Photos from the Author, Maria Smilios
All photos and captions below are made available by the author, Maria Smilios, and may not be used without her consent.
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Missouria Louvinia Meadows-Walker: Originally from Clinton, South Carolina, a hard line Jim Crow town, she was the 8th of 12 children raised by a single mother who told her that education was the only way out. In the mornings, before school she would pick cotton and dream of becoming a nurse. In 1936, she graduated from Howard University and made her way to Sea View where she worked on the men’s ward for over two decades. She was a fierce advocate for equality and the integration of Black nurses into the American Nurses Association. |
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Edna & Americus: In 1900, Edna was born on the floor of a tar paper shack in Savannah, GA. Her mother was a laundress and her father was an enslaved man who walked off his plantion in 1899 and reinvented himself as a preacher. He taught his daughter to dream big, and she did, believing she could become a surgeon. After graduating from the Georgia infirmary, she couldn’t find a nursing job—at the time, Black nurses were only allowed to work in Black hospitals. For years she worked as a clerk, and then in 1932, she finally became working at Sea View as one of the few nurses selected for the surgical unit. She was also one of the first nurses to buy a house and begin to establish a new middle class Black community by Sea View that is still thriving today. She had a 25 year tenure at Sea View, and the name Black Angels came from the Christmas cards she received from her patients. Americus is Edna’s younger sister, but she always said, Americus was more like a daughter because they were 20 years apart. To come to Sea View, she made the difficult decision to leave Edna with her brother in Washington, DC as family were not allowed to live in the nurse’s dorms. Ten years later after Americus graduated High School, Edna brought her north. The two sisters lived together all their lives. Americus also went to nursing school and worked at Sea View. |
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Black Angel (photo of nurse giving pill): Black Angel at Sea View hospital giving patient medication (date unknown). |
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Black Nurses Sea View: A group of Black Angels of Sea View hospital. |
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Georgia Stone Hayden (newspaper article): Orphaned at a young age, Ms. Stone-Hayden was “adopted” by family friends and grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, described by her family as “a hot as hell place with a single traffic light.” She was determined to become a nurse and enrolled at Tuskegee where she graduated honors. She came to Sea View and worked in the adult wards, where she eventually became a supervisor. |
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Marjory Tucker Reed: In 1946, at 17, needing a job to support her family, she began working at Sea View as an aide and eventually went to nursing school and became a pediatric surgical nurse. About nursing, Marjory said, “I loved the nursing and taking care of the patients…I was never scared of getting the disease” Her most memorable experiences were working in the operating room where “they were taking out lungs.” She retired in 1988 after a 43 year career at Sea View.
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Virginia Allen (2023): Virginia Allen is one of the last living Black Angels. In 1947, at a mere 16 years old, with no nursing experience she came to work at Sea View hospital to help fill a dire nurse shortage set off by the war. She was hired to work in the children’s hospital where she cared for babies and little kids. |
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Mamie Daniels: (nee Blair) A native Staten Islander, Mamie contracted TB at 19 and arrived at Sea View gravely ill: “they said I was dying,” she told me in an interview. A year later, she had gotten a little bit better but was still very sick. In 1951, she got “lucky,” as she said, because she was chosen as one 92 patients to partake in the first human trials with the drug isoniazid that became the first drug to cure tuberculosis. Mamie passed away last year at 90 years old. |