I find that I am drawn to unusual stories that appear in the New York Times Obituaries. This is one that recently caught my attention. Nancy Leftenant-Colon, 104, Dies; Army Nurse Broke a Color Barrier - The New York Times Maybe it will interest you as well.
Nancy Leftenant-Colon | |
|---|---|
 Leftenant-Colon circa 1940s | |
| Born | September 29, 1920 |
| Died | January 8, 2025 (aged 104) Amityville, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Nurse |
Nancy Leftenant-Colon (September 29, 1920 – January 8, 2025) became the first African American in the regular United States Army Nurse Corps in March 1948 after it was desegregated.[1]
Biography
[edit]Leftenant was born September 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, South Carolina, near Charleston. Her parents were Eunice and James Leftenant and she was one of their 12 children. Her father was the son of a freed slave. The family moved to New York in 1923 and built their own home in Amityville, Long Island. She hyphenated her husband's name after they married, to Leftenant-Colon. She died in Amityville, New York on January 8, 2025, at the age of 104.[2][3]
She finished high school in 1939 and then trained at the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx and then worked in a local hospital. In January 1945 she was allowed to join the United States Army Nurse Corps as a Second Lieutenant reservist and was initially assigned to Lowell Hospital in Massachusetts. In 1946 she was promoted and assigned to 332nd Station Medical Group in Ohio on Lockbourne Army Air Base. One notable incident was when the local hospital would not treat a black woman who had gone into premature labor. Leftenant-Colon and a flight surgeon managed the delivery of the 3 pound weight premature baby at the air base and the child survived.[2]
In 1952 Leftenant-Colon became a flight nurse in the US Air Force. She was assigned overseas, including during the Korean and Vietnam wars. She was aboard the first medical evacuation flight into the French outpost during the battle of Dien Bien Phu.[3] She reached the rank of major and in 1965 retired from the military and her post as Chief Nurse at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey. She continued to work, as a school nurse in Amityville Memorial High School until 1984.[2]
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Leftenant-Colon was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Tuskegee University and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from University of Mount Saint Vincent in New York. In 1989 she was the first woman national president of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc.[4] One of her brothers had been a pilot in the Tuskegee Airmen who was killed in a mid-air collision and four other siblings were also in the military.[2] In 2018, a construction of a new media center at Amityville High School was announced, named after Leftenant-Colon.[3]
References
[edit]- ^ Hine, Darlene Clark (1997). Black Women in America: Science, Health and Medicine. New York: Facts on File Inc. ISBN 0816034249.
- ^ a b c d Thompson, Cheryl W. "First Black Woman to serve in the US Army Nurse Corps after desegregation dies". National Public radio. Retrieved January 15, 2025.
- ^ a b c "Nancy Leftenant-Colon" (PDF). Tuskegee Airmen.
- ^ "Nancy Leftenant-Colon, the first Black woman in Army Nurse Corps, dies at 104". NBC News. The Associated Press. January 22, 2025. Retrieved January 23, 2025.
Nancy Leftenant-Colon, 104, Dies; Army Nurse Broke a Color Barrier
After years of being barred from a segregated military, she became the first Black nurse in the regular U.S. armed forces. She was later an Air Force officer.
Nancy Leftenant-Colon, a granddaughter of enslaved people who in 1948 became the first Black nurse to serve in the regular U.S. armed forces, died on Jan. 8 in Amityville, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 104.
Her great-niece Gilda Leftenant confirmed the death, in a nursing facility.
Mrs. Leftenant-Colon joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in February 1948, several months before President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order desegregating the armed forces.
It was the culmination of a seven-year struggle. She had first tried to enlist in 1941, fresh out of nursing school, but was told the military did not accept Black women. She kept trying, and in 1945, with the flow of wounded servicemen from overseas combat near its peak, she was accepted into the reserves.
She was one of just 500 Black nurses to serve during World War II, out of a total of 50,000 — a result of government caps that kept thousands more Black women from serving.
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Mrs. Leftenant-Colon began her service at a hospital in Lowell, Mass. Though she served in a segregated unit, the hospital itself was integrated, part of what was called a military experiment in desegregation.
A year later, she transferred to Lockbourne Army Air Field in Columbus, Ohio, where she joined the nursing unit attached to the 332nd Fighter Group, part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
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She repeatedly faced hostile supervisors, who made it clear that she would be cashiered for the slightest infraction. “I made sure I was spit and polish all the time,” she told the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 2023.
Once, when a Black woman under her care went into labor prematurely, she and her patient were refused admission to a whites-only hospital in Columbus; she and a Black flight surgeon delivered the baby on their own. (The baby survived.)
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Later, while serving in Alabama, Mrs. Leftenant-Colon was not allowed to eat in whites-only restaurants, even in her uniform. When she was traveling through a Southern city, a white woman spit in her face.
She joined the U.S. Air Force in 1952, five years after it was created, in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a flight nurse.
She got her wish: Over the next 13 years, her postings included Germany, Japan and various installations around the United States. In 1954, she helped evacuate wounded French soldiers from Dien Bien Phu, an outpost under siege by Vietnamese Communist forces. She met Bob Hope when he was on a military-sponsored tour; another time, she met Marilyn Monroe.
“I got to travel the world for free,” she told Newsday.
Her commission as an officer in the Army Nurse Corps made international news.
“It was just part of the job,” she told Newsday in 1978. “But then there were articles in The New York Times, letters from as far away as England, and a newsreel.”Nancy Carol Leftenant, known since childhood as Lefty, was born on Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, S.C., a farming community near Charleston. Both her parents, James and Eunice (Middleton) Leftenant, were the children of parents born into slavery.
When Nancy was 3, the family — which eventually included 11 other children — moved to Amityville, where her father found a job as a laborer and her mother as a domestic worker.
She graduated from the Lincoln School for Nurses, in the Bronx, one of the first institutions of its type open to Black women. While repeatedly trying to enlist in the military, she worked at hospitals around New York City.
“I saw a picture of an Army nurse with her cape,” she told Newsday in 1997. “She looked so good — straight and tall. I wanted to do my part.”
She married Bayard Colon in 1960. He died in 1972. In addition to Gilda Leftenant, she is survived by a sister, Amy, as well as several other nieces and nephews.
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Mrs. Leftenant-Colon retired with the rank of major in 1965 and then returned to Amityville, where she worked as a nurse for her local high school.
She also became active in Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an association for veterans of that storied unit. From 1989 to 1991, she served as its president. She was the only woman ever to hold that position.
It was a particularly bittersweet assignment: Not only had she helped care for pilots in the unit, but one of her brothers, Samuel G. Leftenant, had been a Tuskegee Airman himself. He flew a P-51 Mustang, and in 1945 he was shot down over Austria. He was declared dead, though his remains were never recovered.
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