Staupers, Mabel Keaton

▪ American nurse and executive

née  Doyle 

born February 27, 1890, Barbados, West Indies

died November 29, 1989, Washington, D.C., U.S.

      Caribbean-American nurse and organization executive, most noted for her role in eliminating segregation in the Armed Forces Nurse Corps during World War II.

      Staupers immigrated to the United States with her family in 1903. In 1914 she enrolled in the Freedmen's Hospital School of Nursing (Howard University College of Nursing) in Washington, D.C., and after graduating with honours in 1917, she became a private-duty nurse. In 1920 she joined black physicians Louis T. Wright and James Wilson to establish the Booker T. Washington Sanitarium, the first hospital in Harlem to treat black Americans with tuberculosis. Staupers served as the director of nursing of the Washington Sanitarium in 1920–21 and afterward accepted a working fellowship at the Henry Phipps Institute for Tuberculosis in Philadelphia.

      In 1922 Staupers returned to New York City to undertake a study of the health-care needs in Harlem. Her research led to the founding of the Harlem Committee of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. She became the organization's first executive secretary, a post she held for twelve years. In 1934 she was named executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), which, owing to her early efforts, would eventually help black nurses to gain unrestricted membership in state and national nursing organizations.

      Taking advantage of the high public awareness of the nursing profession during World War II, Staupers launched a campaign seeking the integration of black nurses into the Armed Forces Nurse Corps. By 1941 black nurses were admitted to the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but a strict system of quotas hindered their full integration; the U.S. Navy continued its policy of exclusion. When the War Department began to consider a draft of nurses, Staupers enlisted the help of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and orchestrated a nationwide letter-writing campaign to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other political leaders of the need to recognize black nurses. Overwhelming public support of desegregation persuaded the armed forces, both Army and Navy, to wholly accept black nurses by January 1945.

      Staupers' success in ending discrimination in the Armed Forces Nurse Corps buoyed her struggle for the full integration of the American Nurses Association, which was achieved in 1948. With the NACGN goal of full professional integration of black nurses having been met, the organization dissolved itself in 1951.

      In 1951 Staupers was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She published her autobiography, No Time for Prejudice: A Story of the Integration of Negroes in Nursing in the United States, in 1961.

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