Carrie Broadfoot
*Carrie Early Broadfoot was born on this date in 1870. She was a Black nurse and family consumer services advocate.
Carrie Early was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and educated at Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia, graduating in 1899. She was Superintendent from 1900-1904 and moved to Raleigh in the fall of 1904 or winter of 1905. There, she became the Superintendent of St. Agnes Hospital School of Nursing who had been established in Raleigh in 1896 for the Black community. She joined the Red Cross and planned to go overseas during World War I. Instead, she was directed to work at home to help control the influenza epidemic sweeping the country at the time.
In 1920, she and four other North Carolina African American nurses attended a meeting of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in Washington, DC. In 1923, these five nurses founded the North Carolina Colored Graduate Nurses Association (later renamed the North Carolina Association of Negro Registered Nurses). Broadfoot served as its president for the first eight years. This professional organization continued until 1949 when it merged with the North Carolina Nurses Association.
She worked at Lincoln Hospital in North Carolina. In 1923, North Carolina opened a Negro Division of the State Sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, and Broadfoot served as the Nursing Superintendent of the African American division of the Sanatorium as well as Director of its African American nursing school.
She directed this Division until 1944, when a stroke forced her to move in with her sister in Roxbury, MA. Carrie Broadfoot passed away on January 8, 1945; she was buried in Fayetteville's Elmwood Cemetery. In 2016 she was inducted into the North Carolina Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She was married to Thomas Broadfoot (1855-1933).
