Caring Hands, Bold Spirits -- 50 Years Ago, Seattle's Pioneering African-American Nurses Forged A Valuable Legacy From Trying Times

Fifty years ago, 13 Seattle nurses got together and began the work of creating something good out of a bad situation, the kind of story people have always looked to for uplift.

When we feel alone, put upon and unappreciated, their story and stories like it tell us not to give up - that we can indeed overcome, that sometimes external forces are not as powerful as our reaction to them.

The nurses I'm talking about formed a group they named for Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first African-American woman to earn a nursing degree in this country.

In 1949, these 13 included all the black nurses in Seattle when they began the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization to support each other and to help young women who wanted to become nurses.

Over the years they have helped nearly 70 women and men in their careers through the scholarships they fund.

A couple of days ago I listened to the stories of three of Seattle's pioneer African-American nurses.

Maxine Haynes was the first black nurse at Providence Hospital (now Providence Seattle Medical Center). Gertrude Dawson was the first black nurse at Harborview Hospital (now Harborview Medical Center) and Frances Terry was the first black woman to graduate from the nursing program at Seattle University. `The most beautiful sight'

Haynes is a Seattle native, born here in 1919. She decided early that she wanted to be a nurse.

"My grandfather was very ill. He was at home because in those days we didn't go to the hospital. They didn't want you there." It was 1924 and Haynes was 4 or 5 years old.

Black nurses didn't work in the hospitals then and went home to home instead. "The nurse came at night all in white with a cape and a hat. She was the most beautiful sight I had seen.

"She would wake me up and say, `Baby, come sing to your grandpa,' and I'd sing `Just a little walk with Jesus makes it right, makes it all right.' "

Years later Haynes attended the University of Washington and took the courses required to enter nursing school.

But when she applied to that school in 1939, "The dean told me, `We can't take colored girls in the school of nursing.' " Said it right to her face as if it were no more remarkable than saying the sky is blue.

Haynes went on and got her sociology degree. She wrote to the American Nurses Association and they sent her a list of the 19 nursing schools that would accept black students. Most were in the south, but two were in New York where she had relatives. So she went to New York.

She cleaned houses, did typing and other jobs to earn money and made her dream happen.

Private rooms, added cost

Terry's family moved here from Mississippi in 1942 when she was 12. When her mother became seriously ill and had to be hospitalized, she at first shared a room with a white patient.

"Her skin was so light they didn't know what she was, but when we came to visit they got her out of that room quick. They put her in a private room and charged us extra," Terry says. Her mother died that year, 1946.

Terry got a private dormitory room years later when she entered the nursing school at Seattle University. All the other students had roommates but she was told parents would not tolerate having a black girl in a room with their daughters.

She was the only black student in the program and the first to graduate from it, in 1951.

First at Harborview

Gertrude Dawson already was a nurse when she came to Seattle from her native Florida in 1945. She'd graduated from nursing school in 1944, but could earn only $90 a month. So she sent out applications and was accepted by Tuskegee Institute and Jefferson Hospital in Alabama and Harborview, way up in the opposite corner of the country.

Harborview was paying the most, so she headed northwest. After four days and nights on a train, she stepped out at King Street Station and got a cab. The driver told her she must be mistaken about the address, there were no colored nurses at Harborview.

She protested but he took her to the one place he thought there might be black nurses, a nursing home in Georgetown. When they got there, the driver asked the folks inside if they were expecting her. They weren't.

Dawson finally got to Harborview, but she paid the cabbie only the $2 a direct trip would have cost.

A few months after Dawson arrived in Seattle, Haynes came back to her hometown with a nursing degree and experience as a psychiatric nurse at New York's Bellevue Hospital.

Haynes got a job at Providence Hospital, the first black nurse ever to do so. "The white nurses didn't even speak to me." To learn the routines, she followed the white nurses around, learned where things were kept and introduced herself to patients.

The black nurses all had problems with co-workers and even with patients.

Dawson says one night she was the only nurse on duty when a man who was brought in with two broken legs refused to let her give him an injection. I won't repeat what the man said, but the doctor on duty had him loaded onto a stretcher and taken to another hospital.

That support meant a lot to her. All of the women found support amid the rebuffs.

Haynes says the nurses who at firsthadn't spoken to her changed over time. They gave her gifts when she got married and again when her first child was born.

Dawson says, "It's not the people always that cause you the problems. It's the system."

The system dictates who can do what and who can go where, and people tend to just go along. Some of the white people who got to know these women became their friends.

But being the only one in the early days was especially lonely business and that was the impetus for the first black nurses gathering.

Dawson invited some of her Florida classmates to move west. Five came and three stayed in Seattle, and were the only other black nurses she knew until she met Ann Foy Baker.

Baker decided to invite nurses to her home, including those she knew and those Dawson knew. They checked around and found there were 13 black nurses in the city and invited them all. That was 1949.

As they talked about the small numbers of black nurses and the difficulties that black people who might want to become nurses faced in getting into and through nursing school, they came up with what would be their permanent project: raising money and giving support to black nursing students.

They held a dinner and charged $2.50 a plate. The Mary Mahoney St. Patrick's Day Dinner became an annual event.

But the support they gave each other was just as critical. "That support kept them grounded and kept them in Seattle because we all had different levels of tolerance," Terry says.

Each of the three women I spoke with has her own story of accomplishment, but their group gift to all of us is their spirit.

"It shows the spirit that black Americans have," Terry says. "If you have an education, you reach down and bring someone else along."

Haynes has even taught nursing at the same UW school that wouldn't have her as a student.

We need some of what they have. They never gave up and they never traded their humanity for a weapon. They let character carry them forward.

"We didn't get stuck," Terry says. "We kept moving when people were prejudiced against us."

When it comes to race relations, white people have a choice as to whether they will associate with and engage black people. Black people who want to survive and to thrive don't have a choice. We have to nurture relationships with white people. "Our goal is to reduce racism," Terry says. "We have to find a way to ease their tension."

Whenever I hear someone talk about black deficiencies, I think of women and men like these three nurses and I think of all of the obstacles put in their paths.

The system still operates. Obstacles are sometimes more subtle, but they are still there and that is why the Mary Mahoney nurses continue their work.

Jerry Large's column appears Sundays and Thursdays in the Scene section of The Seattle Times. You can reach him c/o The Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. Phone: 206-464-3346. Fax: 206-464-2261. E-mail: jlarge@seattletimes.com.

--------------------- Who was Mary Mahoney? ---------------------

Mary Mahoney graduated in 1879 from the nursing school of the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Only four of 18 women who started the rigorous course with Mahoney finished. Mahoney was respected as a skillful nurse and was an advocate of women's suffrage.

---------------------- 50th anniversary party ----------------------

The Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization will hold its 50th anniversary dinner and dance at 6 p.m. Saturday at The Atrium, 5701 Sixth Ave. S., Seattle. The event will benefit the organization's nursing scholarship fund. $50 donation. Call 206-543-0283 or 206-325-3944.