Negro nurses in hospitals

Abstract

creasingly being hired by hospitals which have predominantly white patients and staffs. In undertaking a study of nursing, one of my main objectives was to discover how the services of Negro nurses were being utilized and how they functioned on the nursing staffs of several hospitals. Integration, as opposed to patterns of segregation and discrimination, was taken to mean the entrance and assimilation of the Negro nurse into the work force without distinction. An attempt was made to find out such things as: patterns of hiring and placement, relationships of the Negro nurse with all those with whom she came in contact, her behavior in the face of problem situations, how others behaved toward her. Integration was to be understood in terms of the particular institutional setting of the hospital and the nurse's role in that setting. Data were drawn from 97 interviews, 83 of them with nurses, including 38 Negro nurses, and personal observation in three hospitals. The research site was a midwestern city, in 1951 and 1952. Hospital A was a Jewish one and enjoyed the reputation in the community of being a pioneer in integration. Hospital B, a university hospital, was known to have slowly and begrudgingly hired Negro nurses. Hospital C was an all Negro hospital. Nurses described their work history and experiences in their current positions (1). The pervading spirit in which integration was initiated in Hospital A and Hospital B was quite different. As Professor Everett C. Hughes has pointed out, a secular institution will modify exclusionary policies when threatened with great crises. The extreme nursing shortage since World War II constituted such a crisis, and in Hospital B this dire shortage led to the reluctant hiring of Negro nurses. The action was taken in a spirit of resignation, and Negro nurses once hired were expected to solve any problems of discriminatory behavior without assistance from