Nancy Leftenant-Colon, Barrier-breaking Military Nurse, Dies at 104

The Washington Post

13:12 JST, January 24, 2025

Nancy Leftenant-Colon, who battled racial discrimination in a barrier-breaking career as a military nurse, serving as the first African American in the regular Army Nurse Corps and later caring for the sick and injured as a flight nurse in the Air Force, died Jan. 8 at a nursing home in Amityville, New York. She was 104.

Her nephew Chris Leftenant confirmed the death but did not know the cause.

“Lefty,” as she was known, was one of six siblings who served in the military, starting out as a reservist in the Army Nurse Corps in 1945 and retiring 20 years later as a major in the Air Force. In between, she set up hospital wards in Japan, cared for French legionnaires evacuated from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and established herself as a role model for African Americans in the armed forces.

“I had to be the best,” she said of her early years in the Army, “because I knew whatever I did, other Blacks after me would be judged by what I did and how I did it.”

By the time Maj. Leftenant-Colon was granted reserve status in the Army Nurse Corps, three months before the end of World War II in Europe, only a few hundred Black nurses had been admitted into the Army. Accepted under strict quotas and granted only limited participation in the war effort, they served with segregated troops at segregated bases, and in some cases were brought in as replacements for White nurses at prisoner-of-war camps.

But as the number of casualties rose in 1945, Black nurses were increasingly dispatched to Army hospitals for wounded soldiers. Maj. Leftenant-Colon found herself assigned to Lowell General Hospital, at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, where according to an account in Airman, the Air Force’s official magazine, she was part of an “experiment” to determine whether she and three dozen other Black colleagues could properly care for White patients.

At a welcome briefing, the head nurse declared that Maj. Leftenant-Colon and the other Black nurses were not wanted at the hospital – she knew that “their kind were problem children,” she said – and would be kicked out if they fell short of standards.

“That speech made us even more determined to success,” Maj. Leftenant-Colon told Airman in a 1998 interview.

Working 12-hour days, six days a week, Maj. Leftenant-Colon looked after an orthopedic ward of 40 patients, aided by an orderly and a German POW. “It didn’t seem to matter to the patients what color my skin was,” she said. “Everybody bleeds red, after all.”

The next year, she was transferred to Lockbourne Army Air Field in Ohio, where she cared for some of the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of Black aviators and support personnel who had served with distinction during the war.

Maj. Leftenant-Colon was a first lieutenant at the airfield when, in February 1948, she was accepted into the regular Army Nurse Corps, following pressure from civil rights activists and nursing advocates calling for African Americans to be allowed to serve in the permanent corps. Later that year, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, abolishing segregation in the military.

Her appointment made national news. Some papers also printed a photo showing Maj. Leftenant-Colon helping deliver a baby girl who was born prematurely, weighing 1 pound 7 ounces. The girl was not expected to survive: According to NPR and an account from Tuskegee Airmen Inc., a commemorative group, the child’s mother had been barred from a local “Whites Only” hospital, leaving Maj. Leftenant-Colon and her Army colleagues to deliver the child on their own and to nurse her to health.

Although Maj. Leftenant-Colon was thrilled to become a full-fledged member of the Army corps, she soon switched military branches, joining the newly independent Air Force so that she could become a flight nurse. She was inspired in part by her younger brother Samuel G. Leftenant, who had served as a fighter pilot – one of the Tuskegee Airmen – during World War II. His P-51 Mustang went down in 1945, following a midair collision with another American plane during an escort mission to Austria. He was declared dead the next year, although his body was never found.

Maj. Leftenant-Colon said she was accepted by most of her White colleagues in the Air Force, which she came to consider a second family. She treated wounded troops overseas, serving on an air route between South Korea and Japan, and in 1954 she was part of the first medical evacuation flight into Dien Bien Phu, where French forces were decisively routed by the Vietnamese in a battle that heralded the end of French colonial Indochina.

At times her career took her into the Deep South, including for flight training in Alabama during the heyday of Jim Crow. Maj. Leftenant-Colon, who had once been spit on by a White man while in uniform in New Orleans, took precautions to protect herself: Avoiding segregated hotels and restaurants, she drove hundreds of miles out of her way to sleep and dine at military bases and friends’ homes. She sometimes went an entire day without drinking, to avoid having to risk her safety looking for a bathroom in an unfriendly town. To reduce the chances she might encounter engine trouble in Klan country, she bought a new car every two years.

Those efforts took a toll, Maj. Leftenant-Colon said, although she never considered changing careers. “You cry on the inside, but you couldn’t let anybody see you in that state,” she told Newsday in 2020. “I don’t know anything that would turn me away from nursing. That was my baby.”

In her last posting, she served as chief nurse at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. She later returned to nursing as a civilian, working for 13 years as the school nurse at Amityville Memorial High School, her alma mater on the South Shore of Long Island, which renamed its library media center in her honor in 2019.

She seemed almost embarrassed by publicity, and was resolute in telling reporters that she considered herself less a trailblazer or pioneer than someone who was just trying to serve her country. “I’ll be glad when people stop writing about the first Black [to do] this or that,” she said in a 1978 Newsday interview, when the Amityville district announced an honorary Nancy Leftenant-Colon Month. “‘American’ sounds just fine to me.”

The seventh of 12 children, Nancy Carol Leftenant was born outside Charleston in Goose Creek, South Carolina, on Sept. 29, 1920. When she was 3, she and her family moved north to Amityville, where her father found work as a laborer, her mother as a domestic. Both parents were the children of enslaved people.

The family was poor but self-sufficient, raising their own pigs and poultry. After graduating from high school in 1939, Maj. Leftenant-Colon became the first person in the family to pursue higher education, studying in the Bronx at the Lincoln School for Nurses, one of the first nursing schools open to African Americans.

During her first year at Lincoln, she came across a magazine photo of an Army nurse. “She was striking, standing proud in her starched white uniform, black cape flowing behind her,” Maj. Leftenant-Colon told Airman. “She really looked good. And boy, did she have this air of confidence, like she knew where she was going and what she was doing. When I saw that, I said to myself that’s what I want to be.”

In retirement, she settled on Long Island with her husband, Bayard Colon, a guidance counselor and Air Force Reserve captain. They married in 1960, and he died in 1972.

Survivors include a sister, Amy Leftenant.

Maj. Leftenant-Colon helped promote the legacy of Black aviators and veterans while volunteering with Tuskegee Airmen Inc., rising to become its first female president in 1989. In interviews, she often highlighted the role African Americans played in the country’s history, serving in the military while also fighting for equal rights back home.

“They may not have included the contributions we’ve made in the history books, but we know that we’ve contributed to the success of the armed forces,” she told USA Today in 1991. “They need to add this to history books. They may as well start now.”