Mary E. Merritt

Mary Eliza Merritt was an American nurse, born near Berea, Kentucky, on 27 April 1881 and died in Louisville in 1953. She was the first African American licensed as a nurse in Kentucky. The only child of Thomas and Catherine Merritt, she studied at Berea College, graduated with a two-year nursing degree in 1902, and finished her training at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C. after the Day Law segregated Kentucky colleges in 1904. In 1906 she nursed the retired politician Cassius M. Clay, and in 1907 she supervised nursing at Protective Home and Mitchell Hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas, where she started a training programme. She spent most of her career at the Red Cross Hospital in Louisville, founded by African Americans in the Jim Crow era and the only place in Kentucky where they could train as nurses until 1937. She was its Superintendent of nursing from 1914 to 1945, and received a certificate of merit from President Woodrow Wilson for nursing soldiers at Camp Taylor in 1918. She won the Mary Mahoney Medal in 1949.