Alma Elizabeth Gault

Alma Elizabeth Gault (1891 to 1981) was an American nurse administrator who worked to bring African American nurses and the schools that trained them into the professional nursing associations of her country. Under her leadership the school of nursing at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, became the first segregated black nursing school to be admitted to membership in the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing, a step that gave its graduates standing that the segregated system had withheld. In recognition of that work she was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1984, three years after her death. Her record belongs to the history of nursing education and of the long effort to open professional bodies to nurses of every background.