🌟 Join us for a day of celebration and education at the African American Arts and History Showcase on February 8th, 2025 at the prestigious Killeen Civic and Conference Center! 🎨
IMPAC OUTREACH
PRESENTS
AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTS & HISTORY SHOWCASE
This year’s event promises to be unforgettable, with our 2025 Heritage Legacy Curators ensuring a truly enriching experience for all attendees. ✨
Secure your tickets now on https://2025AAAHS.eventbrite.com or by visiting impacoutreach.org. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to celebrate African American arts and history. See you there!
Dr. Virginia Allen
Black Angels
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.
Allen is one of the last living Black Angels—a name patients gave the Black nurses recruited to staff Staten Island’s Sea View Hospital at the end of the 1920s. They cared for patients with active tuberculosis (TB), a painful and debilitating contagious disease that killed 5.6 million U.S. residents between 1900 and 1950. In New York City alone, the disease killed 10,000 people annually before the city opened a sanatorium on Staten Island, where, in those days, TB patients would find sunlight, fresh air, and plenty of rest—the standard treatment for the disease at the time.