The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

During the pre-antibiotic days of the 1920s and 1930s, when people died from infections now easily curable, a group of intrepid and steadfast female nurses known as the “Black Angels”  came together to fight one of humankind’s greatest scourges: tuberculosis.

An agonizing disease responsible for killing over five million Americans in the first half of the 20th century, tuberculosis was decimating New York’s population and causing a devastating nursing shortage across the city.

Desperate to avert a public health crisis set off by white nurses quitting Sea View, a 2000-bed municipal TB sanitorium built specifically to quarantine New York’s poorest, city officials summoned Black nurses. They promised them good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow—some even hoped the nurses would become sick and die, solving America’s “colored problem.” The call went out, winding its way into the American South, and soon the women began to come.

Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the women who boarded Jim Crow trains and buses headed to the remote borough of Staten Island. Once there, they stepped into the dark world of tuberculosis and Sea View, dubbed the “pest house”—a place no one left alive. For decades, they worked in inconceivable conditions, putting in 14-hour days caring for people who lay waiting to die or, worse, become “guinea pigs” to test experimental (often deadly) drugs. Within months, all the nurses became infected with latent TB, their bodies turned into ticking time bombs. But they kept working, supporting one another as they struggled to save lives and change a system that saw them as less than.

Deeply researched, using first-hand interviews and archives, and vibrantly told with intimacy and exquisite detail, The Black Angels captures the beauty and drama of science, sickness, and the fight for equality. Smilios puts the tenacious young women who prevailed under impossible circumstances at the center of this riveting story, showing us how the human spirit and its will to survive can ultimately change the course of history.