Mabel Keaton Staupers spent eleven years organizing Black nurses into a force the federal government could not ignore, broke the Army Nurse Corps quota in January 1945, and then argued for closing down the organization she had built.
Harlem
Staupers was born Mabel Doyle on February 27, 1890 in Barbados and came to New York with her family at thirteen. She graduated from the Freedmen's Hospital School of Nursing in Washington in 1917, one of the few American programs that trained Black nurses at all.
She went into private duty, because that was the work available, and quickly found the larger problem underneath it: there was nowhere in Harlem for a Black tuberculosis patient to be treated. In 1920 she helped found the Booker T. Washington Sanatorium, the first inpatient tuberculosis facility in the city open to Black patients and staffed by Black doctors and nurses. She then spent twelve years as executive secretary of the Harlem Committee of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association.
The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses
In 1934 Staupers became the first paid executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, the body Mary Eliza Mahoney had helped found in 1908 because the state affiliates of the American Nurses Association would not admit Black members.
The association had no money and about 175 members. Staupers turned it into a lobbying operation.
The quota
When the United States entered the Second World War the Army Nurse Corps set a quota: 56 Black nurses, in segregated assignments, out of a corps that would grow past 50,000. The Navy took none at all. At the same time the government was declaring a nursing shortage severe enough to justify drafting nurses.
Staupers attacked the contradiction directly. She built a national letter-writing campaign, took the case to Eleanor Roosevelt in person in 1944, and made sure the press understood that the War Department was proposing to conscript white nurses while turning away qualified Black volunteers.
In January 1945 the Army announced a nurse draft. Public reaction against the quota was immediate and overwhelming — thousands of letters and telegrams reached the War Department and the White House within days.
On January 20, 1945, the Surgeon General announced that the Army Nurse Corps was open to all applicants regardless of race. A telegram to Staupers put it plainly: "Negro nurses will be accepted without regard to any quota." The Navy followed within days.
Closing the organization down
Three years later the American Nurses Association admitted Black nurses to full individual membership.
Staupers argued that this made the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses unnecessary, and that keeping it going would ratify the separation it existed to end. She became its president in 1949 for the specific purpose of dissolving it. The membership voted to close in 1949 and the association wound up in 1951, having done what it was built to do.
She received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1951, and published No Time for Prejudice, her account of the campaign, in 1961.
Staupers died in Washington on November 29, 1989, at 99. She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1996.
Related
- Mary Eliza Mahoney
- The Cadet Nurse Corps
- History of nursing
- Nursing in New York
- Nursing in the District of Columbia
Sources
- Mabel Keaton Staupers, for the chronology of the campaign and the 1945 telegram. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Learning from Mabel Keaton Staupers. National Park Service. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Mabel Keaton Staupers (1890–1989). BlackPast. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.