Mary Eliza Mahoney – First Black Nurse in the US

Mary Eliza Mahoney became the first professionally qualified Black nurse in the United States in 1879. She was an excellent clinician, and she spent the rest of her life fighting for the rights of minority nurses and women.

Early life

Mahoney was born on May 7, 1845, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to freed slave parents who had moved north for an environment with less racial discrimination. She stood barely 90 pounds, but her energy and drive never matched her size. Deeply religious, she set her sights on nursing from a young age.

She started at the New England Hospital for Women and Children at 18 and worked there for 15 years as a cook, maid, and washerwoman before beginning her nurse training. At 33, in 1878, she became the first Black woman accepted into the hospital's 16-month program.

That hospital was the first institution in the US to offer a formal nurse training course, established in 1872. It was founded and staffed entirely by women physicians, who knew prejudice firsthand and likely gave Mahoney a chance other schools would not.

Career

Of 42 students who entered the program, Mahoney was one of only four to finish it, graduating as the first Black professionally qualified nurse. For the next 30 years she worked mainly as a private duty nurse in wealthy white households. Word of her efficiency and calm spread, and she was called to work across Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, and North Carolina. She took pride in proving there was no place for discrimination in nursing.

From 1911 to 1912, at age 66, she served as supervisor at the Howard Orphan Asylum for Black Children in New York, then retired to Boston and stayed active in nurses' and women's rights. At 76, she was one of the first women in Boston to register to vote after the 19th Amendment passed.

After a three year battle with cancer, Mahoney died on January 4, 1926, at age 81. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts.

The legacy of Mary Mahoney

Mahoney rarely missed a national nurses' meeting. In 1896 she became one of the first Black members of the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, later renamed the American Nurses Association.

She understood that nurses had to stand together to lift the status of Black members of the profession, and she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) to advance their interests and end racial discrimination. At the first NACGN convention in 1909, she delivered the welcome address, a passionate plea against inequality in nursing education and a call to admit more African American students to nursing schools.

In her honor, the NACGN established the Mary Mahoney Award in 1936 to recognize work that advances the interests of Black nurses. The award continued after the organization merged with the ANA in 1951. The ANA still presents it in recognition of nurses who increase diversity and inclusion in the profession.

Helen Sullivan Miller, who received the medal in 1968, visited Mahoney's grave in Everett and found only a simple marker. She launched a drive for a proper monument, and the gravestone was dedicated in 1973.

Mahoney was inducted into the American Nurses Hall of Fame in 1976 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. As May Wykle, a medal recipient and nursing dean, put it: today's minority nurses stand on her shoulders, and we owe a debt to a determined pioneer and role model.