![]() After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, black nurses tried to enroll in the Red Cross, which was then the procurement agency for the Army Nurse Corps. Long before World War II, black nurses had been struggling to serve their country. They volunteered to serve to help wounded American soldiers, not the enemy. Army Nurse Corps, this assignment felt like a betrayal. To the African-American women who had endured the arduous process of being admitted into the U.S. Farms, plants, canneries, and other industries needed workers.įor black nurses, the assignment to take care of German POWs-to tend to Nazis-was deeply unwelcome. And, with millions of American men away serving in the military, there was a significant labor shortage in the United States. Prisoners of war, under rules set by the Geneva Convention, could be made to work for the detaining power. ![]() Some POWs remained until 1948.Īnd these POWs were kept busy. Though their presence is rarely discussed in American history, from 1942 to 1946, there were 371,683 German POWs scattered across the country in more than 600 camps. She was stationed there to look after German prisoners of war, who had been captured in Europe and Northern Africa and then sent across the Atlantic Ocean, for detainment in the United States during World War II.Įlinor, like many other black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps, was tasked with caring for German POWs-men who represented Hitler’s racist regime of white supremacy. Infuriated and humiliated, Elinor left Woolworth’s and returned to POW Camp Florence, in the Arizona desert. The only thing that counted at that moment-and in that place, where Jim Crow laws remained in force-was the waiter’s perception of a black army nurse as not standing on equal footing with his white customers. It probably never occurred to him that the woman in uniform was from a family that served its country, as Elinor’s father had in the First World War, as well as another relative who had been part of the Union Army during the Civil War. Army Nurse Corps, serving her country during wartime, and she had grown up in a predominantly white, upwardly mobile Boston suburb that didn’t subject her family to discrimination.īut the waiter who turned Elinor away wasn’t moved by her patriotism. She was, after all, an officer in the U.S. On the summer afternoon in 1944 that 23-year-old Elinor Powell walked into the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Phoenix, it never occurred to her that she would be refused service.
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