Mary Keys Gipson: Pioneer African American Nurse in the South (ca. 1854–1953)

Mary Keys “Mollie” Gipson (Gibson), the first certified African American nurse in the South, daughter of Sam Keys and Judie (Stump) Keys, was born in Carrollton, Mississippi, around 1854. Mary Keys grew up in slavery under the Albert Keys family. She demonstrated intelligence and a talent for caregiving from a young age. Even as a child Keys was called upon to attend the sick and injured. She was described as possessing a “magic touch” that “dispelled the fear and anxiety of the sick when she was at their bedside.” Because of these skills, the Keys family taught her housekeeping skills, such as sewing and cooking, and how to read and write. Keys worked as a domestic servant for William Virgil Mayfield, who by 1880 had moved with her to a farm near Sherman, Texas. After the Mayfields moved farther west, Keys stayed in Sherman. She married Reverend Franklin Pierce Gipson on August 21, 1884, in Sherman, and the couple subsequently moved to Fort Worth. They had one known child together. In Fort Worth Mary Gipson worked with her husband to establish the Gipson Memorial CME Church, eventually known as the Carter Metropolitan CME Church, of which her husband was the first pastor.

By the 1890s Gipson worked as a midwife and nurse in Fort Worth. In 1903, with her husband’s encouragement, she left home and enrolled in the Chautauqua School of Nursing in Jamestown, New York. On March 2, 1907, she graduated from the school and earned a nursing certificate, the first ever given to an African American woman living in the South. Returning to Fort Worth, Gipson worked under White doctors such as Isaac Lycurgus Van Zandt, Elias J. Beall, and William A. Duringer and may have later worked for Black physician Riley A. Ransom. She assisted in surgeries, obstetrics, and other medical procedures. During her nursing career, she helped deliver countless babies in south Fort Worth.

Gipson was an avid desegregationist and pushed for the professionalization of nursing. In 1908 she was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), which was organized to increase professional standards in nursing, break down racial barriers, and develop leadership among Black nurses. In 1909 Gipson joined the Texas Graduate Nurses’ Association (now the Texas Nurses Association) in lobbying the Texas legislature to pass a law creating standard licensing requirements for nurses and creating the State Board of Nurse Examiners. Gipson and other members of the NACGN pushed the American Nursing Association (ANA) to end its racially exclusionary membership rules. Since 1916 membership in the national association had been based on membership in state and district-level chapters, which could bar the members of minority groups from membership. In 1948, due to the work of Gipson and other Black nurses, the ANA opened up national membership to all nurses denied membership from state or district nurses’ associations.

On August 4, 1913, Gipson’s husband passed away. She later moved to Mount Pleasant to be with her niece Mary Etta Underwood. In the 1920s Gipson and Underwood moved to Dallas, where Gipson continued to be a nurse for the community. In 1952 she contracted a serious illness that forced Underwood to give up her income from sewing to care for her. The Dallas Morning News published an article about Gipson to raise awareness about her plight. This was the only profile on her life and career to be published in her lifetime. On June 11, 1953, around the age of ninety-nine, Gipson died of nephritis at her home in Dallas. She was buried at the West Hill Cemetery in Sherman. Gipson remained an obscure figure until Fort Worth historian Larry O’Neal brought new attention to her life story. O’Neal helped organize a Mary Keys Gipson Day celebration, held on March 5, 2019, at the Fort Worth City Hall. The Fort Worth Birthing & Wellness Center created the Mary Keys Gibson Scholarship, given annually to a nurse midwife of color.