In Touch With Mary, Martha, and Adah

By Betty Miller Buttram
FWIS Contributing Writer

Three African American nurses of the 20th century are remembered in the nursing field as (1) the first African American to graduate from an American School of nursing; (2) one of the few African Americans members of her high school class to graduate and one of the first people to campaign for racial equality in nursing; and (3) the only black woman in her nursing class of thirty to graduate.

In 1908, three African American nurses, Mary Eliza Mahoney, Martha Minerva Franklin, and Adah Belle Thoms co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) in response to their exclusion from the white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (NAAAUS) which later became known as the American Nurses Association (ANA).

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born in 1845 in Dorchester, Massachusetts to formerly enslaved parents who had migrated from North Carolina before the start of the Civil War. At the age thirty-three, Mahoney was admitted with 39 other students into a sixteen-month program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Mahoney did not meet the age criteria that was between twenty-one and thirty-one, but the administration accepted her because from the age of 15, she had worked sixteen hours daily for over fifteen years as a cook, aid, and washerwoman. The extensive 16-month long training consisted of long hours, lectures, and training in classes full of physiological subjects, food for the sick, surgical nursing, child-bed nursing, disinfectants, bedside procedures such as taking vital signs and bandaging, and private duty nursing. Mahoney graduated in 1879 as a registered nurse with three other colleagues. She was the first African American woman to do so in the United States. Mahoney worked for many years as a private care nurse for white, wealthy families. Most of her work was with new mothers and newborns in New Jersey with the occasional travel to other states in the north and southeast coast.

Being an African American woman in a white society, Mahoney often experienced discrimination. In Massachusetts, it was difficult for African American nurses to find work in African American homes or in white homes that already had African American employees in household work. Mahoney was a strong supporter of women’s suffrage. In 1920, Mahoney was among the first women in Boston to register to vote. In 1923, Mahoney was diagnosed with breast cancer and battled the illness for three years until she died on January 4, 1926, at the age of 80. Her grave is in Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts. Today, the Mary Mahoney Award is bestowed biennially by the American Nurses Association (ANA) in recognition of significant contributions in advancing equal opportunities in nursing for members of minority groups. Mahoney was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976 and the National Women’s Hall of Fame 1993.

Martha Minerva Franklin was born in New Milford, Connecticut on October 29, 1870. She had two siblings and her father had been a soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1890 Franklin graduated from high school as one of the few African American members of her class. She moved to Philadelphia in 1895 to attend the Women’s Hospital Training School for Nurses and graduated in December 1897. She did some in-home private duty nursing and in the early 1900s, then Franklin moved to New Haven. In the fall of 1906, she became active in the status of black nurses and determined that the prestigious Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (NAAUSC) was technically open to African American members, but the many State Associations refused to admit qualified African American nurses for full membership. In 1908, she co-founded, along with Mary Eliza Mahoney and Adah Belle Thoms, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) and was elected president at the first meeting. The goals of the NACGN, at that time, were to improve training for the nurses, reduce racial inequality in the nursing profession and cultivate leaders from within the black nursing community. Franklin moved to New York City in 1928 and worked as a public-school nurse. She retired later and moved back to New Haven. She died at the age of 98 on September 26, 1968, and is buried in Walnut Grove Cemetery. In 1976, Franklin was inducted into the American Nurses Association (ANA) Nursing Hall of Fame. In 2009, she was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.

Adah Belle Thoms was born on January 12, 1870, in Richmond, Virginia. Before she became a nurse, she was a schoolteacher in Richmond, Virginia and in the 1890s, she moved to New York to study elocution and speech at Cooper Union. She then studied nursing at the Women’s Infirmary and School of Therapeutic Massage and graduated in 1900 as the only Black woman in a class of thirty. She continued her education at the Lincoln Hospital and Home School of Nursing, a school for Black women, graduating in 1905. She served as superintendent of nurses and acting director at Lincoln Hospital between 1906 and 1923 until she retired in 1923. Thoms co-founded with Mary Eliza Mahoney and Martha Minerva Franklin the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and served as president of the NACGN from 1916 to 1923. Thoms lobbied with the American Red Cross to have African Americans serve as nurses during World I. The Surgeon General agreed to limit enrollment in the Army Nurse Corps in July 1918 and enrollment started during the flu epidemic in December 1918. Thoms died in New York City, February 21, 1943. In 1936, she was the first recipient of the award from the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. She was inducted in 1976 into the American Nursing Association (ANA), Hall of Fame.

In 1951, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) merged with the American Nurses Association (ANA).