Mabel Keaton Staupers

Trailblazing nurse who dismantled racial barriers in American healthcare and military nursing.

Mabel Keaton Staupers (1890–1989) transformed American healthcare through her relentless campaign against racial segregation in nursing. As executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), she successfully integrated Black nurses into the Army and Navy Nurse Corps during WWII.

Her strategic 1945 Final Fight for Integration campaign pressured President Franklin Roosevelt to desegregate military nursing. This led to the integration of 2,000 Black nurses into the Armed Forces by 1948. Staupers' memoir No Time for Prejudice (1961) documented these struggles.

Key milestones:

• Founded Booker T. Washington Sanatorium (1920) – first Harlem facility treating Black TB patients
• Instrumental in merging NACGN with American Nurses Association (1951)
• Awarded Spingarn Medal by NAACP (1951)

Her legacy lives through the Mabel Staupers Scholarship supporting minority nursing students. The National Black Nurses Association calls her the architect of integration in military nursing.