Chapter 03: An African American Man in Nursing School in the 60s
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Description
In this chapter, Mr. Brewer sketches his decision to enter nursing school and talks about the challenges for men in the nursing profession in the 1960s. The story begins when he and a friend decided to apply for jobs as orderlies at a Dallas hospital, where he became interested in medicine and nursing and entered the program at Dallas Vocational Nursing School (1967-1968). He discusses the fact that he was the only male in his class and one of five black students and tells stories to demonstrate his ability to succeed in this environment. Next he explains his decision to enter the four-year nursing program at Prairie View College [Prairie View A&M University, 1968 – 1972; the nursing program located in Houston, Texas]. Mr. Brewer then talks about the different roles he served in a hospital and the experience he gained.
He then turns to the sources of suspicion and difficulties accepting male nurses at the time. He explains limits on how and where men could practice. He also talks about the advantages he had interning at a county hospital, where he was given unusual levels of responsibility.
Identifier
BrewerCC_01_20190516_C03
Publication Date
5-2-2019
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS, Oral History Interview, May 02, 2019
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Experiences Related to Gender, Race, Ethnicity; Personal Background; Overview
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I met some—a lot of different people, and I met a guy. I met one young man who we spent a lot of time together on campus, doing things, studying, and having fun. And one day, I probably made—mentioned to my friend. I said, “I’m in school, and this is my second semester” and then I said, “I have to work. I’ve got to make money. I just can’t live off of grants, and that’s not enough money for me to survive and to help my mother.” And I said, “This—I need to go get a job.” His grandfather was a physician in Dallas, and he said, “Why don’t we try the hospital? Let’s go get a job in the hospital.” “Sure, yeah, let’s go, let’s try it out.” My sister is already a nurse, so I knew a little about what she’s doing and her style of living, and I could see it was very positive. She was making money and—well, money that we’ve never had before, and she was in a very worthy profession. Her husband was—she married—got married. She married a guy who’s also a licensed vocational nurse, so I got—I had a chance to see him in his role, and I was very impressed, very cleanly dressed every day, very smart, very articulate about what he was doing. It sounded great to hear somebody talking about anatomy and physiology and diseases. That had an impression on me. So we went to the hospital, and we applied for a job, and when we applied for a job, we told the personnel of the record, at the time the personnel was not big like it is today. It was a small room, and you meet a personnel person, and they either hire you or not hire you. And we told we was [sic] college students, and they were impressed, “We’re college students, we need a job, we want to work,” and he said, “So what type of work do you want to do?” and we looked at each other and said, “What kind of work you got?” And he said, “Well, we have these orderly positions,” and obviously, we need to work in the evenings and after class in the evenings after school. And he said, “Well, we have some orderly positions open on the evenings—in the evening, and I think you guys would be—would do well at that. It doesn’t require any special skills at this time, and you will—I do think you’ll learn a lot.” We said, “We’ll take it.” And we did tell just a slight little fib in that we told the personnel of the record we were premed majors. And that was impressive, right? I was an accounting major, now I forget what he was majoring in, but his grandfather was a doctor, you know, “We want to be doctors” something. “Okay, well we’re going to hire you as orderlies.” Well, we didn’t know what an orderly was. We thought orderly was like being a security guard, maintaining order. We came to work, got out of the orientation, which was nothing, and they said, “Well—” I was assigned to be like on-call orderly. He was assigned to work up in the labor and delivery area, moving the linen, dirty and the soiled linen, cleaning, that type of thing, and I was basically the same. I was called—be taking equipment to different parts of the hospital, but I thought it was very prestigious because I—my name got to be called over the PA system. In the olden days in the hospital, they had a public-address system where they would call, “Dr. Johnson, calling Dr. Johnson.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, yeah, I remember.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
But they would say, “Calling Cecil the orderly, Cecil the orderly, go to Four South or go in Five North.” And I would go there, and the nurses would tell me what they wanted done, “Take the dirty linen and take it to the chute—take it down or pick up some supplies” or whatever. I thought that was quite very impressive getting my name called over the PA system.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So how long did you work in that role before you decided, hey—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Less than a year. While I was working at Parkland, I became quite interested in medicine and what the nurses were doing. And at that time in 1966, ’67, there were no—very few if any registered nurses, male, and there were a handful of male LVNs, my brother-in-law being one of them, and I thought, You know, this is maybe what I want to do. So I knew he had—he graduated from Dallas Vocational Nursing School, which was the linked with the Dallas Independent School District, and I said, “This is what I want to do.” And I applied, I was accepted—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And that was to—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—in 1967.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And that is Dallas Vocational Nursing School?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Uh-huh. And I enrolled, and you—I was... I showed up for class, and lo and behold, I’m the only male in this class for this year, 1967. There were approximately probably, I would say, 70 students, maybe 5 black students including me, and I’m the only male. And this is my first encounter with white students ever in my life because remember in the ’60s, everything was segregated, so I never interacted with any white male students ever. This is my first—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
(overlapping dialogue; inaudible).
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—encounter with white female students and white instructors. I had never had a white instructor in my life.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So tell me about that. I mean what were you feelings going into that, what were you thinking about?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I mean, I think by the time I was a teenager, 18, 19 years old, I had such arrogance about me by that time, I didn’t—I wasn’t intimated or anything like that. I really can’t recall if I was—had any feelings at all other than I wanted to be a nurse, I wanted to succeed. I was accepted by the instructors, and they supported me, and I always tell people that there’s something special about the first and the only. So they were kind of protective of me in a way because I’m the only male and I’m black in this class of—and I’m—I want to be a nurse. That’s a triple threat, you know—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—in 1967.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—was there any weird gender stuff going on? Like, why does a guy want to be a nurse, you know?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
There wasn’t any gendered stuff going on—there was plenty of gender stuff going on especially among my peer group because it was also homophobic at that time, and the whole issue of discussing homophobic ideas was wide open at that time. My friends would confront me with, “Are you gay?” Well, that’s not the word they used back then; they used another word. (laughs) And there was a lot of stigma, a lot of stigma about that, and I really—I felt good about myself. My self-confidence was high and I—so I didn’t let that get in my way. I think that what I saw in becoming in an LVN was what I saw in my brother-in-law, intelligence, respect, respectability in your community, this whole—the whole appearance thing just—that elevated your personality in your work group, in your community, with your friends.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s your brother-in-law’s name?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
[Willy?].
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And his last name?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
[Hill?].
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And your sister married—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
[Peggy?]—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Peggy.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Peggy. And so he’ll—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—they had a tremendous amount of influence on me at that time.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yes, it sounds like they really did.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And so I became the president of my LVN class among all these women. They treated me well. I loved feeling I was protected. And while I was in the LVN school, I went to school in the mornings and I worked at my orderly job at Parkland in the evening.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what’s the—I’m sorry, what was the name of the hospital?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Parkland Memorial Hospital, which is now on the Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Parkland Hospital is the county hospital for Dallas County, huge. And I know Southwestern Medical School is one of the best—better medical schools in the country. And I got different roles. I got to work in different places while I was working at Parkland. I went from being the float orderly, and I got a job in emergency room at Parkland working with registration, which allowed me to do things with registering patients. Well, back in those days, we’d make nameplates on a—like a typewriter, a metal typewriter, and you would get these little metal plates, and that was one of my primary jobs on the evening as well as retrieving the paper charts for a patient. But there would be a lull in the emergency room, and during that time, my supervisor will allow me to study. So they knew I was in the LVN school, they were impressed with that, they said, “You can study during your—during the downtime,” so I was able to study on company time while working.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, they were really supportive all around.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I think they were supportive all around. I mean, I think they’re more supportive because I was in a minority role of wanting to be a nurse, a male nurse who’s a black one. Well, really, you know?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Mm-hmm.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And so I did that all the way through the LVN school. I graduated and then while I was in the LVN school, I received encouragement from everybody to pursue additional education. My LVN instructors—[Ms. Neal?] over at Baylor Medical Center—I forget all the name of all those instructors now—they were very supportive. They said, “You should—you’re doing well, you should maybe consider becoming a registered nurse.” They had not met many male registered nurses. I was slated to graduate in 1968. I took them up on their word. I was feeling so good about becoming an LVN. I was doing well in school, making excellent grades, getting lots of kudos, feedback from nurses, encouragement from my sister and brother-in-law and other people in the community who had maybe been stigmatizing me. And so I started to apply for college to become a registered nurse. I applied, I went to TWU, they weren’t accepting men in their program because it’s Texas Woman’s University, and that was the big university in Dallas. So I read that Prairie View nurse—Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college where my teachers had gone to school had a nursing program, a four-year nursing program because the—my encouragement was to get a four-year education, the degree. One day, my nephew and I, we got and—we borrowed my brother’s car, we drove to Prairie View. I went in, I applied, I met with the dean, and she was supportive, and I got accepted into Prairie View in 1968, and I finished my LVN program like August the, say, twenty-seventh, and four days later, I was on the campus of Prairie View and then I—and then two weeks later, I took my LVN license certification, passed that, and became an LVN, and I’m also in school studying for my baccalaureate in nursing simultaneously.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And you got that degree in 1972.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Right. I completed my four-year baccalaureate education from Prairie View University in 1972. While I was in nursing school, I was the president of my nursing class from freshman through my senior year. I had lots of great experiences, also some—very much some challenges because remember this is 1968, so this is 1969, 1970, there’s still not a great acceptance of men in nursing. The stigma is even bigger for—on male nurses at that time. When I entered Prairie View, I was one of six guys who were in my—who were accepted into that first male class then. We were the first males to be accepted into Prairie View’s program.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
The dean at the time was a trailblazer. However, the guys dropped out—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you’re the—
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
—along the way.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—the only one left?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I was the only one left to graduate in 1972, so I became the first male graduate of Prairie View A&M University College of Nursing in 1972.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, was the stigma in—against male nurses at the time, did—what were the ideas patients were bringing versus what were the ideas that students and professionals in healthcare bringing?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, the perspective—let me start [taking two faces?], perspective of the patients. In the LVN school, we were told—we were—I was told that “The jobs that would be available to you as a male LVN would be in the area of men care.” Urology, orthopedics, emergency room, those were the traditional roles of a nurse—a male nurse in the ’60s whether you were in Dallas or Chicago. That’s on the military as a medic, a medic level because a lot of guys went to the military and then they—and when they left and they became medics, and after medic, they entered nursing school. But remember in 1960s and the ’70s, all those guys in the Vietnam War. It was post-Vietnam where you saw the surge of male nurses, but they were coming out of the military where they’ve been medics. But anyway, my experience was that I at my—well, in the LVN school and when I did work doing the summers between—when I was in Prairie View, my job were in urology, orthopedics, were my primary roles. I was not allowed to care for female patients. I was allowed to assist in the care of a female patient but not independent.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What about children?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Oh, the same thing with children. I was able to care for children, male kids—I mean, excuse me, the males only. Because I can recall in my baccalaureate program at Prairie View, one of the significant courses that you take is like you take Medical-Surgical Nursing, Mental Health Nursing, OB, pediatric nursing. With my OB rotations, I had trouble finding a hospital that would accept me as a nursing student, a professional nursing student for my clinical care.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
St. Luke’s wouldn’t accept me, Methodist Hospital wouldn’t accept me, so I ended up having to do all of my OB experience and pediatric experiences at the county. It not called Lyndon Baines Johnson, but at the time, it was called Jefferson Davis Hospital. And guess what, I don’t regret it. I’m glad they sent me to Jeff Davis Hospital, the county hospital. My experiences were far beyond what my colleague—what my peer group was getting.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Really? Why was that?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
This county hospital, it was a little more liberal. I was allowed to work independently with my patients, and I think that was the difference.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
And so that was my—one of my biggest encounters as a nursing—male nursing student was in the area of OB-GYN. I didn’t have any problem with psych or the others, but one of the things we—I had to be very cognizant of was the gender situation and respected that and not—and didn’t—I didn’t try to pressure that. It was 1970, 1971. That was just the time.
Recommended Citation
Brewer, Cecil C. RN, BSN, MS and Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: An African American Man in Nursing School in the 60s" (2019). Interview Chapters. 905.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/905
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