Mabel Keaton Staupers
February 27, 1890 – November 29, 1989
Nurse and Activist
Mabel Keaton Staupers Led Battle (born February 27, 1890, Barbados, West Indies—died November 29, 1989, Washington, D.C., U.S.), Caribbean-American nurse and organization executive, most noted for her role in eliminating segregation in the Armed Forces Nurse Corps during World War II.to End Racial Prejudice in Nursing (1890 to 1989). Color was the greatest obstacle that had to be faced by every black aspiring to become a nurse in the early years. Like Mary Eliza Mahony, Mary Seacole, and Susie King Taylor, Mabel Staupers had to win over her skin color.
Mabel Staupers started nursing with noteworthy qualifications as she graduated with honors from the Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing in Washington D.C. in 1917. She became a private-duty nurse. In 1920 she joined black physicians Louis T. Wright and James Wilson to establish the Booker T. Washington Sanitarium, the first hospital in Harlem to treat black Americans with tuberculosis. Staupers served as the director of nursing of the Washington Sanitarium in 1920–21 and afterward accepted a working fellowship at the Henry Phipps Institute for Tuberculosis in Philadelphia.
Staupers became a surveyor of health needs before she was given a significant position as executive secretary for the Harlem Tuberculosis Committee, a Tuberculosis and Health Association unit in New York, in 1922. As a surveyor, she saw more clearly the wide disparity between black and white, with regards to both access to equitable healthcare services and treatment of black nurses in her profession’s organizations such as the American Nurses Association and National League of Nursing Education. When she became executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses for 12 years, Staupers built a more stable platform for black nurses in the profession by forming coalitions both in nursing and non-nursing communities.
Her efforts to bring an end to racial discrimination among nurses paid off when the government integrated black nursing in the U.S. Army Nurses Corps after Pearl Harbor. Staupers continued her fight to liberate colored nurses even after war, successfully gaining full membership for black nurses in the ANA, only 2 years after her resignation from the NACGN, which was also dissolved in 1949. Like Mahoney, Mabel Keaton Staupers also became an ANA Hall of Fame inductee, 7 years after her death on November 29, 1989.