Mabel Staupers, a leader that has had a profound effect in shaping the nursing profession throughout the decades that demonstrated a remarkable capacity for growth and enhancement. She has had an extreme impact on the evolution and expansion of the field. In an honest attempt I will demonstrate how she played a part in changing the stigma that surrounded the diversity of nursing by showcasing how she impacted the nursing field and her dedication to it.
On February 27, 1890, Mabel Stauper was born as Mabel Doyle to the parentage of Thomas and Pauline Doyle in Barbados, West Indies. However in 1903 Staupers immigrated to Harlem, New York with her parents, where she completed her primary and secondary education. In 1914, Mabel was accepted into Freedman’s Hospital School of Nursing in Washington, D.C, in which she graduated with honors, three years later. Upon graduating, Stauper started working as a private service nurse. Along with Louis T. Wright and James Wilson, Stauper founded the Booker T. Washington Sanitarium in Harlem, in which treated African Americans who suffered from tuberculosis.
Upon conducting a detailed investigation in 1922 in regards to the health care needs in Harlem, Stauper found that African American treatment for tuberculosis was seriously shortcoming. In response to this crisis, a committee was founded by New York, where Stauper was appointed as executive secretary. She spent 12 years assuring that the residents of Harlem suffering from tuberculosis would get the adequate resources for allocating the disease.
Mabel Stauper was designated as an executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1934 and she retained this position until 1946. She encouraged black nurses by establishing a local and state nursing association, informing black nurses and protesting to integrate the Armed Forces Nurse Corps. Although the integration officially took place in 1941, African American was still denied full integration. It wasn’t until the year of 1945 when there was a nationwide shortage of nurses during World War II and the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt that Staupers campaign succeeded.
In the year of 1948, Stauper directed her attention to that of the (ANA) American Nurses Association, the leading organization of professional nurses in the United States. Stauper along with other prominent black nurses pressured the ANA to integrate its organization in 1949. Soon after this historic event, Stauper was elected president of the National Association of Colored Graduated Nurses (NACGN). However, in 1950 Stauper managed the disbanding of the NACGN, sensing that the establishment had already fulfilled its mission, being that black nurses now had full access to all nursing organizations.
Within the year of 1951, Stauper received the Springarn Medal for her part as an advocate for racial equality and also for her outstanding achievement. Ten years later Mabel published her own history of the NACGN. John V. Lindsay, New York Mayor presented Stauper with a quote of appreciation, in which read, “To an immigrant who came to the United States and by Individual Effort through Education and Personal Achievement has become an Outstanding American Leader and Distinguished Citizen of America” (www.blackpast.com). In the year of 1970, Mabel Stauper moved to Washington D.C. where she resided until her death on November 29, 1989.

Citation
Mabel Keaton Staupers, No Time For Prejudice: A Story of the Integration of Negroes in Nursing in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1961);

Darlene Clark Hines, Black Women in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);

“Mabel Staupers, 99, Leader for Nurses, Dies,” The New York Times (October 6, 1989).
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/staupers-mabel-keaton-1890-1989