Nancy Lieutenant-Colon, the granddaughter of enslaved people who in 1948 became the first black nurse to serve in the US regular army, died on Jan. 8 in Amityville, NY, Long Island. He was 104 years old.
His niece, Gilda Lieutenant, confirmed his death at a nursing home.
Mrs. Lieutenant-Colon joined the US Army Nurse Corps in February 1948, a few months before President Harry S. Truman signed the desegregation order.
It was the end of a seven-year struggle. She first tried to enlist in 1941, fresh out of nursing school, but was told that the military did not accept black women. He kept trying, and in 1945, with the flow of wounded soldiers from the war overseas nearing a peak, he was accepted into the reserves.
She was one of 500 black nurses who served during World War II, out of 50,000 in total – a result of government caps that prevented thousands of black women from working.
Mrs. Lieutenant-Colon began his service at a hospital in Lowell, Mass. Although he worked in a segregated unit, the hospital itself was integrated, part of what was called the military’s experiment in segregation.
A year later, he moved to Lockbourne Army Air Field in Columbus, Ohio, where he joined the nursing unit attached to the 332nd Fighter Group, part of the famous Tuskegee Airmen.
He repeatedly faced cruel managers, who made it clear that he would be given money if he broke a small rule. “I made sure I was spit and polished all the time,” he told the 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 white-only hospital in Columbus; she and the black surgeon delivered the baby alone. (The child survived.)
Later, when he served in Alabama, Mrs. Lieutenant-Colon was not allowed to eat in whites-only restaurants, even in his uniform. When he was walking in a Southern town, a white woman spat in his face.
She joined the US Air Force in 1952, five years after its creation, to fulfill her dream of becoming a flight nurse.
He got his wish: Over the next 13 years, his deployments included Germany, Japan and various installations in the United States. In 1954, he helped evacuate wounded French soldiers from Dien Bien Phu, an army besieged by Vietnamese Communist forces. He met Bob Hope while on a military-sponsored tour; at one point, 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 as far away as England, and a magazine.”
Nancy Carol Leftenant, known since childhood as Lefty, was born on Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, SC, a farming community near Charleston. Both his parents, James and Eunice (Middleton) Leftenant, were children of parents born into slavery.
When Nancy was 3 years old, the family – which eventually included 11 other children – moved to Amityville, where her father found work as a laborer and her mother as a housekeeper.
She graduated from the Lincoln School for Nurses, in the Bronx, one of the first institutions of its kind open to black women. While he tried several times 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,” he told Newsday in 1997. “He looked so good – straight and tall. I wanted to do my part.”
She married Bayard Colon in 1960. He died in 1972. Besides Gilda Leftenant, he is survived by his sister, Amy, and several other nieces and nephews.
Mrs. Lieutenant-Colon retired from the academy in 1965 and returned to Amityville, where she worked as a nurse at the local high school.
He also served at Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization for veterans of that storied unit. From 1989 to 1991, he served as its president. She was the only woman to hold that position.
It was a particularly painful assignment: Not only was he assisting the pilots in the squadron, but one of his brothers, Samuel G. Lieutenant, had been a Tuskegee Airman himself. He flew a P-51 Mustang, and in 1945 was shot down over Austria. He is said to have died, although his remains have not been found.
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