Nancy Leftenant-Colon, The First Black Woman To Serve In The Desegregated U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Dies

Well done, Mrs. Leftenant-Colon!

The first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps following its desegregation after World War II, Nancy Leftenant-Colon, passed away at 104, VPM reported.

Leftenant-Colon passed away peacefully on Jan. 8 at the Massapequa Center Rehabilitation and Nursing in Amityville, New York, where she grew up. The history-maker aspired to become a nurse after graduating from Amityville Memorial High School in 1939. She started her career at the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, New York, the first school in the country to train Black women to become nurses. Her niece, Cheryl Leftenant, said, “Aunt Nancy had a long, blessed life.”

After briefly working at a local hospital, Leftenant-Colon began her career as a U.S. Army Nurse Corps reservist in January 1945. Her first assignment was to attend to wounded soldiers. Still, in 1946, the nurse was transferred to the 332nd Station Medical Group at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Ohio, where she met flight surgeon and Tuskegee Airman Vance H. Marchbanks Jr.. Together, the team safely delivered a premature baby weighing just close to three pounds and who, due to a lack of sufficient Vitamin K, was expected not to survive.

A hospital that only accepted white mothers at the time rejected the Black mother of that premature baby, leaving Marchbanks and Leftenant-Colon on their own to save the baby’s life. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. I had to help save that baby’s life,” Leftenant-Colon said during a 2023 interview.

“It had such an effect on me,” she continued, revealing that she received a card from that family decades later.

The legendary healthcare provider was the daughter of formerly enslaved people, James and Eunice Leftenant, and was one of 12 children born in the small town of Goose Creek, South Carolina, according to NPR. While neither of her parents received an education past the sixth grade, Leftenant-Colon said her parents always instilled the value of education, public service, and hard work within her and her siblings. As a result, the family moved to New York during the Great Migration era, where millions of Black Americans fled north to escape the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South. “My parents were poor, but we were happy,” she once said.

“My mother and father raised a hell of a family.”

After then-President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order to end segregation in the military in July 1948, Leftenant-Colon jumped at the chance to obtain regular status in the Army Nurse Corps. She applied and was granted. Her career expanded to unknown heights, becoming a flight nurse with the U.S. Air Force in 1952 after the military dismantled the first Black pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, also known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Her younger brother, 2nd Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, was one of the 355 Tuskegee pilots deployed to North Africa and Europe during World War II. It was in the Air Force that she met Reserve Capt. Bayard Colon. The two married, but Colon passed away in 1972.

After retiring from military duties in 1965, she returned to her Amityville hometown to work as a school nurse at her alma mater between 1971 and 1984. Five years later, she served as the first national female president of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. While Leftenant-Colon and her late husband never had any children, she is survived by one sister, Amy, and a slew of nieces and nephews. During one of her final interviews, looking back on her life, Leftenant-Colon said, “It’s been a wonderful life.”