Nancy Leftenant-Colon persevered to become first Black nurse in regular Army, overcoming vile actions by some
As a young woman, Nancy Leftenant-Colon was walking through a neighborhood in the South when a white passerby spit in her face.
That Leftenant-Colon was in a U.S. Army uniform was irrelevant. That she was an officer was irrelevant. That she was serving her country at time of war was irrelevant, too.
This was in the 1940s, one of Leftenant-Colon's experiences as a Black woman.
But it was hardly enough to stop Leftenant-Colon. Not from continuing onward. Not from pursuing — and achieving — her personal and professional goals.
“My folks did very well in teaching us,” Leftenant-Colon said last week, sitting in her living room at the Dominican Village senior living community in North Amityville, explaining why she simply ignored the vile offense. “My dad would always say, ‘Treat people the way you would like to be treated’ … We would have to decide what we wanted to do in life and had to go for it. Nobody gave us anything.
“We had to work to accomplish this.”
Now 102, Nancy Leftenant-Colon, who later switched from the Army to the newly formed U.S. Air Force, attaining the rank of major, was the first Black nurse to be commissioned into the regular U.S. Army Nursing Corps — after President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, mandating the desegregation of the military.
She received the Congressional Gold Medal from President George W. Bush, and has been honored by the Congressional Black Caucus, President Bill Clinton, and Long Island officials. Leftenant-Colon also remains the only woman ever elected national president of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization tasked with preserving the legacy of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
Born Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, South Carolina, just outside of Charleston, Leftenant-Colon was one of 12 children — six boys, six girls — born to James and Eunice Leftenant.
Her father and mother were the children of slaves.
The Leftenants understood the value of education, and they knew the odds of their children getting a good one in the Jim Crow South was between slim and none. So, when Nancy Leftenant was 3, the family moved north to Amityville. That move would change their lives.
Once in Amityville, James Leftenant built a home. Leftenant-Colon's sister Amy still lives in that house.
James Leftenant also built what would become a hugely successful trash-hauling business in Amityville despite being Black in a then-predominantly white village.
All 12 of the Leftenant children graduated from Amityville High School.
Five of the six boys served in segregated military units in World War II. In addition to Nancy Leftenant-Colon, two of her sisters — Joan and Mary — also became military nurses.
One brother, 2nd Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, was a Tuskegee Airman. He was lost in combat — first, listed as missing in action; later, killed in action — when his P-51 Mustang fighter plane went down while escorting white B-17 bomber crews on a mission over Austria on April 12, 1945, weeks before the end of World War II in Europe. Samuel Leftenant was posthumously awarded the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. Although his body was never recovered, he was given a full military funeral that included a horse-drawn cart carrying a flag-draped coffin at Arlington National Cemetery in 2016.
His name is listed among those on the fabled “Tablet of the Missing” in Florence, Italy.
“It’s remarkable,” longtime friend Sharon M. Hunter Nikolaus, a former U.S. Air Force squadron commander who met Leftenant-Colon through Tuskegee Airmen Inc., said of her friend and the Leftenant family. “What an amazing family … I wish I could have met the parents.”
“She was a pioneer,” Sandra Kress Davis, president of the Museum of Nursing at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, said of Leftenant-Colon. “God bless her, because she was really something, absolutely something, with what she accomplished.”
There were other Black nurses before Leftenant-Colon.
Harriet Tubman, who, as a famed conductor on the Underground Railroad helped Black slaves escape to the free states and Canada, was a nurse during the Civil War, tending to Black soldiers. According to the National Women’s History Museum, Mary Eliza Mahoney, born in Massachusetts in 1845 to former slaves, became the first Black person to graduate from an American nursing school. That was in 1879.
Adah Belle Thomas was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses — and fought for Blacks to serve as American Red Cross nurses in World War I, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Della H. Raney was the first Black nurse to report for duty in World War II.
But in becoming the first commissioned Black nurse to serve in a desegregated U.S. Army, Leftenant-Colon became the first Black nurse to work in — and oversee — a desegregated ward, treating military personnel of all ethnicities and races; she was in charge of white nurses, not only those who were Black. That came after years of hard work that included her graduation from the Lincoln School of Nursing in the Bronx in 1941, her work as an Army Nurse Corps reservist in 1945 and her assignment to Lowell General Hospital at Fort Devers, Massachusetts, where, as a second lieutenant, she treated World War II wounded in a segregated ward.
It was a testimony to her perseverance. Even after that white passerby spat in her face.
As always, the 5-foor-2 Leftenant-Colon, known as Lefty, turned negative into positive, obstacle into advantage.
Informed when she was younger that she couldn't have children, she said: "I decided then every child was mine. There were no ifs, ands or buts." Left widowed when her husband, Air Force reservist Capt. Bayard K. Colon, suffered a heart attack in 1972, she battled on through.
That same mentality, she said, was behind her successful military career.
“I made sure I was spit and polish all the time,” Leftenant-Colon said, noting she and her fellow Black nurses bore the brunt of all sorts of backlash — including from “snotty-nosed” white first and second lieutenants who she said often asked her: “How could you be stationed here?” The inference being she couldn’t possibly be qualified — due to the color of her skin.
“I was in charge of my wards,” she said. “And I made sure it was known I was in charge of my wards … We never failed an inspection, never.”
As a flight nurse with the 6481st Medical Evacuation Group based in Tachikawa, Japan, she flew aboard C-46, C-47, C-54 and C-124 transport planes and set up hospital wards in war zones during the Korean War. In addition to Japan, she also served in Germany, as well as in Alabama, Alaska, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Ohio.
In 1954, she was on the first medical flight to evacuate French Legionnaires from the defeated French outpost in Dien Bien Phu Province in Vietnam. Ultimately, she helped evacuate more than 100 members of the French Expeditionary Force within earshot of the shooting.
During her career, she also met Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe, and even an Arab sheikh.
“I got to travel the world for free,” was how the still spry Leftenant-Colon explained it last week.
Following her retirement in 1965, Leftenant-Colon returned to Long Island and from 1971 to 1984 was the school nurse at Amityville High School.
In 1995, Leftenant-Colon was inducted into the Long Island Air and Space Hall of Fame. In 2018, the new library media center at Amityville High was named in her honor.
Although the Amityville Historical Society said it was featuring Leftenant-Colon and her family in the museum’s Black History Month celebration, even today few know their story.
“It’s important,” Kress Davis of the nursing museum said of Leftenant-Colon, “that this history be a part of what nurses learn today, because they have to realize everything they’re doing today, everything they’re able to do, is a result of nurses like this who came before.”
As Hunter Nikolaus, the longtime friend who still calls Leftenant-Colon “Dr. Nancy," said: “It’s a family that gave everything they had to this country — and where’s their thanks? As a Black woman I would’ve never gotten a commission in the Air Force had someone like Dr. Nancy not opened that door. I would not have had the career I had in the military …
"Our young people today have no idea — or, even an understanding — of what this woman, of what her family, went through. I think had Dr. Nancy and her family been white, from a national perspective, I think it would’ve been different. I think their story would be national news, not just local news. That’s what I think,” Nikolaus added.
As a young woman, Nancy Leftenant-Colon was walking through a neighborhood in the South when a white passerby spit in her face.
That Leftenant-Colon was in a U.S. Army uniform was irrelevant. That she was an officer was irrelevant. That she was serving her country at time of war was irrelevant, too.
This was in the 1940s, one of Leftenant-Colon's experiences as a Black woman.
But it was hardly enough to stop Leftenant-Colon. Not from continuing onward. Not from pursuing — and achieving — her personal and professional goals.
WHAT TO KNOW
A 1941 graduate of the Lincoln School of Nursing in the Bronx, Nancy Leftenant-Colon is the first Black woman to be commissioned into the regular U.S. Army Nurse Corps.
She is the only woman ever elected national president of Tuskegee Airmen Inc.
The Amityville High School library media center was named in honor of Leftenant-Colon in 2018.
“My folks did very well in teaching us,” Leftenant-Colon said last week, sitting in her living room at the Dominican Village senior living community in North Amityville, explaining why she simply ignored the vile offense. “My dad would always say, ‘Treat people the way you would like to be treated’ … We would have to decide what we wanted to do in life and had to go for it. Nobody gave us anything.
“We had to work to accomplish this.”
Nancy Leftenant-Colon served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and Air Force in the 1940s and 1950s. Credit: Courtesy Nancy Leftenant-Colon
Now 102, Nancy Leftenant-Colon, who later switched from the Army to the newly formed U.S. Air Force, attaining the rank of major, was the first Black nurse to be commissioned into the regular U.S. Army Nursing Corps — after President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, mandating the desegregation of the military.
Congressional Gold Medal
She received the Congressional Gold Medal from President George W. Bush, and has been honored by the Congressional Black Caucus, President Bill Clinton, and Long Island officials. Leftenant-Colon also remains the only woman ever elected national president of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization tasked with preserving the legacy of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
Born Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, South Carolina, just outside of Charleston, Leftenant-Colon was one of 12 children — six boys, six girls — born to James and Eunice Leftenant.
Her father and mother were the children of slaves.
The Leftenants understood the value of education, and they knew the odds of their children getting a good one in the Jim Crow South was between slim and none. So, when Nancy Leftenant was 3, the family moved north to Amityville. That move would change their lives.
Once in Amityville, James Leftenant built a home. Leftenant-Colon's sister Amy still lives in that house.
A portrait of Second Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, a Tuskegee Airman who was killed in action during World War II, is viewed by his sisters Mary Leftenant, left, and Nancy Leftenant- Colon at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale on Feb. 15, 2007. Credit: Newsday Staff/DICK YARWOOD
James Leftenant also built what would become a hugely successful trash-hauling business in Amityville despite being Black in a then-predominantly white village.
Amityville High School grads
All 12 of the Leftenant children graduated from Amityville High School.
Five of the six boys served in segregated military units in World War II. In addition to Nancy Leftenant-Colon, two of her sisters — Joan and Mary — also became military nurses.
One brother, 2nd Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, was a Tuskegee Airman. He was lost in combat — first, listed as missing in action; later, killed in action — when his P-51 Mustang fighter plane went down while escorting white B-17 bomber crews on a mission over Austria on April 12, 1945, weeks before the end of World War II in Europe. Samuel Leftenant was posthumously awarded the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. Although his body was never recovered, he was given a full military funeral that included a horse-drawn cart carrying a flag-draped coffin at Arlington National Cemetery in 2016.
His name is listed among those on the fabled “Tablet of the Missing” in Florence, Italy.
“It’s remarkable,” longtime friend Sharon M. Hunter Nikolaus, a former U.S. Air Force squadron commander who met Leftenant-Colon through Tuskegee Airmen Inc., said of her friend and the Leftenant family. “What an amazing family … I wish I could have met the parents.”
“She was a pioneer,” Sandra Kress Davis, president of the Museum of Nursing at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, said of Leftenant-Colon. “God bless her, because she was really something, absolutely something, with what she accomplished.”
There were other Black nurses before Leftenant-Colon.
Harriet Tubman, who, as a famed conductor on the Underground Railroad helped Black slaves escape to the free states and Canada, was a nurse during the Civil War, tending to Black soldiers. According to the National Women’s History Museum, Mary Eliza Mahoney, born in Massachusetts in 1845 to former slaves, became the first Black person to graduate from an American nursing school. That was in 1879.
Adah Belle Thomas was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses — and fought for Blacks to serve as American Red Cross nurses in World War I, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Della H. Raney was the first Black nurse to report for duty in World War II.
Jerry Burton, president of the East Coast Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen, left, talks with Nancy Leftenant-Colon, center, during a gathering that followed a memorial service for Nancy's brother Second Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, on Jan. 14, 2016. Her brother was killed in action in Europe during World War II. Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Im/The Washington Post
Oversaw desegregated ward
But in becoming the first commissioned Black nurse to serve in a desegregated U.S. Army, Leftenant-Colon became the first Black nurse to work in — and oversee — a desegregated ward, treating military personnel of all ethnicities and races; she was in charge of white nurses, not only those who were Black. That came after years of hard work that included her graduation from the Lincoln School of Nursing in the Bronx in 1941, her work as an Army Nurse Corps reservist in 1945 and her assignment to Lowell General Hospital at Fort Devers, Massachusetts, where, as a second lieutenant, she treated World War II wounded in a segregated ward.
It was a testimony to her perseverance. Even after that white passerby spat in her face.
As always, the 5-foor-2 Leftenant-Colon, known as Lefty, turned negative into positive, obstacle into advantage.
Informed when she was younger that she couldn't have children, she said: "I decided then every child was mine. There were no ifs, ands or buts." Left widowed when her husband, Air Force reservist Capt. Bayard K. Colon, suffered a heart attack in 1972, she battled on through.
That same mentality, she said, was behind her successful military career.
“I made sure I was spit and polish all the time,” Leftenant-Colon said, noting she and her fellow Black nurses bore the brunt of all sorts of backlash — including from “snotty-nosed” white first and second lieutenants who she said often asked her: “How could you be stationed here?” The inference being she couldn’t possibly be qualified — due to the color of her skin.
“I was in charge of my wards,” she said. “And I made sure it was known I was in charge of my wards … We never failed an inspection, never.”
As a flight nurse with the 6481st Medical Evacuation Group based in Tachikawa, Japan, she flew aboard C-46, C-47, C-54 and C-124 transport planes and set up hospital wards in war zones during the Korean War. In addition to Japan, she also served in Germany, as well as in Alabama, Alaska, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Ohio.
Evacuation mission
In 1954, she was on the first medical flight to evacuate French Legionnaires from the defeated French outpost in Dien Bien Phu Province in Vietnam. Ultimately, she helped evacuate more than 100 members of the French Expeditionary Force within earshot of the shooting.
During her career, she also met Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe, and even an Arab sheikh.
“I got to travel the world for free,” was how the still spry Leftenant-Colon explained it last week.
Following her retirement in 1965, Leftenant-Colon returned to Long Island and from 1971 to 1984 was the school nurse at Amityville High School.
In 1995, Leftenant-Colon was inducted into the Long Island Air and Space Hall of Fame. In 2018, the new library media center at Amityville High was named in her honor.
Although the Amityville Historical Society said it was featuring Leftenant-Colon and her family in the museum’s Black History Month celebration, even today few know their story.
“It’s important,” Kress Davis of the nursing museum said of Leftenant-Colon, “that this history be a part of what nurses learn today, because they have to realize everything they’re doing today, everything they’re able to do, is a result of nurses like this who came before.”
As Hunter Nikolaus, the longtime friend who still calls Leftenant-Colon “Dr. Nancy," said: “It’s a family that gave everything they had to this country — and where’s their thanks? As a Black woman I would’ve never gotten a commission in the Air Force had someone like Dr. Nancy not opened that door. I would not have had the career I had in the military …
"Our young people today have no idea — or, even an understanding — of what this woman, of what her family, went through. I think had Dr. Nancy and her family been white, from a national perspective, I think it would’ve been different. I think their story would be national news, not just local news. That’s what I think,” Nikolaus added.
John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”
