In 1918, Aileen Cole and Clara Rollins ached to become Red Cross war nurses.1 Cole, aged 24 years, had recently passed her registration exams, and Rollins, 34, had years of nursing experience.2 The two boarded with other nurses in a Washington, DC, brick row house near Freedmen’s Hospital, where they had all graduated from the rigorous nurse training school. The Red Cross had enrolled Cole and Rollins on paper, but had done nothing else: the US Army and Navy, for which the Red Cross served as the official recruiter, did not accept Black nurses.3
In October, the influenza pandemic brought change. The Red Cross called up Cole, Rollins, and several other Black nurses for civilian duty, and sent them to West Virginia to battle pandemic influenza.4 This 1918–1919 pandemic was responsible for at least 50 million deaths worldwide and 675 000 in the United States.5 It also created opportunities for previously excluded Black nurses, including the first 18 to serve in the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) between December 1918 and August 1919.6
Although Black nurses’ roles in World War I and the pandemic have been noted by numerous historians, this article represents the first effort to move these nurses from periphery to center, and to critically analyze their struggle to serve as a seminal episode in the long and ongoing movement for civil rights and racial health equity.7 Using archival materials, news reports, census records, and published literature, we highlight how Black nurses fulfilled a critical need for skilled care during the pandemic and the war’s aftermath, but received little recognition. We also show how nurses and Black community leaders viewed this service as a political act. We present this story as a historical case study of nursing and racism in a public health emergency, while raising transhistorical questions: Do public health emergencies spur advancements in health equity? Or do they merely allow exploitation of already-marginalized persons? Although a single case study cannot offer definitive answers, it can provide valuable insights.