On March 8, 1945, Phyllis Mae Dailey was inducted into the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Dailey was the first African American sworn in as a Navy nurse on 8 March 1945, following changes in Navy recruitment and admittance procedures that had previously excluded black women from joining the Nurse Corps.Although African-American nurses were not officially prohibited from entering the services after 1944, they were often “overlooked” in Army, Navy and Red Cross recruiting drives until early 1945.First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mable Keaton Staupers, executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, were among the most vocal critics of the implicit ban on African-American nurses.
