First Black woman to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps after desegregation dies

Nancy Leftenant-Colon, the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps when it was desegregated after World War II and the sister of one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen pilots, died Jan. 8 in Amityville, N.Y. She was 104.

Leftenant-Colon died peacefully at Massapequa Center Rehabilitation and Nursing in Amityville, where she had lived for the past year, a nephew, Chris Leftenant, told NPR. "Aunt Nancy had a long, blessed life," a niece, Cheryl Leftenant, said. Leftenant-Colon graduated from Amityville Memorial High School in 1939 and dreamed of being a nurse. She attended the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, the first school in the country to train Black women to become nurses, according to the New York Public Library archives.

She worked at a local hospital before joining the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a reservist in January 1945. She was initially assigned to Lowell Hospital in Massachusetts, where she tended to soldiers wounded during the conflict, according to her biography on file with Tuskegee Airmen Inc. in Alabama.