Estelle Massey Osborne was the first Black nurse in the United States to earn a master's degree, and she spent the Second World War using a federal advisory post to prise open nursing schools that had never admitted a Black student.
Texas to Columbia
She was born Estelle Massey on May 3, 1901 in Palestine, Texas, the eighth of eleven children. She trained as a teacher first, then went to nursing at the City Hospital No. 2 School of Nursing in St Louis, graduating in 1923.
In 1931 she took a master's in nursing education at Teachers College, Columbia — the first Black nurse in the country to hold one. She had been funded by a Rosenwald Fund fellowship, which she got partly because nobody could point to a Black nurse with a graduate degree, which was the problem.
She became educational director at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, the teaching hospital of Howard University, and then the first Black director of nursing at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St Louis, which trained a large share of the Black nurses in the country.
The NACGN
Osborne was president of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses from 1934 to 1939 — the organization Mary Eliza Mahoney had helped found, with Mabel Keaton Staupers as its executive secretary from 1934. The two of them ran it together through the years that mattered most.
The war
In 1943 Osborne was appointed a consultant to the National Nursing Council for War Service. It is a bureaucratic-sounding job and it was the lever.
The Cadet Nurse Corps, created that year, paid the tuition of any student a participating school admitted, and the Bolton Act barred participating schools from discriminating by race. Osborne's work was to make that clause mean something: to find the schools that had never taken a Black applicant, put the federal money in front of them, and hold them to the condition attached to it.
Over the war years about twenty nursing schools admitted Black students for the first time, and roughly 2,000 Black women entered nursing through the Cadet Nurse Corps. The Army and Navy dropped their bans in 1945 under Staupers's campaign. Those two things are the same operation from two directions.
Afterwards
In 1945 Osborne became the first Black faculty member at New York University's Department of Nursing Education, where she taught until 1954. She was later an associate general director of the National League for Nursing and one of the first Black nurses elected to the American Nurses Association board.
She received the Mary Mahoney Award in 1946 and was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1984. She died on December 12, 1981, at 80.
Related
- Mabel Keaton Staupers
- Mary Eliza Mahoney
- The Cadet Nurse Corps
- Hazel Johnson-Brown
- The nurse faculty shortage
Sources
- Estelle Massey Osborne, for the chronology, the wartime consultancy and the school admissions figures. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, 1943 to 1948. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Accessed September 9, 2026.