May …

The Lincoln School for Nurses — also known as Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home School for Nurses and Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing — was a pioneering nursing institution that played a vital role in expanding professional healthcare training for African American women and helped shape the landscape of American medicine, social justice, and community empowerment.

The school was founded in May 1898 in the Bronx, NY at the site of what was then the Colored Home and Hospital, and later became Lincoln Hospital, in response to the exclusion of Black women from most nursing programs of the era. It was the first purpose-built nursing school for African American women in the United States, created to provide education and clinical training at a time when opportunities for Black nurses were extremely limited.

The first class graduated in 1900 with just six students, but the school quickly grew in reputation and enrollment. It attracted young women from across the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa who sought professional nursing careers that would otherwise have been out of reach.

Driven by a mission to meet both healthcare needs and racial barriers in professional education, the school became an influential institution whose alumni made significant contributions to nursing practice and public health.

Key participants included graduates such as Adah Belle Thoms, who served as acting director and became a leader in the movement to integrate nursing into mainstream professional associations, and many others who later became educators, military nurses, and public health advocates. Thoms and other members of the school’s Alumnae Association, formed in 1905, helped organize the historic National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. This organization advocated for Black nurses’ inclusion in national military and professional corps.

Over its more than six decades of operation, a total of 1,864 women completed its training, contributing to hospitals, military service, education, and community health programs throughout the country.

The school left a lasting legacy in American healthcare, civil rights, and cultural history by expanding access to professional nursing training and challenging racial discrimination in medical education. Its alumni served with distinction in both peacetime and wartime, including some who became the first African American women in branches of military nursing, university faculty, and healthcare leadership.

Though the school closed in 1961, its impact continues to be remembered through archival collections, commemorative reunions, and its influence on subsequent generations of nurses and healthcare professionals.

For its contributions to professional nursing and racial equity, the Lincoln School for Nurses and its graduates have been recognized in historical exhibits and nursing scholarship as foundational to the integration and advancement of Black women in American medicine.