Tuskegee Airmen were not the only ones making Black history during World War II

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 28 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 Army Nurse Corps. They were military officers and the pilot cadets saluted them. My mother was one of those angels of mercy. My mom, the former First LT Louise Lomax, did not talk much about her ten years of military nursing, but her Tuskegee Army Flying School scrapbook told a story, nevertheless.

I may have seen this scrapbook when I was much younger. However, when my mother became ill and had to be cared for in a nursing home, I, her only child, had to close up her apartment. Among her things, I found the Tuskegee Army Flying School scrapbook. I saw that the Tuskegee Airmen were not the only ones making black history during World War II, but the nurses had to fight gender as well as racial discrimination. Through my research, I found out more about them. It was time for their story to be told.

About the Author

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.

NewSouth Books, a trade imprint of the University of Georgia Press, specializes in books on southern history and culture, particularly in the area of civil and human rights.