On January 4, 1945, an emergency meeting about army nurses took place at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. About three hundred citizens and nurses attended to hear Major General Norman T. Kirk, the U.S. Army surgeon general at the time, make a highly anticipated announcement that a conscription of nurses was under serious consideration given the large number of American soldiers returning home wounded. In the month of December alone, thirty thousand injured Americans came back from war, and he expected another thirty thousand soon after. He calculated that the United States Nurse Corps, which had forty thousand nurses, needed an additional ten thousand nurses immediately, and a draft would be required if volunteer nurses didn’t step forward.4

Mabel Staupers, who attended the meeting, was outraged by General Kirk’s blatant disregard for the talented and willing black nurses who wanted to serve but were passed over. If nurses were in such demand, she asked him, then why did the United States Army Nurse Corps have only three hundred black nurses in its ranks although nine thousand had signed up? And even more volunteers would have stepped forward had word not begun to spread about the poor treatment of black nurses in the army. Kirk responded that the number of black nurses was in proportion to the number of black troops serving in the army, which wasn’t true. The fact was black nurses were not called to serve in the same proportion as white nurses. The military was discriminating against black nurses and everyone knew it.5

Kirk also reportedly said that the army didn’t mix black nurses with white ones. That was another false statement. In 1944 Staupers visited Camp Livingston in Louisiana, where white and black nurses were treating patients of all races because the demand for medical care was so great. The lines of segregation were secondary to the needs of wounded men, as Staupers noted, and there was no reason that practice couldn’t be implemented at other military posts throughout the United States.

His erroneous statement makes clear that either General Kirk did not have a grasp on the working lives of black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps or he didn’t know what to do about it or didn’t want to do anything about it. His dismissive tone confirmed the obvious—no one in the military wanted black nurses to serve or had thoughtfully considered how they were being utilized.

After the meeting, in a joint statement, Staupers and the National Nursing Council for War Service pointed out that General Kirk was wrong about numerous facts: the 330 black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps accounted for far less than one-tenth the number of Negro soldiers in the army, which was the accepted ratio of nurses to soldiers.