The National Black Nurses Association represents African American registered nurses, licensed practical and vocational nurses, nursing students and retired nurses in the United States, the Eastern Caribbean and Africa. It was founded at a meeting in Cleveland, Ohio in 1971 and incorporated in Ohio on 2 September 1972.
Its founders, among them Lauranne Sams and Betty Smith Williams, formed it because the existing professional associations had excluded or marginalised Black nurses for decades. That history is the reason the organisation exists as a separate body rather than a caucus inside another one, and it places the association squarely in the civil rights period of American nursing. See history of nursing.
What came before it
The association was founded twenty years after its predecessor had closed itself down, and the gap is the story.
The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses ran from 1908 to 1951. Martha Minerva Franklin created it by writing to every Black nurse in the country she could find, in an era when nobody counted them, and founded it with Adah Belle Thoms and Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first Black woman in America to complete a nursing programme.
It did the work that could not be done by individuals. Thoms forced the Army to accept its first Black nurses in 1918. Estelle Massey Osborne used a federal wartime post to open about twenty nursing schools to Black students. Mabel Keaton Staupers broke the Army Nurse Corps quota in January 1945.
Then, in 1949, having got Black nurses admitted to individual membership of the American Nurses Association, Staupers argued that keeping the organisation alive would ratify the separation it existed to end, and the membership voted it out of existence. It wound up in 1951.
Twenty years later a new generation concluded that individual membership in a national association had not delivered representation, a voice on policy, or a route into leadership, and founded the National Black Nurses Association. Whether the 1951 dissolution was right is still argued over in the profession's own literature.
Scale and structure
The association reports representing 308,000 Black nurses through more than 100 chartered chapters across more than 33 states. Chapters do much of the visible work, running local health screening, mentoring and community programmes.
What it does
Scholarships. It awards scholarships to nursing students each year, which addresses the pipeline directly at the point where cost forces people out.
Research and publishing. It publishes a peer-reviewed journal carrying research on the health of Black communities and on the Black nursing workforce.
Policy. It runs an annual day on Capitol Hill for members to brief legislators on health disparities, and campaigns on maternal health, violence prevention and workforce diversity.
Why the workforce numbers matter
The national workforce survey shows the profession slowly becoming more diverse: nurses identifying as Black or African American rose from 6.3 percent to 8.6 percent of registered nurses in two years, with Asian nurses at 7.9 percent and Hispanic or Latino nurses at 7.2 percent. Men fell slightly, to 10.4 percent.
Set against the population those nurses serve, the gap remains large, and it is largest at the point of entry. Faculty capacity and the cost of nursing school shape who gets in, and licensure results shape who gets through. That makes scholarships and mentoring a workforce intervention as well as an equity one. See the nursing shortage and the nurse faculty shortage.
Similar organisations exist for other groups, including the National Association of Hispanic Nurses — founded in 1975 by Ildaura Murillo-Rohde — and national associations for Filipino American nurses and for Asian American and Pacific Islander nurses. They have often worked together on federal workforce policy. Luther Christman founded the equivalent body for men in nursing for the same reason.
Related
- Nursing organizations
- History of nursing
- The nursing shortage
- The nurse faculty shortage
- Internationally educated nurses
- Notable nurses
Sources
- NBNA history. National Black Nurses Association, for the 1971 founding, the 1972 incorporation, the founders, chapters and programmes. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey. National Council of State Boards of Nursing and National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers, for workforce composition. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- A new beginning: the story of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, 1908–1951. Hine DC. Accessed September 9, 2026.