The Campaign for Action is pleased to recognize Black History Month with this powerful story about Black nurses recruited in the late 1920s to care for patients with active tuberculosis (TB), a painful and debilitating contagious disease that killed 5.6 million U.S. residents between 1900 and 1950.
The year was 1947, and the invitation to leave her childhood home in Detroit came from an admired aunt who worked as a nurse in New York City. Few teenagers pack up, leave their families, and head to a distant city to take a dangerous job, but Virginia Allen did just that. Though only 16 years old, Allen set out on a journey that would involve her in one of the 20th century’s major medical breakthroughs.