Frances Reed Elliott

Frances Reed Elliott, newspaper clipping 1918

Frances Reed Elliott also Frances Elliott Davis (born April 28, 1882 near Shelby (North Carolina) , † May 2, 1965 in Mount Clemens , Michigan ) was the first African American nurse to become a member of the American Red Cross . She was accepted on July 2, 1918 in the American Red Cross Nursing Service (Sisterhood of the American Red Cross). Elliott was a nursing teacher and organizer in various institutions. She struggled African American sisters for equality First World War . With the first nursing school she organized for blacks in Michigan, she made it possible for Afro-American women resident there to gain access to nursing education. She worked in public health and cared for the poor and workers during the United States ' economic crisis .

Family background

Elliott was born on April 28, 1882, about nine miles from Shelby, North Carolina . Her mother, Emma Elliott, was of the Elliott family, a very respected and respected white family; her father Edward Donoho Elliott was a descendant of the first settlers in North Carolina and a Methodist preacher. Frances Elliott's father Darryl (last name unknown) was the son of a former Afro-American slave of the Elliott family and a Cherokee and was a sharecropper (German leaseholder). It is not entirely clear when the affair between the white planter's daughter and the African-American Cherokee began; it is possible that they grew up together on the Hinton's Creek family 's plantation .

The state laws of the time prohibited marriage or cohabitation of blacks and whites. When the pregnancy of Elliott's mother became known, her father Darryl fled from a legitimate fear of being lynched and left North Carolina. Her mother also left the state and settled in Tennessee. In her will, she left her daughter with her share of the family's estates. Emma Elliott died when her daughter was five years old. All of the extended family refused to take in the black child, and Frances Elliott came under state custody.

Childhood and youth

Elliott lived in five different foster families until she was 17 . Her schooling and education were sporadic at best, but thanks to the Dorsett African-American foster family, Elliott made an effort to improve her reading and writing skills so that one day she could become a nurse. The Dorsett family eventually organized a foster home with a minister in Raleigh, North Carolina , to give them access to better schools. The preacher Withrow, however, was mostly interested in the money Elliott brought him from her property, and took her from school so that she could also go to work.

When Elliott was working as a nanny for the white Reed family, they took care of her. They sent Elliott to boarding school in Knoxville, Tennessee so she could escape the Withrow family, and provided her with school fees, clothes, and everything she needed for eight years. Elliott took the name Reed out of gratitude. After graduating from historic African-American Knoxville College , the Reed family pleaded for teacher training, but Elliott wanted to get her wish to work as a nurse. She first worked as a teacher in Henderson (North Carolina) to earn enough money for the nursing school herself. Elliott left the South in 1910 and moved to Washington, DC

Education and early career

Nurses at Freedmen's Hospital

Elliott began her training as a nurse in 1910 at Freedmen's Hospital Training School for Nurses , a nursing school that trained African American nurses. At that time there were two different final exams that were held separately according to skin color. The exams for white sisters were considered the more demanding and had a higher reputation. Elliott successfully requested that she be allowed to take the White Nurse exam, becoming the first black nurse to graduate in the District of Columbia .

After graduating, Elliott took a few jobs as a private nurse and then moved to the African American Provident Hospital in Baltimore , Maryland , as a head nurse. In addition to her work there, she attended additional courses at Columbia University . Elliott wanted to get involved and became interested in the work of the American Red Cross (ARC). There, however, the policy of racial discrimination and segregation still applied , so that their efforts to gain acceptance initially failed.

At that time, many discriminatory practices against black people were common in the healthcare sector. For example, African American nurses and patients were only addressed by their first names, while they were expected to address the white nurses and other staff by their nurse surname , miss, or misses . In addition, it was made difficult for the black sisters to join the professional associations and the Red Cross, which required training in a hospital with over 50 beds as a prerequisite for joining. For most of the nurses, almost all of whom were educated at Freedman's Hospital, a small segregated hospital, this condition made admission almost impossible.

American Red Cross

Although Elliott was initially turned down at the ARK because of her skin color, she persevered. In the end, due to her high academic level, reason was found to reject Elliott. In the summer of 1916 she was finally accepted into the nursing program for rural communities (English rural nursing program ) and sent to Columbia University for further training. A year later she was delegated to Jackson, Tennessee for her first assignment for the ARC. She was officially admitted to the ARK on July 2, 1918 and then became the first African-American nurse to become a member of the ARK Nursing Service. As a result, around 90 black nurses were accepted into the Red Cross by the end of the war.

During the First World War , Elliott volunteered with the US Army Nurse Corps . Their white colleagues at the ARK all automatically received their Red Cross badges, which allowed them to switch to the Corps. However, Elliot's badge was marked "1A" and identified her as the first African American sister and she was prohibited from changing. Elliott did not surrender and contributed to the war effort by providing nursing care to soldiers and their families in Chattanooga, Tennessee . However, she was never allowed to participate in overseas missions. The system of labeling black nurses remained in use until 1949, however, the Nurse Corps admission policy was changed in 1941 and the first black nurse Della H. Raney was accepted into the corps.

Spanish flu

Elliott was returning to her ward in Jackson when the Spanish flu broke out in the United States in September 1918 . The flu spread quickly and affected soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of people fell ill and the flu created a national health crisis for which the country was poorly prepared. The First World War came to an end and the nurses were now fighting the flu.

When the flu hit Jackson, Elliott was looking for ways to help her community. At a time when only wealthy Americans owned and could drive a car, she took driving lessons and began driving door-to-door to help affected families, black and white. She fell seriously ill with the flu in the winter of 1918/1919 and retained a heart defect.

Career after 1920

Eleanor Roosevelt, Elliot Supporter, Attends Black Nursing School (1936)

In the early 1920s, Elliott took on various roles before she was hired in 1927 with assistance from the ARK at the Detroit Public Health Department . There she went to great lengths to support the poorest in Detroit and eventually moved with her husband William Davis to a shabby neighborhood of Detroit to be closer to the needy. In 1929 she received a Rosenwald Fund scholarship for a bachelor's degree at Columbia University Teachers College. However, her health was too bad to accept. She was a major contributor to the ARC as the director of nursing education in Tuskegee, Alabama and the organizer of the first nursing school for African American nurses in Michigan at Dunbar Hospital in Detroit. Elliott led prenatal stations, maternity wards and children's hospitals in Detroit and managed a grocery store in the Ford Motor Company to the workers during the economic crisis to be supplied with food.

In the 1940s, Elliott set up a children's ward at the Carver School. She turned to then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for support and, to Elliott's great surprise, she personally participated in the project and helped with the planning and financing of the facility. Afterward, Elliott returned to the nursing profession at age 62, working as a nurse at nearby Eloise Hospital in Wayne County .

End of career and death

At 69, Elliott finally retired. In addition to membership of the Red Cross, she was also a member of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses , the National Organization of Public Health Nursing, the League of Nursing Education and the American Nurses Association . The ARK planned a ceremony to honor Elliott for her long career, merit, and perseverance in overcoming racial barriers. Elliott died of a heart attack nine days before the event on May 2, 1965 in Mount Clemens, Michigan. She was buried in Rosehill Cemetery in Eaton Rapids , Michigan.

In 2019, Elliott was honored by the ARK as part of Black History Month .

literature

• Jessica A. Bandel: World War I Nurse Frances Reed Elliott Davis. In: North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. August 3, 2017, accessed June 30, 2020.
• Jean Maddern Pitrone: Trailblazer: Negro nurse in the American Red Cross . Harcourt 1969, ISBN 978-0152896508 (English).
• Phoebe Ann Pollitt: African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia. McFarland 2016, ISBN 978-0786479658 (English).
• Dalyce Newby: Davis, Frances Elliott . In: American National Biography Online, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-19-860669-7 (English).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Jessica A. Bandel: World War I Nurse Frances Reed Elliott Davis at North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources , published August 3, 2017 (English), accessed June 23, 2020
2. ↑ Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan, John M. Parman: Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching in Social Science History Volume 42, Issue 4, 2018 (English) pp. 635–675
3. ↑ ^{a b} Phoebe Ann Pollitt: African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia McFarland, 2016, ISBN 978-0786479658 (English) p. 117
4. ↑ ^{a b} Phoebe Ann Pollitt: African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia McFarland, 2016, ISBN 978-0786479658 (English) p. 118
5. ↑ Pitrone, Jean Maddern. Trail blazer; Negro nurse in the American Red Cross . New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. 191 p.
6. ^ Judith Walzer Leavitt: Women and Health in America: Historical Readings University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, ISBN 978-02991-5964-1 (English) pp. 475-487
7. ↑ American Red Cross: Significant Dates Section 1910–1929 (English), accessed June 23, 2020
8. ↑ American Nurse: Three Red Cross Women Who Persevered: African American History Month of February 14, 2017 (English) accessed on July 1, 2020
9. ↑ National Underground Railroad Freedom Center: Heroes of the American Red Cross (English) accessed June 23, 2020
10. ^ National Negro Health News: Negro Nurses , 1944, Volume 12, Issue 2, p. 7
11. ↑ ^{a b} American Red Cross: Red Cross Celebrates African American History Month from February 1, 2019 (English) accessed on June 23, 2020
12. ↑ Phoebe Ann Pollitt: African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia McFarland, 2016, ISBN 978-0786479658 (English) p. 119
13. ^ Find a Grave: Frances Elliott Davis

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