Edith DeVoe

Edith Mazie DeVoe (24 October 1921 to 17 November 2000) was an American nurse who broke racial barriers in the United States Navy. Born in Washington, D.C., she trained at the Freedmen's Hospital nursing school, graduating in 1942, and studied public health nursing in Richmond, Virginia, before working for the Visiting Nurse Association. She was commissioned an ensign in the Navy Reserve in April 1945 and served at the Boston Navy Yard during the war. In January 1948 she transferred to the Navy Nurse Corps as the first Black nurse in the regular Navy, a moment Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. cited when arguing for desegregating the military. In 1950 she became the first Black nurse posted outside the American mainland, at Tripler Army-Navy Hospital in Hawaii, where she cared for evacuees and wounded from the Korean War. She rose to lieutenant in 1952 and retired in 1960, and is buried at Quantico National Cemetery.