01/22/2025
NCA salutes Maj. Nancy Leftenant-Colon, the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, during .
Born, Sept. 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, S. C., Leftenant-Colon, affectionately called “Lefty” was one of 12 children born to James, the son of a freed slave, and Eunice Leftenant. She graduated Amityville Memorial High School in 1939, and 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 joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a reservist in January 1945, and was assigned to Lowell Hospital in Massachusetts; and was then assigned to the 332nd Station Medical Group at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Ohio in 1946.
There she and fellow flight surgeon and Tuskegee Airman Vance H. Marchbanks, Jr., saved the life of a premature baby girl born to a Black woman who was refused healthcare at a local hospital which only accepted white patients - so the two delivered the child on their own.
In July 1948, President Truman signed an executive order ending segregation in the military, and Leftenant-Colon seized the opportunity to get regular status in the Army Nurse Corps.
In 1952, 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 returned to Amityville and worked as the school nurse at her alma mater –high school – from 1971 until 1984. She married Air Force Reserve Capt. Bayard Colon, who died in 1972. The couple had no children.
Leftenant-Colon’s younger brother, 2nd Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, was a Tuskegee Airman pilot deployed to North Africa and Europe during WWII. He died, April 12, 1945, when his plane collided mid-air with a fellow pilots. He was 21 years old. His remains have never been found.
Leftenant-Colon died peacefully this year, Jan. 8, at Massapequa Center Rehabilitation and Nursing in Amityville She was 104. She is buried at Amityville Cemetery in New York.
