A00387 - Special Thank You to Fred Gregory, Class of 1962, re Nancy Leftenant-Colon, First Black Nurse in the United States Armed Forces
As is my custom, I send a special thank you to Fred Gregory for his comments concerning his friend Nancy Leftenant Colon. Fred, who knows a bit about aviation himself, got to know Nancy through her affiliation with the Tuskegee Airman, Inc. As noted in the New York Times Obituary, Nancy's brother, Samuel Leftenant, was a Tuskegee Airman. He was shot down over Austria in 1945 and his remains were never found. Nancy Leftenant was an active member with the Tuskegee Airman, Inc. and served as its president from 1989 to 1991, the only woman to have ever served in that capacity.
I find that I am drawn to unusual stories that appear in the New York Times Obituaries. This is one that recently caught my attention. Nancy Leftenant-Colon, 104, Dies; Army Nurse Broke a Color Barrier - The New York Times Maybe it will interest you as well.
Nancy Leftenant-Colon, 104, Dies; Army Nurse Broke a Color Barrier
After years of being barred from a segregated military, she became the first Black nurse in the regular U.S. armed forces. She was later an Air Force officer.
Nancy Leftenant-Colon, a granddaughter of enslaved people who in 1948 became the first Black nurse to serve in the regular U.S. armed forces, died on Jan. 8 in Amityville, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 104.
Her great-niece Gilda Leftenant confirmed the death, in a nursing facility.
Mrs. Leftenant-Colon joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in February 1948, several months before President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order desegregating the armed forces.
It was the culmination of a seven-year struggle. She had first tried to enlist in 1941, fresh out of nursing school, but was told the military did not accept Black women. She kept trying, and in 1945, with the flow of wounded servicemen from overseas combat near its peak, she was accepted into the reserves.
She was one of just 500 Black nurses to serve during World War II, out of a total of 50,000 — a result of government caps that kept thousands more Black women from serving.
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Mrs. Leftenant-Colon began her service at a hospital in Lowell, Mass. Though she served in a segregated unit, the hospital itself was integrated, part of what was called a military experiment in desegregation.
A year later, she transferred to Lockbourne Army Air Field in Columbus, Ohio, where she joined the nursing unit attached to the 332nd Fighter Group, part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
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She repeatedly faced hostile supervisors, who made it clear that she would be cashiered for the slightest infraction. “I made sure I was spit and polish all the time,” she told the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 2023.
Once, when a Black woman under her care went into labor prematurely, she and her patient were refused admission to a whites-only hospital in Columbus; she and a Black flight surgeon delivered the baby on their own. (The baby survived.)
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Later, while serving in Alabama, Mrs. Leftenant-Colon was not allowed to eat in whites-only restaurants, even in her uniform. When she was traveling through a Southern city, a white woman spit in her face.
She joined the U.S. Air Force in 1952, five years after it was created, in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a flight nurse.
She got her wish: Over the next 13 years, her postings included Germany, Japan and various installations around the United States. In 1954, she helped evacuate wounded French soldiers from Dien Bien Phu, an outpost under siege by Vietnamese Communist forces. She met Bob Hope when he was on a military-sponsored tour; another time, she met Marilyn Monroe.
“I got to travel the world for free,” she told Newsday.
Her commission as an officer in the Army Nurse Corps made international news.
“It was just part of the job,” she told Newsday in 1978. “But then there were articles in The New York Times, letters from as far away as England, and a newsreel.”
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Nancy Carol Leftenant, known since childhood as Lefty, was born on Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, S.C., a farming community near Charleston. Both her parents, James and Eunice (Middleton) Leftenant, were the children of parents born into slavery.
When Nancy was 3, the family — which eventually included 11 other children — moved to Amityville, where her father found a job as a laborer and her mother as a domestic worker.
She graduated from the Lincoln School for Nurses, in the Bronx, one of the first institutions of its type open to Black women. While repeatedly trying to enlist in the military, she worked at hospitals around New York City.
“I saw a picture of an Army nurse with her cape,” she told Newsday in 1997. “She looked so good — straight and tall. I wanted to do my part.”
She married Bayard Colon in 1960. He died in 1972. In addition to Gilda Leftenant, she is survived by a sister, Amy, as well as several other nieces and nephews.
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Mrs. Leftenant-Colon retired with the rank of major in 1965 and then returned to Amityville, where she worked as a nurse for her local high school.
She also became active in Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an association for veterans of that storied unit. From 1989 to 1991, she served as its president. She was the only woman ever to hold that position.
It was a particularly bittersweet assignment: Not only had she helped care for pilots in the unit, but one of her brothers, Samuel G. Leftenant, had been a Tuskegee Airman himself. He flew a P-51 Mustang, and in 1945 he was shot down over Austria. He was declared dead, though his remains were never recovered.
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