The Naval Nurse Corps rejected Jenkins. “I remember the letter,” she said. “It said, ‘We regret to inform you that we are not accepting Negro nurses at this time.’” Consequently, Jenkins applied to the Army Nurse Corps while working at a hospital in New York City, and upon acceptance was sent to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, for basic training in October of 1944.

Jenkins breezed through the six weeks of drills and exercises, all supervised by white nurses. “It was beautiful there and the supervising nurses were all very nice. But I remember that they weren’t experienced in segregation,” she said. “They sent a photo of us in uniform to our hometown newspapers. They sent mine to the Daily Oklahoman, who returned it and told them to find a black paper.”

Although that experience was embarrassing, Jenkins had grown up in a segregated state and had already developed a thick skin. But things quickly soured when she completed basic training and left for Fort Huachuca. After a few weeks there, she was sent to Camp San Luis Obispo in California to care for Italian and Japanese POWs.

“I was surprised to have been sent to a prisoner of war camp,” she said. “Due to the integrated experience in New York, it was disappointing to go to POW camps, which segregated us.”

Jenkins tried to make the best of her experience at the camp, but she soon learned that she would never be happy as a black nurse in the army. She befriended a Jewish warrant officer from New York, who invited her to the officers’ club with him one evening. When they walked in together, a silence filled the room, and everyone stared at Jenkins and the officer, giving them nasty looks and purposely bumping them while passing by. “They would walk close to us and give us an evil eye. We were told to leave and never to come back. Apparently, my presence upset the white officers and their wives, even though I was an officer in the army too.” Her friend was shipped overseas shortly after the episode, and Jenkins was transferred to Camp Papago Park, a German POW camp in Arizona. “It definitely was punishment,” she said.14

Camp Papago Park was closer to Phoenix, but that didn’t change the isolating experience for black nurses like Jenkins, who found themselves routinely left out of army meetings and official social functions hosted by the white officers stationed there. At times the discrimination was so pervasive that some white officers would reprimand and insult black nurses in front of the German prisoners or, worse, allow the POWs to be disrespectful as well.