In the hospital ward, one German POW told an African American nurse that he hated “niggers.” The nurse reported the incident to the commanding officer of Camp Papago Park with an assumption that the German POW would be sent back to his barracks and punished. But later that day she found out that nothing had happened to him. The nurse wrote to Mabel Staupers detailing the injustice. The German POW was able to plead his case to Colonel Moore, a Texan described in the letter as “the officer who refused to shake hands with the new Negro doctors when Huachuca was first opened.” Once Moore heard the POW’s side of things, the prisoner was allowed to stay put without a reprimand. “That is the worst insult an army officer should ever have to take,” wrote the nurse. “I think it is insult enough to be out here taking care of them when we volunteered to come into the army to nurse military personnel. . . . It is sickening to see the treatment given to these prisoners when our own men are actually suffering from lack of food and good treatment. All of this is making us very bitter.”15

Whoever was in charge of a given camp would set the tone for racial tolerance. If the most powerful person was a staunch segregationist, then the environment for African Americans would be oppressive. At Camp Florence, there had been commanding officers who allowed black nurses to eat in the same dining area as white officers, and there were other COs who did not want blacks and whites eating together at all, which was the way it was when Elinor arrived. But no matter how many letters Mabel Staupers received from nurses pleading for relief, the military ignored them.

Oneida Miller Stuart’s experience in the army only reinforced how indefensible the conditions remained for many black nurses, even toward the end of the war. Stuart was called “nigger” habitually. A black nurse who entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1945, Stuart was sent to Nichols Army Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, where large numbers of wounded Allied men were returning from battle. There, both black and white soldiers were patients, as well as German POWs. Naturally, the black nurses overwhelmingly tended to the African American enlisted men and German prisoners, but depending on demand, they found themselves caring for white American soldiers too. “We were called ‘nigger’ many a times,” said Miller. “But you just kept on going. They’d say, ‘Nigger don’t you put your hands on me.’ It would really get to me sometimes.”

On her days off, Stuart would go into Louisville to look at dresses in various retail shops, but she couldn’t try anything on. Even as a member of the military, she, as a black woman, was only allowed to hold the piece up to herself in the mirror.16