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Turning the Tide, The Christine Weems Northern story, 1997 (see transcript below)
Turning the Tide: the Christine Weems Northern story
Christine Lenora Weems didn’t really plan on being a nurse. Even as a high-schooler, she had her sights set on a career as a physician, but she was black and female, and her principal advised her to instead pursue a nursing career.
“In those days,” she said, “you did what you were told.” Besides, her father sided with the principal’s determination.
At first, she said, the KU School of Nursing rebuffed her efforts to enroll in the three-year diploma program: “The woman who was the director at the time looked me right in the eye and said, ‘we don’t take coloreds.’”
However, a new director soon took over, she recounted, one with a considerably more open view on such matters. “She said, ‘Of course you’ll get in,’ and I started classes that September.”
She would go on to become the first black woman to graduate from the University of Kansas School of Nursing, one of 54 students accorded diplomas in that class of 1952. She had matriculated from Sumner High School, which had no white students, to the School of Nursing, which with the exception of her, had no black students.
Yet, while she recalled that she was lonely at first, “there are always a certain number of people who are supportive. I had some classmates who didn’t see black people as something to fear.”
There was, however, lingering evidence of differentiation. At least one instructor’s actions implied she was none-too-happy about the black student’s presence; “I can remember being in class, raising my hand and never, never, being called on.”
And while her classmates had roommates with whom to study, to ruminate and to share jokes and gossip, Christine Weems was assigned no one the three years she lived and studied at KU.
Still, she made friends. Now, 45 years after graduation, “there is a group of us who stay in touch.”
Shortly after she was awarded her nursing diploma in 1952, she took a teaching position at what was then known as Providence Hospital and stayed in academic nursing until the mid-1960s, when she signed on as a nurse in the Kansas City, Mo., School District.
The switch to a more clinical role was motivated, in part, by her desire to increase the number of black applicants to nursing school.
At last count, she could lay claim to having influenced 54 African-American women who went on to graduate. A niece now studying at the University of Missouri-Kansas City will make it 55.
Nurse, mentor, mother. She and her husband Emanuel Northern, who she married in November 1952, the year she graduated, raised four children: One is now a lawyer, another a firefighter and author of children’s books, a third a businessman based in Europe and a fourth who also went into business.
“It’s been a full life,” she said. “A very full life.” – T.B.
Topics Newsletter. February 17, 1997.
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