Mabel Keaton Staupers (1890–1989), originally from Barbados, became a U.S. citizen in 1917 and studied nursing at Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing in Washington, D.C. Like Scales, a major focus of her early career was on battling tuberculosis, which had hit the Black community especially hard. She helped establish the inpatient tuberculosis clinic at the Booker T. Washington Sanatorium and later became executive secretary of the Harlem Tuberculosis Committee.
Staupers also worked hard to improve the status of African-American nurses. During World War II, she led the campaign to integrate Black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps, meeting with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to explain the folly of the president’s plan to draft white nurses while Black nurses were either unemployed or allowed to treat only POWs and Black soldiers. Thanks to that effort, President Franklin Roosevelt ended racial enlistment restrictions for Army nurses in 1945.
Staupers became president of the NACGN in 1949 and orchestrated the organization’s merger with the ANA two years later. In 1961, she published a memoir, “No Time for Prejudice: A Story of the Integration of Negroes in Nursing in the United States.”