Betty Smith Williams helped found the National Black Nurses Association twenty years after the previous organization for Black nurses had voted itself out of existence on the grounds that it was no longer needed.
Firsts
Williams was born in 1929 in Ohio and took a degree in zoology at Howard University before nursing.
She graduated from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University in 1954, the first Black nurse to do so. In 1956 she became the first Black professor at Mount St Mary's College in Los Angeles, and one of the first Black faculty members at a college or university in California.
She went on to teach public health nursing at UCLA, held administrative and dean posts across several institutions, and became a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 1980.
Why a new organization was needed
The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses had run from 1908 to 1951. Mabel Keaton Staupers had argued for closing it once the American Nurses Association admitted Black nurses to individual membership, on the reasoning that keeping it alive would ratify the separation it had existed to end.
Twenty years of individual membership demonstrated the limits of that reasoning. Black nurses were members of the national association and were not in its leadership, not shaping its policy positions, and not being heard on the health of Black communities.
Williams co-founded the Council of Black Nurses in Los Angeles in 1968 to address that locally. A Black caucus formed at the American Nurses Association meeting in 1970, chaired by Lauranne Sams, and out of it came a national meeting in Cleveland in 1971 at which the National Black Nurses Association was founded. Sams became its first president; the association incorporated in Ohio in 1972.
Williams was its president from 1995 to 1999.
The argument underneath
The question the two organizations pose between them has never been settled: whether a group inside a profession is better served by a separate body with its own voice, or by full membership in the general one.
The 1951 dissolution took the second view and the 1971 founding took the first, and both were decided by people who had spent their careers on the problem. The National Black Nurses Association now reports representing 308,000 nurses through more than 100 chapters. See the National Black Nurses Association.
Related
- National Black Nurses Association
- Mabel Keaton Staupers
- Martha Minerva Franklin
- Ildaura Murillo-Rohde
- The nurse faculty shortage
Sources
- Betty Smith Williams, for her education, the Mount St Mary's appointment and the NBNA presidency. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Dr. Betty Smith Williams: A Trailblazer for Black Nurses and Health Equity. Washington State University College of Nursing, February 2025. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- NBNA history. National Black Nurses Association, on the 1970 caucus, Lauranne Sams and the 1971 founding. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Uniting Nurses of Color. Think, Case Western Reserve University. Accessed September 9, 2026.