At the height of the Great Migration, droves of Black men traveled north in search of industrial cities with labor jobs and other steady work. But less mentioned are the groups of educated and professional Black women who also left their homes looking for employment and a better life. Among them, a small army of courageous nurses with a legacy of standing on the frontlines during the city’s darkest times. Staten Island’s ‘Black Angels’ were exceptionally skilled Black women who risked their lives to help treat and cure tuberculosis patients in the historic Sea View Hospital from the 1930s to 1961.
By the early 1900s, Harlem, which was seeing a cultural renaissance, and the Lower East Side were considered “hotbeds” for tuberculosis, a deadly disease often found spreading in the city’s tightly packed tenement buildings. These poor living conditions were prevalent at the time among the waves of mostly European immigrant families settling in the city, some Black communities, lower-income families, and homeless populations. New York City leaders considered these groups “ignorant” or “careless” for getting infected and campaigned to isolate sick patients.
“This was one of the darkest periods in American history. Cast the pre-antibiotic age of the Great Depression against the landscape of Jim Crow,” said Maria Smilios, an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “I don’t think people really grasp it. When you say no antibiotics, it’s nothing, zero. You have strep throat. You don’t get an antibiotic. It’s a wing and a prayer, and you might die.
“[City leaders] got sick and tired of watching people die and get sick,” said Smilios. “This was the dawning of public health.”
They opened Sea View Hospital on Staten Island for the treatment and quarantine of people with tuberculosis in 1913 — with the U.S. on the cusp of World War I. It was a 360-acre sanatorium campus with several buildings and lodgings for staff. It became one of the largest hospitals in the country treating the disease. Sea View saw early success in combating it, but by 1929, tuberculosis was still the “third-leading killer” in the city. After years of watching colleagues succumb and die, in the hospital and in the war, white nurses with other options of employment started quitting en masse.
Desperate to fill the void, the city deemed using Black nurses to treat highly contagious people, considered “undesirable,” acceptable, according to the Staten Island Museum (SIM). The city began recruiting these nurses from southern and midwestern colleges with a promised “rare opportunity” for training at an integrated hospital with housing and a salary. The patients of Sea View dubbed their nurses the “Black Angels” for embracing them despite the risk to their health and that of their families.
“Black women teachers and nurses, they really changed the course of history, and they’re not talked about at all,” said Smilios, who is the author of “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.”
Remembering the Angels
PHOTO CREDIT: Contributed by Maria Smilios.
“Tuberculosis was a deadly disease. It killed millions. Those nurses, their legacy is they put themselves in harm’s way,” said Virginia Allen, 94, one of the oldest surviving Black Angels nursing aides in New York, who now resides at Sea View’s nursing home, remembering what times were like generations ago.
Allen moved from Detroit to Staten Island when she was 16. She lived with her aunt Edna Sutton-Ballard, a registered nurse at Sea View. Allen was a young student at Central School for Practical Nurses in 1947. She was a nurse’s aide at Sea View while she studied. After her graduation in 1957, she went on to work as a private duty nurse, a surgical nurse, and in labor relations with Local 1199 AFL-CIO.
She was one of hundreds of women who came to Sea View to treat patients afflicted with tuberculosis, which was not fully cured until 1951.
Leah Bennett, 61, a journalist and editor, remembered the bravery of her mother, Curlene Jennings Bennett, a nurse at Sea View from 1957 to 1958 before leaving to work as a public health nurse with a specialty in neonatal care. “She was so confident. She walked into tuberculosis like it was nothing.” She is now one of the oldest living Black Angels nurses in New York, also currently residing on Staten Island. She had a stroke at 89 years old and is now in poor health, said her daughter.
PHOTO CREDIT: Contributed by Pamela Washington.
Pamela Washington, 69, is a retired special education teacher who is related to several Black Angels, such as Leola Washington (aunt), Melody Pete Owens (great aunt), and Joann Molina (cousin). Her mother, Lucille Washington, worked in the kitchen at Sea View Hospital. Washington said that her family took cleanliness very seriously when they came home from work.
“My auntie would have a thing about washing hands. Oh my god, my family, my whole family can tell you that you could not come up those stairs without washing your hands first,” said Washington. “And when she came into the house, she would take her stuff off and wash all up her arms and her face. I remember that as a little girl, yeah. She’d take her clothes off. I guess she just didn’t want anybody to catch anything.”
The work they did
Generations of Black Angels descendants were not always aware of the harsh realities that their mothers, grandmothers, great aunts, cousins, sisters, and friends faced every day. Most never discussed their jobs. They carried them out with a sense of duty and grace.
“When I was growing up, you sorta knew the history of the Black Angels, but I didn’t recognize the importance of it,” said Steve Molina, 60, who had a mother and grandmother who worked at Sea View in the 1960s. “I feel it now as an older person.”
By 1936, the hospital began conducting tuberculosis research. Upwards of 300 nurses, 45 physicians, and 400 support staff were employed, according to the Staten Island Museum. When World War II ended, one of the first antibiotics, streptomycin, showed promise in treating the disease. Building off of the antibiotic, Sea View’s Dr. Edward Robitzek and Irving Selikoff began developing a treatment protocol with isoniazid in 1951 and 1952. For those two years, the Black Angels were integral to the success of the drug trials that would eventually cure tuberculosis.
“The nurses were tasked to administer the medication three times a day. But they weren’t just giving out a pill. They were also tasked to look at the emotional, mental, and physical aspects of these patients,” said Smilios. “They knew this disease so well. They started to notate whatever side effects there were.”
The disease raged throughout the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and into World War II. Fresh air and rest were still mainly how TB was treated before the trials. When that failed, and it spread in a patient’s body, doctors prescribed horrific surgeries where ribs were sawed off “six to eight at a time.”
Chest cavities were punctured and stuffed with things like ping-pong balls to keep lungs from collapsing, according to the Staten Island Museum. All of which the Black Angels witnessed firsthand. Many did contract inactive tuberculosis while at Sea View, but because of the stringent skills of the nurses, few died from the disease.
Robitzek later noted that “had it not been for the Black nurses,” nothing in the hospital and the trials would have worked, said Smilios. Their dedication and accomplishments were rarely acknowledged though. Black nurses and staff at Sea View weren’t given supervisor positions, which were reserved for white nurses. The nursing staff was entirely Black until the cure for tuberculosis was found, according to the museum.
“I tear up sometimes when I hear about the Black Angels because I knew so many of them personally, not just like my family, I knew a lot of those ladies growing up,” said Washington.
As the medication to treat the disease became easily accessible, it was no longer a death sentence. Sea View’s tuberculosis hospital closed in 1961.
But many of the Black Angels and their families continued to live and work in and around the hospital even as racial dynamics in the area took a turn. White Staten Islanders decried the influx of Black people and migrants to the borough in the 1960s and 70s. As a result, the neighborhood experienced decades of racial violence.
Not just nurses
The Black Angels were huge proponents of civil rights and homeownership, standing in resistant communities nearby whenever necessary to secure homes for their families on Staten Island’s North Shore.
Through organizations like the Women’s Civic and Political Union, Lambda Kappa Mu Sorority, Inc., the National Council of Negro Women Staten Island section (NCNW-SI), Helping Hands Society, the Booker T. Washington Colored Servicemen’s Center, and St. Philips Baptist Church, they worked to shape and build a close-knit and thriving community.
Their area along Bradley Avenue was in Willowbrook, referred to as Dog Patch (now Meiers Corners). It joined with other Black communities on the island, like Sandy Ground, a free Black settlement on Staten Island’s southside that specialized in shellfish and especially oysters back in the 1800s.
One of them was Hazel Pedro Herring, a Sandy Ground native and a nurses’ aide at Sea View. She was also a member of the Women’s Civic and Political Union, an organization focused on teaching Black women about politics and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote, according to the museum. “She had kindness, goodness, and God at the top of the list, and always went to church,” said her daughter, Lucille Herring, 79, herself a retired nurse who specialized in infection control.
PHOTO CREDIT: Contributed by Lucille Herring.
Another was Missouria Louvinia Meadows-Walker, a Black Angel who worked at Sea View in 1935. An innovator, she co-founded the Progressive Nursing Club at St. Phillips Baptist Church; and was one of the movers and shakers who called on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) so she could buy her house in Dog Patch in 1944. Her white neighbors sent her a petition, warning her not to move in. Despite their threats, she enjoyed her home.
Meadows-Walker was involved in the clinical trials in 1951 and moved on to Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan before retiring in 1970. She was a founding member of Staten Island’s Chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.
Bernice “Bunny” Meadows Alleyne, 79, her grandniece, described her as “a great person.”
While they were securing the community, they still took care of home.
PHOTO CREDIT: Contributed by Patricia Wilson.
George Meadows, 78, also had several nurses in his family. His mother, Teresa “Tessie” Meadows, passed away when he was 12 years old. He, like countless others, was essentially raised by the Black Angels. He can remember his great aunt’s house being a vibrant childcare center where nurses would drop their kids off during the day. As a child, he remembers doing odd jobs around the island for them and getting paid.
“They were pioneers and raised a community of children,” said Meadows.
“Nana was an amazing woman. Loved her family and was very diligent. She worked the 7-3 shift. Got home around 4 in the afternoon,” said Patricia “Pat” Wilson, 66. Her grandmother was Nellie Mae Holmes, who worked as a Licensed Practical Nurse at Sea View for 24 years. She spent her final years on the campus as a resident of Sea View’s nursing home. “I would always ask to call my Nana when she got home. And she never complained. She just took care of her patients.”
A modern lens
Today, Sea View operates mainly as a nursing home and elderly rehabilitation facility. A place that is as impressive in size as it is deeply haunting. Throughout the grounds, many of the buildings that served tuberculosis patients are now derelict and covered with graffiti, overgrown weeds, with hollowed-out insides, and missing windows. But looking back to a time when much of Staten Island’s North Shore district was still covered with thick woods and fruit trees, the hospital once stood on the cutting edge of modern medicine.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ariama C. Long
“I think it’s really important [that] people realize what these women have done in history. Growing up, I had no clue of what we’re talking about right now. None,” said Henry “Hank” Pegeron, 67, currently works at Sea View and cares for his mother. His grandmother, Marguerite E. Oates, was a Black Angel at the hospital. “My grandmother didn’t talk about the trials and tribulations they went through. They more or less protected us from all this stuff. And I believe most of the ancestors will tell you the same thing. They were guardians.”