Martha Minerva Franklin founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses by writing, by hand, to every Black nurse in the United States she could locate.
Alone in the class
Franklin was born on October 29, 1870 in New Milford, Connecticut, and grew up in Meriden.
She entered the Woman's Hospital Training School for Nurses in Philadelphia in 1895 and graduated in December 1897, the only Black member of her class. Like Mary Eliza Mahoney twenty years earlier, she went into private duty nursing, because hospitals would not employ her.
The letters
Franklin's insight was that she did not actually know how many Black nurses there were, what had happened to them, or whether her experience was typical — and neither did anyone else. Nobody counted them.
So in 1906 she began finding out. She sent more than 500 handwritten letters to Black nurses, nursing school superintendents and nursing organizations, asking what conditions were, who was being admitted where, and who was being refused.
The replies gave her the first picture of Black nursing in America as a whole: exclusion from most training schools, exclusion from hospital employment, exclusion from the state nursing associations and therefore from the American Nurses Association, which admitted members only through them.
She then sent about 1,500 more letters proposing a national meeting.
1908
Fifty-two nurses came to Lincoln Hospital and Home in New York in August 1908 and founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Franklin was elected its first president.
Its aims were to raise the standard of training available to Black nurses, break down the exclusions, and develop leadership from within. It ran for forty-three years and did all three — the campaigns of Adah Belle Thoms in the First World War, Estelle Massey Osborne in the schools and Mabel Keaton Staupers against the Army quota were all run through the organization Franklin's letters created.
Afterwards
Franklin took further training at Lincoln Hospital, graduating in 1913, and worked in the New York City public schools. She studied at Teachers College, Columbia in her fifties.
She returned to New Haven and died on September 26, 1968, at 97, having outlived her own organization by seventeen years — it had voted itself out of existence in 1951 on the grounds that it had won.
She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976 and the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 2009.
Related
Sources
- Martha Minerva Franklin, for the chronology, the letter campaign and the founding of the NACGN. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Martha Minerva Franklin. Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame. Accessed September 9, 2026.