Frances Reed Elliott Davis
First Black Nurse at the American Red Cross
Frances Reed Elliott Davis was born in North Carolina in 1883. When she was five years old her mother died of tuberculosis. As her mother was white and her father was half Black and half Cherokee, he had already fled the state to avoid death by lynching. After her mother’s death, her mother’s family entered Davis into the foster care system since they did not want to care for a non-white child. While her mother had legally left her 49-acre estate to her daughter, it was never disclosed to her, and so she saved money from teaching to put herself through nursing school. She entered the Freedmen’s School of Nursing in Washington, D.C. in 1910 and went on to become the first Black nurse in the district to pass the final board exam.
Davis went on to become the first Black nurse hired to the American Red Cross in 1918, despite having been denied initially for her skin color. Her Red Cross pin was marked as “1A” (“A” designating her skin color) and would remain her designation through 1949. During World War I, while white nurses were deployed, Black nurses were not permitted to serve. During the 1918 flu pandemic, Davis taught herself to drive so as to care for patients in their homes and came down with the flu herself, leaving her with permanent heart damage. She took a role in the Detroit Public Health Department in 1927 and later helped to organize the first training school for Black nurses at the Dunbar Hospital. In the 1940s she established a childcare facility funded by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and remained director of the facility into her sixties. Her biography Trailblazer: Negro Nurse in the American Red Cross was published in 1969.
Sources
We sourced information for the above biography from the American Red Cross and the North Carolina Department of National and Cultural Resources.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
