Black-Sistory: Capt. Mary Lee Mills, U.S. public health officer and international nurse
Imagine a Black girl, one of eleven children, the daughter of a farm laborer, and the granddaughter of formerly enslaved persons whose life’s journey took her from an impoverished, rural county in North Carolina the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Mary Lee Mills, MSN, RN, MPH, CNM, was born in Pender County, North Carolina, in August 1912,* and faced educational inequalities in its segregated schools. Russell Brooker, Ph.D., author of “The Education of Black Children in the Jim Crow South” wrote: “There were limits on what blacks (sic) could be taught in school. White school leaders did not want black children to be exposed to ideas like equality and freedom. Carter G. Woodson told how some black children in Southern schools were not allowed to use books that included the Declaration of Independence or the U. S. Constitution.”
Despite racial discrimination, Mills excelled as a student in a one-teacher schoolhouse. (She boasted about being a teacher’s assistant at age 5.) In an excerpt from North Carolina Nurses: A Century of Caring, an oral history video, she said that she had considered studying law. “… I thought about law, and then I saw so many hungry lawyers around I decided I have to go into something that will pay me some money to help me do something else.”
At age 18, Mills moved to Durham, NC and enrolled in the Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing, where she strove to excel. “I read the professional journals, newspapers, listened to the news, you know, what are the diseases that we’re facing right now?” She graduated as a registered nurse in 1934.
Mills had learned about midwifery programs in New York City and met with Dr. George M. Cooper, a public health official who controlled the state’s educational funds. “(But you know, so far as for providing the funds for you to study, how do we know you’ll come back when it’s over?” Consequently, in exchange for tuition, Cooper convinced her to spend one year in Northampton County working alongside “granny midwives,” uneducated and untrained older women who delivered most of the babies for African American mothers in rural areas.
“The midwife was nothing but a neighbor,” said Mills, “a kind neighbor, who joined in and did what she could to help … there was nobody else …. We did not have a hospital in Northampton County; we had some private physicians, but they were far apart.”
In its January/February 2022 issue, Frontline, a newsletter published by the Commissioned Officers Association noted, “While working as a midwife in Roxboro, NC, she helped a woman give birth to premature triplets, then had to drive the mother and her babies over an hour back to Durham to the African American hospital, as no hospital in Roxboro would admit them.”
After completion of her studies in the North, Mills returned to North Carolina Central University (NCC) in Durham to direct its one-year public health nursing certificate program in partnership with the University of North Carolina, which denied African American students’ admission to its School of Public Health. In a video interview, Betty Dennis, PhD, former professor, and chair for the NCC School of Nursing, said, “For her to make a public health nursing to primarily available to African Americans was, I think, a very outstanding contribution on her part.”
That same year, Mills became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS). From 1946 to 1951, she served as chief nursing officer in Liberia, West Africa, where she created the country’s first public health campaigns, helped establish the Franklin D. Roosevelt Children’s Ward in Monrovia and the Tubman School National School of Nursing. Liberia invested her as Knight Official of the Liberian Humane Order of African Redemption.
While in Liberia, Mills adopted two orphan boys and raised them in America with the help of her parents.
In 1952, her assignment was in Lebanon, where she established the country’s first nursing school. “The Lebanese people were not strange to me,” she wrote, “… it was only fitting that I received the grand welcoming party so typical of Lebanese hospitality.” She spent several months living an Arab family.”
Her other assignments were in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Chad where she provided health education, nursing care, and worked in smallpox and malaria eradication campaigns. Mills learned to speak French, Arabic, Cambodian, and several African dialects.
After retiring from the USPHS, Mills joined the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) as a nursing consultant in the migrant health program and she provided political, policy and program advice about migrant worker health care. She traveled to Finland, Germany, and Denmark to study their national health care systems. At public health conferences in Mexico, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, and Sweden, she spoke about nursing, midwifery.
Among her many honors are the Lebanon’s National Order of the Cedar for “acts of courage and public service,” North Carolina’s Order of the Long Leaf Pine for “extraordinary service,” the USPHS’s Distinguished Service Award, and the Rockefeller Service Award. The American Nurses Association (ANA) gave her its Mary Mahoney Award. In 2012, the organization inducted her into its Hall of Fame.
In retirement, Mills contributed articles to the Pender Chronicle and the Pender Post.
In a 2012 article, Minority Nurse stated, “Her life story is an inspiration to all nurses to expand our horizons and recognize that we can to be of service not just at home but to people all over the world.”
Mills’ extraordinary life of service ended on February 2, 2010, at age 98.
* No record found with day of her birth.
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