Hazel Johnson-Brown was turned away from her local nursing school because she was Black. Thirty-two years later she was a brigadier general commanding every nurse in the United States Army.
Refused
She was born Hazel Winifred Johnson on October 10, 1927 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, one of seven children on a family farm, and decided at about twelve that she would be a nurse.
The Chester County Hospital School of Nursing, a few miles from her home, refused her application. The reason given was her race.
She went to New York instead, trained at the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing, graduating in 1950, and started on the emergency ward there.
The Army
Johnson enlisted in 1955, at a point when the Army was one of the few large American employers where a Black nurse could expect to be promoted on performance — Mabel Keaton Staupers had broken the Army Nurse Corps quota exactly ten years earlier, and the services had been formally desegregated in 1948.
She served twenty-eight years. She was an operating room nurse and then an instructor, took a nursing degree at Villanova in 1959, a master's at Columbia in 1963 and a doctorate in educational administration at Catholic University in 1978, and ran the Army Medical Department's nursing research programme.
On September 1, 1979 she was promoted to brigadier general and appointed the sixteenth Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, responsible for about 7,000 nurses and a budget in the hundreds of millions.
She was the first Black woman to become a general officer in the United States Army, and the first Black chief of the Army Nurse Corps.
Afterwards
Johnson-Brown retired in 1983 and went into policy rather than practice. She ran the American Nurses Association's government relations division, then taught at George Mason University, where she was a full professor and directed the Center for Health Policy — training nurses to work on legislation on the reasoning that the profession loses most of its arguments before the bedside is reached.
She died on August 5, 2011 in Wilmington, Delaware, at 83, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. George Mason's school of nursing carries her name.
Related
- Mabel Keaton Staupers
- Mary Eliza Mahoney
- The Cadet Nurse Corps
- Estelle Massey Osborne
- History of nursing
Sources
- Hazel Johnson-Brown, for the chronology, the rejected application and the 1979 promotion. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown. Army Medical Department Office of Medical History. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Hazel W. Johnson-Brown. National Women's Hall of Fame. Accessed September 9, 2026.