Nancy Leftenant-Colon, the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps when it was desegregated after World War II and the sister of one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen pilots, died Jan. 8 in Amityville, N.Y. She was 104.
Leftenant-Colon died peacefully at Massapequa Center Rehabilitation and Nursing in Amityville, where she had lived for the past year, a nephew, Chris Leftenant, told NPR.
"Aunt Nancy had a long, blessed life," a niece, Cheryl Leftenant, said.
Leftenant-Colon graduated from Amityville Memorial High School in 1939 and dreamed of being a nurse. She attended the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, the first school in the country to train Black women to become nurses, according to the New York Public Library archives.
She worked at a local hospital before joining the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a reservist in January 1945. She was initially assigned to Lowell Hospital in Massachusetts, where she tended to soldiers wounded during the conflict, according to her biography on file with Tuskegee Airmen Inc. in Alabama.
The following year, she was assigned to the 332nd Station Medical Group at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Ohio. That's where she teamed up with prominent flight surgeon and Tuskegee Airman Vance H. Marchbanks Jr., and the two delivered and saved the life of a premature baby girl who weighed just three pounds, suffered from a Vitamin K deficiency and wasn't expected to survive.
The local hospital, which only accepted white patients at the time, refused to allow the Black mother to give birth there, so the pair delivered the baby on their own. Leftenant-Colon said she administered Vitamin K to the baby while Marchbanks devised an incubator-type contraption for the newborn. The child survived.
"I don't know how I did it, but I did it," Leftenant-Colon told NPR in a 2023 interview. "I had to help save that baby's life. It had such an effect on me."
Leftenant-Colon said she received a card from her decades later.
In July 1948, when President Harry S. Truman signed the executive order ending segregation in the military, Leftenant-Colon saw it as an opportunity to get regular status in the Army Nurse Corps, something that eluded her until then because of her race. She applied for it, and got it.
In 1952, several years after the military deactivated the 332nd Fighter Group, which was the military's first Black pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen, Leftenant-Colon became a flight nurse with the U.S. Air Force. After retiring from the military in 1965 with the rank of major, she eventually returned to Amityville and worked as the school nurse at her alma mater – Amityville Memorial High School – from 1971 until 1984.
She married Air Force Reserve Capt. Bayard Colon, who died in 1972. The couple had no children.
"It's been a wonderful life," Leftenant-Colon said in 2023.
Leftenant-Colon, whose nickname was "Lefty," was born Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, S. C., a town about 15 miles outside of Charleston. She was one of 12 children born to James, the son of a freed slave, and Eunice Leftenant, who had a penchant for smoking a pipe. (A 13th child, a girl, was born to James and his first wife).
Neither of her parents went beyond the sixth grade, but they instilled the value of education, public service and hard work in their children, Leftenant-Colon said. The family moved north to New York as part of the Great Migration, the relocation of millions of Black Americans who fled the Jim Crow South for a better life in the Northeast, Midwest and West.
When Leftenant-Colon's family arrived in Amityville on Long Island, they had little money, but managed to scrape together enough lumber from around town to build their five-room house in 1923. James worked as a laborer; Eunice stayed at home to raise the children.
"My parents were poor, but we were happy," Leftenant-Colon said in 2023.
In 1989, she became the first national female president of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. Her younger brother, 2nd Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, was one of 355 Tuskegee Airmen pilots deployed to North Africa and Europe during World War II.
On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, while escorting B-24 bombers in his P-51C Mustang, Leftenant collided mid-air with another aircraft flown by a fellow airman who bailed before his plane crashed and became a prisoner of war. Leftenant was last seen flying at 10,000 feet before his plane went down near Austria, according to military records. He was 21 years old. His remains have never been found.
"My mother and father raised a hell of a family," Leftenant-Colon told NPR.
Leftenant-Colon is survived by one sister, Amy Leftenant, of Amityville, and a host of nieces and nephews.
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