Leaders.

16. Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African American licensed nurse. Born in Boston in the spring of 1845 to formerly enslaved parents, she began working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in her teens and stayed 15 years in various roles before entering its nursing school, one of the first in the U.S., at age 33. After graduating she built a private nursing career known for efficiency, care, and patience. In 1909 she delivered the welcome address at the first convention of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, earning her lifetime membership and the role of association chaplain. She directed the Howard Orphanage Asylum from 1911 to 1912, retired after 40 years of nursing, and kept championing women's suffrage. She died in 1926 after a three-year battle with breast cancer.

17. Sasha DuBois

Sasha DuBois is a nurse administrator at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. She earned her BSN at Simmons College and MSN at Emmanuel College and devotes her energy to nursing education and mentoring nurses into leadership. She serves on the board of the National Black Nurses Association and as vice president of the New England Regional Black Nurses Association, and she won a 40 Under 40 Leaders in Health Award in 2017.

18. Sheila Antrum

Sheila Antrum is chief operating officer and senior vice president at the University of California San Francisco, where she ensures patient services meet the university's vision. Her goal is to bring more women's voices to the tables where decisions get made. She cochairs the Women of UCSF Health to learn from women across research, teaching, and clinical practice. She has served at the university for nearly 20 years, most recently as chief nursing and patient care services officer.

19. Stephan Davis

Stephan Davis, DNP, is a healthcare executive and educator and a clinical assistant professor at Georgia State University, teaching leadership, policy, community health, and management. He earned his DNP at Yale School of Nursing and a master's in health system administration at Georgetown University. Board certified as an advanced nurse executive with additional certifications in finance, education, and healthcare quality, he serves on the board of the Georgia Nurses Association and was an inaugural member of the leadership committee of the American College of Healthcare Executives LGBTQ forum.

20. Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth, an African American abolitionist who lived from 1797 to 1883, was born into enslavement in New York as one of 10 or 12 children and served as a nurse during her enslavement. After gaining her freedom she worked for the National Freedman's Relief Association in Washington, D.C., advocating for nursing education and formal training programs. She began public speaking in 1849 and fought for Black and women's rights, met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864, and is best remembered for the speech on racial and gender equality she delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention.