National Nurses United

contracted TB at higher rates due to the conditions of their every- day lives. The hospital was initially staffed by white nurses, in an era when Black nurses were fighting discrimination in job and education opportunities, and a ban on joining most state nursing associations and the American Nurses Association (ANA). But by the late '20s, white nurses began leaving Sea View. With a dearth of nurses to do the stigmatized and dangerous work, Black nurses answered the call. Sutton Ballard left the Jim Crow south for Sea View in the early '30s, and in a later "nursing shortage," fueled by unsafe working con- ditions and racism, Allen got the call that changed her life. "It was exciting because I had never had a job before," said Allen, who still remembers vividly, just like rewatching a favorite movie, her first weeks at Sea View. The all-Black education staff taught her everything: from how to take temperatures and bathe patients to specimen collection and proper isolation techniques. "Those nurses were cracker jack," said Allen, noting that the train- ing she first got at Sea View carried forward into "every job I was ever involved in." The Black Angels had given her a foundation for life. Cure through community in a recent keynote speech to the New York State Nurses Asso- ciation (NYSNA)'s convention, Allen emphasized that "The advances in medicine are rarely the work of a single person. They are the result of many people coming together." It's a truth she knows well. As she cared for child tuberculosis patients in the late 1940s and early 50s, many forms of collective O C T O B E R | N O V E M B E R | D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 4 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 23 A Rightful Place in History Virginia Allen is one of the last "Black Angels," a group of Black nurses who helped cure tuberculosis. By Kari Jones " A t 16 years of age, I wasn't sophisticated enough to even think about fear." Now 93, Virginia Allen smiles, recalling the day her parents gave her permission to leave her home in Detroit, Mich. to attend nursing school in New York City. Inspired by a respected aunt, Edna Sutton Ballard, she would become one of 300 "Black Angels," the Black nursing staff caring for tuberculosis (TB) patients at Staten Island's Sea View Hospital. Although she didn't know it then, when Allen stepped onto the hospital grounds in 1947, she was also stepping forward into medical history. Today's nurses who worked through Covid know how terrifying it can be to care for highly contagious patients before the introduction of proven medical interventions. Between 1900 and 1950, when the only prescription for tuberculosis was rest, fresh air, and a healthy diet, TB killed more than 5.6 million people in the United States, including nurses infected on the job. Fueled by crowded and subpar living conditions, especially among the poorest and most marginal- ized people, TB claimed 10,000 lives annually in New York City alone before Sea View opened in 1913. Author Maria Smilios chronicles the history of Sea View's nurses in her book Black Angels. According to Smilios, while iso- lating sick patients away from the public ultimately cut infection rates, the sanatorium was not built on a foundation of care but, rather, of bigotry and greed. New York City officials were moti- vated to remove sick patients to Staten Island by the cost of labor loss when workers infected one another and died, and by contempt for immigrants, the Black population, and the lower classes, who

• Cover