Adah Belle Thoms ran the Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing in New York for seventeen years. She was never given the title of director. The hospital appointed white women over her and left her as acting director, and she stayed and did the job anyway.
Training twice
Thoms was born on January 12, 1870 in Richmond, Virginia, taught school, and came to New York to train.
She graduated in 1900 from the Woman's Infirmary and School of Therapeutic Massage — the only Black woman in a class of thirty — and then trained again at the Lincoln Hospital and Home School of Nursing, graduating in 1905 as class president.
She joined its faculty, and from 1906 to 1923 was its acting director, running the school that trained a substantial share of the Black nurses in the northern United States.
The First World War
When the United States entered the war, the American Red Cross was the route into the Army Nurse Corps, and it would not enrol Black nurses.
Thoms went at it directly and for years — correspondence, delegations, and public pressure on the Red Cross and the Surgeon General, arguing that qualified nurses were being turned away while the Army declared a shortage.
In July 1918 the Surgeon General agreed to a limited enrolment. Black nurses were finally called up in December 1918, during the influenza pandemic, after the Armistice. Eighteen served, in segregated assignments.
It is a small number arriving too late, and it was the first breach. It is the precedent Mabel Keaton Staupers built on to break the Army quota in 1945, and Staupers said so.
The NACGN and Pathfinders
Thoms convened the organizing meeting at Lincoln Hospital in 1907 that produced, the following year, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses — founded with Martha Minerva Franklin and Mary Eliza Mahoney, and fifty-two nurses attending. She was its president from 1916 to 1923.
In 1929 she published Pathfinders: A History of the Progress of Colored Graduate Nurses, the first history of Black nursing in America. She wrote it for the same reason Lavinia Dock wrote hers: a group with no documented record can be told it has no record.
She was the first recipient of the Mary Mahoney Medal in 1936, and was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976. She died in New York on February 21, 1943.
Related
- Mary Eliza Mahoney
- Martha Minerva Franklin
- Mabel Keaton Staupers
- Estelle Massey Osborne
- Julia Stimson
Sources
- Adah Belle Samuels Thoms, for the chronology, the Red Cross campaign and the NACGN. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Pathfinders: A History of the Progress of Colored Graduate Nurses, Adah B. Thoms, 1929. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.