Nancy Lt. Cullen, a granddaughter of enslaved people who became the first black nurse to serve in the regular U.S. armed forces in 1948, died Jan. 8 in Amityville, New York, on Long Island. She was 104.
Her great-niece Gilda Lieutenant confirmed the death at a nursing facility.
Mrs. Lt. Cullen joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in February 1948, several months before President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order desegregating the armed forces.
This was the end of seven years of struggle. She first tried to enroll in 1941 out of nursing school, but was told that the army did not accept black women. She kept trying, and in 1945, with the influx of servicemen wounded from overseas combat near its peak, she was accepted into the reserves.
She was one of only 500 black nurses to serve during World War II, one of a total of 50,000 as a result of government caps that prevented thousands more black women from serving.
Mrs. Lt. Cullen began her service at a hospital in Lowell, Mass. Although he served in a segregated unit, the hospital itself was integrated, part of what was called the military experience in segregation.
A year later, she transferred to Lockbourne Army Airfield in Columbus, Ohio, where she joined a nursing unit attached to the 332nd Fighter Group, a division of the famed Tuskee Airmen.
She repeatedly encountered hostile supervisors, who made it clear that she would become a cashier for the slightest obstacle. “I made sure I was spitting and polishing all the time,” he told Long Island newspaper Newsday in 2023.
Once, when a black woman in his care went into premature labor, he and his patient were denied admission to a whites-only hospital in Columbus. He and a black flight surgeon delivered the baby themselves. (The child survived.)
Later, while serving in Alabama, Mrs. Lt. Cullen, even in her uniform, was not allowed to eat at whites-only restaurants. As she was walking through a southern town, a white woman spat in her face.
She joined the US Air Force in 1952, five years after its formation, to fulfill her dream of becoming a flight nurse.
He got his wish: Over the next 13 years, his postings included various installations around Germany, Japan, and the United States. In 1954, he helped evacuate wounded French soldiers from Dien Bien Phu, an outpost under siege by Vietnamese Communist forces. He met Bob Hope while he was on a military-sponsored tour. Another time, he met Marilyn Monroe.
“I got to travel the world for free,” he told Newsday.
Her commission as an officer in the Army Nurse Corps made international news.
“It was just part of the job,” he told Newsday in 1978. But then there were articles in the New York Times, letters from faraway England, and a newsreel. “
Nancy Carroll Lieutenant, known as Lefty since childhood, was born on September 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, SC, a farming community near Charleston. Her parents, James and Eunice (Middleton) Lieutenant, were both children of parents born into slavery.
When Nancy was 3, the family—which eventually included 11 other children—moved to Amityville, where her father found work as a laborer and her mother as a domestic worker.
She graduated from the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, one of the first institutions of its kind for black women. Repeatedly trying to enlist in the military, he worked in hospitals around New York City.
“I saw a picture of an Army nurse with her cap on,” she told Newsday in 1997. “I wanted to do my job.
She married Byrd Colonel in 1960. He died in 1972. In addition to Gilda Lieutenant, she is survived by one sister, Amy, as well as several other nieces and nephews.
Mrs. Lt. Cullen retired in 1965 with the rank of Major and then returned to Amityville, where she worked as the local high school nurse.
She also became active in the Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an association for veterans of that storied unit. From 1989 to 1991, he served as its president. She was the only woman ever to hold this position.
It was a particularly bittersweet assignment: not only had he helped look after the pilots in the unit, but one of his brothers, Lt. Samuel G., had been a Tuskegee Airman himself. He flew the P-51 Mustang, and was shot down over Austria in 1945. He was pronounced dead, although his remains were never recovered.
