African-American nurses organization has come a long way

Five women getting close to 90 have some history to tell.

The women I visited with one morning last week have made history, too, and helped a lot of younger people build their futures.

It made me feel good just to sit and look at them. Their faces, their posture, their clothes testify to character and strength.

They are the surviving founders of the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization.

There were 13 originally, all registered nurses who came to work in Seattle in the 1940s. They were the first African-American nurses in Seattle.

These women, who have been friends for 60 years and more, gathered in Gertrude Dawson's living room in Southeast Seattle to talk about their part in Seattle's journey.

Most of them started at Harborview, which for a time was the only hospital that would hire them.

"People would come down to see what we looked like," Mary Scott Hooks said. They were a curiosity at first for patients and other staff.

Ernestine Williams said she and another nurse walked downtown after work one day. "At that time we were in full uniform: That was the cape, the white uniform, stockings, shoes. Little kids were grabbing their parents and saying, 'look a there.' ... We were a novelty."

They all got a chuckle out of that story.

They also had stories about white patients who didn't want a black nurse and co-workers who wouldn't speak to them. Time, exposure and their own professionalism helped change that, as did support from white colleagues who just wanted to get the job done.

Harborview hired Seattle's first African-American nurse in 1943. By 1949, there were 13 African-American nurses.

Williams said the nurses decided they needed to organize to support each other as they struggled against discrimination. On July 9, 1949, they formed the Mary Mahoney Registered Nurses Club, named for the woman who, in 1879, became the first African American to graduate from nursing school, the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.

They supported each other professionally and grew into extended family, Rachel Pitts said, celebrating the major events in their lives together, births, birthdays and holidays. And they made helping other young women attend nursing school part of their mission.

Seattle's first black nurses were from schools in the South.

Six of the founding members learned their profession at one school, Brewster Hospital and Nurse Training School in Jacksonville, Fla., the first nursing school in the country for African Americans. The first Brewster nurses made such good impressions that Harborview was open to others, like Pitts, who came to Seattle in 1946.

Facing discrimination

The two founding members who were Seattle natives had to leave town to get their degrees because the University of Washington nursing program wouldn't accept African Americans at that time.

Juanita Davis was born and reared in Seattle. She said the head of the nursing school "cut our visit short. She said, 'We do not accept Negroes in the School of Nursing.' "

Davis said, "My father was very angry about that because my mother was born and raised in this city, and my father said he'd paid enough taxes to educate a lot of people forever."

In 1941, Davis went off to St. Louis for nursing school at Homer G. Phillips, an all-black institution. She worked in Phoenix for a time, then came back to Seattle in 1945 and became the first African-American registered nurse with the King County Public Health Department, working in the venereal-disease clinic, where she says she learned a great deal about life in the community.

A new dean changed the UW nursing school's discriminatory policy and the school graduated its first African-American nurse in 1949.

The Mary Mahoney nurses have given more than 60 scholarships, steered students to other scholarship programs and provided money to help practicing nurses afford to pursue advanced degrees.

Each year they hold a fundraising luncheon, and the nurses cooked all the food themselves.

When Lois Price Spratlen joined the group in 1972, she told them that was way too much work.

Nowadays they have meals prepared. To Price Spratlen, it's an indication of how far they've come that their 60th anniversary luncheon on Saturday will be at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront Hotel.

Not only that, the keynote speaker will be retired Army Brig. Gen. Clara Adams-Ender, whose own story is an indicator of the strides African-American nurses have made.

Price Spratlen, psychotherapist, UW ombudsman and professor in the school of nursing, was so taken with the stories of the early members that she wrote a book about the group, "African American Registered Nurses in Seattle: The Struggle for Opportunity and Success."

Those first 13 soon became 26 and kept growing. Several became supervisors. Dawson was hired by Group Health in 1956 and went on to become a leader there. She has a photograph of her and Sen. Edward Kennedy taken in 1971 when he visited a clinic she ran.

Still relevant

Today, there are just 47 members; the youngest are in their early 30s; and the longtime members worry about attracting younger people, who have more options, options these women helped create.

But the nurses say their group is still relevant. They're right.

In the University of Washington School of Nursing today, there are 30 African Americans out of 631 students. There is room to encourage more people to enter the profession.

Beyond the scholarships they give, the women have a lot to teach about perseverance, dignity and caring.

The Latin root of "nurse" is a word that means to nurture. These ladies did that in their careers, with their families and with the young people they mentored.

And I felt nurtured just sitting with them for a while.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.