Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney was an American nurse who in 1879 became the first African American to complete professional nursing training in the United States, graduating from the New England Hospital for Women and Children. She worked for decades as a private-duty nurse, largely for families who sought her out for her skill in maternal and newborn care, in a profession that excluded Black nurses from most training programs of her era. In 1908 she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses to challenge that exclusion, and she remained active in civil rights and women's suffrage work, becoming one of the first women to register to vote in Boston in 1920.