Browse Items (35 total)

Lieutenant (junior grade) Harriet Ida Pickens, left, and Ensign Frances Wills, the first African-American WAVE officers to be commissioned. They were members of the final graduating class at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School (WR), Northampton,…

During World War I, fourteen African American women served as yeomen (F) in the U.S. Navy as administrative and clerical workers.

Some of the first black nurses to serve in the US Army, standing outside their quarters at Camp Sherman, Chillocothe, OH

Capt. Della H. Raney, Army Nurse Corps, who now heads the nursing staff at the station hospital at Camp Beale, CA - NARA. She became the first African American accepted into the Army Nurse Corps.

Army nurse Hazel W. Johnson became first African American woman brigadier (one-star) general and first African American Chief of the Army Nurse Corps.

Navy nurse Joan Bynum became the first African American woman promoted to captain.

Lillian Smith (right) congratulating Mrs. Mabel Keaton Staupers (left), winner of the 36th Springarn medal for outstanding work in the integration of African American nurses into the American nursing profession, in Atlanta.

Lt. Florie E. Gant...tends a patient at a prisoner-of war hospital somewhere in England.

Auxiliaries Ruth Wade and Lucille Mayo (left to right) further demonstrate their ability to service trucks as taught them during the processing period at Fort Des Moines and put into practice at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Major Margaret E. Bailey became the first African American nurse promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Army Nurse Corps.