Review of "Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters," by Fia Winters Jordan

 Review of

Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters, by Fia Winters Jordan, ISBN 9781588384836

Four out of five stars

Memories, not memoirs

 The word “memories” rather than memoirs in the title is accurate. The book is centered around the experiences of Louise Lomax, who served in the U. S. Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. However, it is not based on any conversations between Lomax and the author, her daughter. Lomax never spoke about her war experiences, and it was only when Lomax went to a nursing facility that the author discovered her mother’s Tuskegee Army Flying School scrapbook and was able to learn the events depicted in this book.

Despite their wearing the uniform of the United States Army and being well trained in their fields, the black nurses were discriminated against like the airmen were. Their base was in the heart of Alabama and to the discriminatory white people, only the color of their skin mattered.

 Being written based on the clues in a scrapbook that contained pictures of the nursing staff, a great deal of the content is short descriptions of the lives of the black nurses during their time in the Army and how they lived after their discharge. None of the short biographies are detailed, yet they give the reader solid information about how they managed to function and do their jobs when they were surrounded by hostility.

 Despite their struggles, this book is a description of how the black nurses managed to succeed and even break new ground in the Army nurse corps. They were small steps, but very significant as the American military was making small steps towards integration.

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