Chapter 34

The Second Call

Summer 1946

As the streptomyces multiplied in fermentation tanks, the nurses at Sea View were busy closing wards. The shutdowns happened slowly. First, they closed one, then two, then three and four; by late spring 1946, the number of shuttered wards had reached ten. To an outsider, the empty spaces, with their neatly made beds and inactivity, looked like hope. But to the nurses, whose patient load had doubled, increasing from ten patients to twenty, the image was jarring, a stark reminder of the worsening nurse shortage.

As the summer moved on, talk among the nurses revolved around the crisis. Almost daily, articles flaunting alarming statistics and warnings rolled off the presses: in July, The New York Times reported, “The acute shortage of nurses has kept at least 1,235 beds in public and voluntary hospitals in New York City empty.” Some paragraphs later, the reporter claimed, there was “no immediate solution to the problem,” adding, “There are 6,000 vacancies on the nursing staffs of hospitals.”

The mayor gave more shocking figures, breaking down the collective numbers: there were 2,904 nurses to care for 17,200 patients, and the list of hospitals shuttering wards kept growing. Throughout the five boroughs, the triage areas swelled, but upstairs on the floors, thousands of beds remained unoccupied: 300 at Welfare Island, 400 at Manhattan Hospital, and close to 200 at Sea View. In Brooklyn, two hospitals shut down their maternity wards, and Kings County Hospital’s new psychiatric wing, housing 386 beds, simply could not open. And on Long Island, local reports said it took twenty-five to thirty calls to find a single nurse for an emergency.

Reasons for the shortage varied: overwork, poor pay, and health concerns. But many nurses returning from the war wanted better opportunities. Initially, the health and hospital administrators took the staff losses in stride, believing the situation would right itself. However, a year after the war, the shortage was growing bigger, and the nurses who kept working were now complicating the situation by demanding change. They wanted a voice in framing policies, social security benefits, and unemployment insurance; shorter hours, more pay, and better working conditions, including less arduous patient loads. If their needs weren’t met, they, too, would leave.

The NAACP embraced the moment and joined in amplifying the voices of Black nurses: it was finally time, they said, for the American Nurses Association to raze its racial barriers and admit Black nurses. But currently, the ANA wasn’t concerned with crossing the color line; it was busy trying to save its profession from complete collapse. Even doctors, usually reticent to involve themselves in nursing issues, made a public declaration: “Doctors and nurses are members of the same family,” and the shortage had “greatly hampered the entire medical profession.”

But not everyone empathized with the nurses’ plight.

The superintendent of Lenox Hill Hospital, Dr. John H. Hayes, blamed Black nurses for the mass exodus. City nurses, Hayes believed, were already properly paid, and they enjoyed the same leisure hours and benefits that other professionals enjoyed. As he saw it, the nursing shortage was a result of a greedy, mostly Black minority intent on convincing their colleagues that nurses were being exploited.

Solving the crisis, Hayes said, was simple: hospitals should hire and train nurses who were prepared to “live a life of service.” And to him, Black nurses were not and never would be committed to such a life. His remarks were ignorant and obscene, and would have been laughable under different circumstances, especially when discussing Sea View.

Tuberculosis care had never been a lure for white nurses, and in recent years, the working conditions had become abysmal, adding to the hardship of hiring and keeping even Black staff. One look around the decades-old sanatorium told a grim story of what Edna and her colleges endured every day: broken beds, rodents, outdated elevators that were small and slow, and too many patients.

At the children’s hospital, where many of Edna’s friends worked, things were worse: nurses were overseeing two wards instead of one, for a total of twenty-five to thirty beds. For an adult ward, the undertaking was overwhelming, but in pediatrics, the task was Herculean. The nurses’ log became a book rife with entries that told of children whose pain had turned to fury.

“Alfonso found sitting on the crib, legs dangling on the outside. When restraint was put on him kicked and screamed, tore linen + threw everything off crib mattress on floor.”

Bobby Kelly likes “to throw feces around.”

Lionel Dunlap “went into temper tantrum” and “spit at nurses, threw all bed clothing on floor, kicked and screamed.”

Edna Zebrowski was a “mess,” and orders were “to keep restraints on arms and give her some phenobarbital.”

Line after line told of so many unhappy children, little beings whose days passed in varied stages of outrage and distress, screaming for “this toy” or “that thing” or “no needle” or “hugs,” or just “NO.” More nurses might have avoided these situations and ameliorated some of their suffering, but at the moment, hiring them was a moot point.

Recently, the secretary of the New York City Nursing Council had crunched its numbers: Nursing schools needed six hundred more students by registration day, September 15. Anything less, the secretary warned, and the nursing profession would become “totally disintegrated.”

These words, this possibility, taunted Edna, Missouria, Janie, and the other Black nurses working at Sea View, mocking them, hemming them in, threatening everything they had fought for: their jobs, their homes, their careers, their families. How sad that it might all end this way.

In Harlem, however, the Black papers didn’t see an ending; they saw a watershed moment, a new beginning for Black nurses: “Every negro nurse who wants to work has a job,” The New York Age declared. And with all city hospitals hiring Black nurses, “negro young women” had new opportunities. Rise, the paper suggested, and own this moment.

And that is what Edna and Missouria, Janie and Clemmie, and so many others did.

They reasoned: if the white nurses refused to work at Sea View, as they had twenty years earlier, then once again, Black nurses would step in and fill the ranks. All of them had friends and family who needed jobs. Between them, they could recruit dozens of employees—if not nurses, then aides, those often overlooked assistants so critical for keeping the wards running. Missouria thought of her niece and nephew, Teresa and Henry, who needed work. They would make excellent aides. Janie also had a relative who wanted a job; she, too, grabbed an application. Clemmie wrote to unemployed friends in Savannah. In no time, word spread across Staten Island, and Marjorie Tucker Reed, an eighteen-year-old single mother, came. It moved down the eastern seaboard and once again into the southern states: Sea View was hiring and offering potential nurses free schooling and housing and on-the-job training.

In August, Edna dialed her niece in Detroit, Virginia Allen, the precocious little girl who had followed her around at Amy’s funeral asking about white uniforms and nurses’ caps.

“Would you like a job?” she asked.