Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters

By Pia Marie Winters Jordan

A scrapbook can tell us much about a person’s life or one period of someone’s life: joys and sorrows, challenges and successes, problems and solutions. Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters focuses on a four-year period from 1942 to 1946 during World War II when up to twenty-eight women from the Army Nurse Corps staffed the station hospital on the base where the future Tuskegee Airmen were undergoing basic and advanced pilot training. These women were African Americans, graduates of nursing schools throughout the country, registered nurses, and lieutenants in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. They were military officers, and the pilot cadets saluted them.

Pia Marie Winters Jordan’s mother was one of those angels of mercy. Her mother, the former first lieutenant Louise Lomax, did not talk much about her ten years of military nursing, but nonetheless, her Tuskegee Army Flying School scrapbook told a story. Although Jordan may have seen this scrapbook when she was much younger, only when her mother became ill and had to be cared for in a nursing home, did Jordan, Louise’s only child, take a closer look, as she began organizing belongings in the process of closing her mother’s apartment. Jordan saw that the Tuskegee Airmen were not the only ones making Black history during World War II; nurses also had to fight gender as well as racial discrimination. Through her research, she found out more about them. It was time for their story to be told.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781588384898

Pia Marie Winters Jordan

PIA MARIE WINTERS JORDAN is the project director of the Tuskegee Army Nurses Project and continues to work on a multimedia documentary on the Army Nurse Corps members who served with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. Jordan retired in 2018 as an associate professor in the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Book preview

MEMORIES OF A TUSKEGEE AIRMEN NURSE AND HER MILITARY SISTERS

MEMORIES OF A

Tuskegee Airmen Nurse

AND HER MILITARY SISTERS

PIA MARIE WINTERS JORDAN

NEWSOUTH BOOKS

an imprint of

THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Athens

Frontispiece from the personal collection of Army nurse Louise Lomax Winters.

Published by NewSouth Books,

an imprint of the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

https://ugapress.org/imprints/newsouth-books/

© 2023 by Pia Marie Winters Jordan

All rights reserved

Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Set in 11/15 Miller Text Roman by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Most NewSouth/University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed in the United States of America

23 24 25 26 27 C 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jordan, Pia Marie Winters, 1956– author.

Title: Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen nurse and her military sisters / Pia Marie Winters Jordan.

Description: Athens : NewSouth Books, an imprint of The University of Georgia Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022056833 | ISBN 9781588384836 (hardback) | ISBN 9781588384898 (epub) | ISBN 9781588385031 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Winters, Louise Lomax, 1920–2011. | Station Hospital (Tuskegee Army Air Field, Ala.) | United States. Army Nurse Corps—Biography. | United States. Army. Air Forces—Nurses. | Military nursing—United States—History—20th century. | African American women—History—20th century. | Discrimination in employment—United States—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Participation, African American. | World War, 1939–1945—Women—United States. | Tuskegee Army Air Field (Ala.)

Classification: LCC D807.U62 .A256 2023 | DDC 940.54763761092 [B]—dc23/eng/20221129

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056833

One of the Lomax family’s favorite photos of Louise as she began her military career. (Photograph by U.S. Army Air Corps.)

For my mother,

Louise Virginia Lomax Winters,

to acknowledge her place in history and that of twenty-seven other African American nurses who served in the Army Nurse Corps as lieutenants during World War II at Tuskegee Army Air Field, Alabama. These women helped a group of pilot cadets stay well during their basic and advanced training. To the God my mother served as an extension of her faith and her desire to help others.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1. Life of a Black Southerner

CHAPTER 2. Education

CHAPTER 3. World War II

CHAPTER 4. Requirements of an ANC Nurse

CHAPTER 5. Military Discrimination

CHAPTER 6. Tuskegee Army Air Field

CHAPTER 7. Station Hospital Organization

CHAPTER 8. The First Nurses

CHAPTER 9. The Caped 13

CHAPTER 10. Local Discrimination

CHAPTER 11. Military Training

CHAPTER 12. Uniforms

CHAPTER 13. Beyond the Caped 13

CHAPTER 14. Duties of Nurses

CHAPTER 15. Patient Care

CHAPTER 16. Off-Duty Activities

CHAPTER 17. Romance

EPILOGUE

WORKS CITED

INDEX

PREFACE

In August of 2006 I made one of my regular visits to my eighty-six-year-old mother, who lived in an independent senior retirement community not far from where I lived.

This former military and civilian nurse was lying across her bed. She looked miserable. Her legs were swollen and she told me that she would not be able to see the facility’s doctor until the next day.

In the preceding weeks, I had noticed that my mother’s eyes looked strange, like pools of darkness. I was my mother’s only child. My mom had ended her nursing career as a psychiatric nurse years ago. She had always been great in counseling me and being my cheerleader, but she was not cheering now. Should I leave her in her apartment and see if this all went away after she saw the doctor the next day?

Whether right or wrong, I made a decision that changed both our lives forever: I took my mother to the local community hospital. I suspected that they would probably keep her overnight. My mom called one of her sisters and told her that I was taking her to the emergency room.

She was admitted. The next day, she started hallucinating. A few days later, she started having seizures, and they wouldn’t stop. After too many days, she was transferred to the university hospital where the seizures stopped almost immediately. The doctors told me they believed my mother had had several ministrokes.

My mother would never return to her senior apartment or drive her car ever again. She would spend the next few years in nursing homes—the last one a veterans’ home in Charlotte Hall, Maryland. She died on Friday, April 1, 2011, at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, almost five years after her strokes.

Before my mother died, I had closed her apartment and put some of her things in storage. That’s when I took a closer look at one of my mother’s scrapbooks. This particular one was blue with raised planes on the front cover. On the bottom of the cover it read, Tuskegee Army Flying School.

This is the scrapbook that nurses used to keep memorabilia about the Tuskegee Army Flying School. (From the personal collection of Army nurse Louise Lomax Winters.)

It appeared my mother had not been into scrapbooking. She had some pictures and other memorabilia just placed between the pages. I started to add her pictures and other memorabilia to the pages, to put the scrapbook into some kind of order.

I vaguely remembered having seen this book before when I was younger, but now I was seeing it with more mature eyes and a greater understanding of where my mother stood in history. Little did I know then that in a few years, I would start to document her role as well as the part more than two dozen other women played in the life of the Army Air Corps pilot trainees who became known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Where do you begin to give recognition to those who have played a part in the telling of a story where there has been little prior documentation? I start with my mother, Louise Virginia Lomax Winters, the initial inspiration for this project. Though my mother is now dead, she was one of the twenty-eight women who were in the Army Nurse Corps stationed at Tuskegee Army Air Field during part or all of their military career. In her scrapbook, she left pictures and other items that have been useful in the documentation of the role of these Angels of Mercy to all on the base at Tuskegee Army Air Field, which was the basic and advanced training ground of these pilot cadets.

I am also grateful to Professor Allissa Hosten Richardson, from what was then the Department of Communication Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, for her encouragement and for helping me lay the foundation for a multimedia documentary on the Tuskegee Army nurses (www.TuskegeeArmyNurses.info). Dr. Richardson is now on the faculty of the University of Southern California, and Morgan State University now houses a School of Global Journalism and Communication from which I retired in 2018.

Nurses Irma Cameron Pete Dryden and Abbie Voorhies Ross DeVerges, who both died in 2020, were most helpful in supplying firsthand information and pictures about their military careers at Tuskegee, site of this Army Air Corps base where the