Authors

  1. Santandrea, Lisa

Abstract

The smart money is on the nurse.

 

Article Content

A dime can't buy a pack of gum, but it's still enough for a juicy story. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, the Treasury Department chose to redesign the 10[cents] piece in his honor. The coin's final etching credited John Sinnock, the U.S. Mint's chief engraver, although it resembled a bronze plaque commissioned in 1944 and created by Harlem Renaissance artist Selma Burke. Burke, a private nurse until 1933, protested, but the initials "JS" remain on the dime. Burke died in 1995 at age 95. FIGURE

  
Figure. Selma Burke... - Click to enlarge in new windowFigure. Selma Burke

All five eventually worked at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital and over the course of their careers worked with such organizations as the American Nurses Association, the Alabama State Nurses Association, the American Red Cross, Chi Eta Phi sorority, the Macon County Nurses Society, the Tuskegee University School of Nursing Alumni Association, and the Coalition of 100 Black Women. And that's a short list.

 

"They are very wise," says Ellen Clarke, PhD, who wrote about these friends and Tuskegee, Alabama natives in her doctoral thesis. "They were in situations where they could have become embittered, but they always tried to make it a win-win situation for everyone."-Lisa Santandrea