Ready to Serve

Abstract

A A NURSE FOR 49 years, I have met with a minimum of racial prejudice which did not resolve itself in understanding. It may have been luck, but looking back I remember only one major instance in which segregation kept me, for a time, from serving as I would have wished as a nurse. Yet, because of that segregation, I was able to serve in a way which may have been more important than my original choice. In, 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, I passed the state board examinations for both the District of Columbia and Maryland after graduation from Freedmen's Hospital Training School in Washington, D.C. Freedmen's has a three-year diploma school for Negro nurses and is a teaching center for Howard University Medical School. Both the hospital and university are old and honored projects of our government, symbols of its obligation to educate the sons and daughters of freed men and women. I was one of the stout-hearted probationers who survived the rigorous three-month testing period. Probationers gave baths, rubbed backs, made beds, took temperatures, served the patients' meals. We also scrubbed white-painted beds and bedside tables and cleaned toilets, bathrooms, and diet kitchens. At the end of three months, the probationer who had demonstrated good moral character and the stamina for drudgery was accepted as a freshman. She was sent to the hospital sewing-room to be given a blue cotton uniform, white collar, white cuffs, and cap. For infractions of the rules, Laura McHale, the director of the school, retrieved the cap. The student, if she were lucky enough to remain in training, worked capless, in disgrace. The hardest rule to keep and the one most often broken: No