Mary Keys Gibson
American nurse
Mary Keys Gibson (also Gipson, 1854–1952) was an American nurse. Gibson, a former enslaved person, worked as a midwife for many years and later earned her degree in nursing in 1907 at age 53. Gibson was the first African American to earn an accredited nursing degree in the Southern United States. She helped desegregate nursing as a profession.
Biography
Gibson was born in Mississippi in 1854 and was an enslaved person. As a young person, she was asked to tend to the sick and injured on the plantation where she was enslaved. After the Civil War, she and her family moved to Sherman, Texas. She met her husband, Reverend Franklin Gibson, in Sherman and the couple moved to Fort Worth in 1872. Together, they helped found what became the Carter Metropolitan CME Church. Mary Gibson worked as a midwife and her husband encouraged her to get a degree in nursing.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Keys Gibson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.