Mary Keys Gibson

Gibson was born in Mississippi in 1854 and was an enslaved person.[2] As a young person, she was asked to tend to the sick and injured on the plantation where she was enslaved.[1] After the Civil War, she and her family moved to Sherman, Texas.[2] She met her husband, Reverend Franklin Gibson, in Sherman and the couple moved to Fort Worth in 1872.[1] Together, they helped found what became the Carter Metropolitan CME Church.[1] Mary Gibson worked as a midwife and her husband encouraged her to get a degree in nursing.[2]

Gibson attended a correspondence school, the Chautauqua School of Nursing because segregated school in Texas did not offer degrees in nursing at the time.[1] When she graduated at age 53 in 1907, she became the first African American person in the Southern United States to earn an accredited nursing certificate.[3][1] In 1909, she lobbied the Texas legislature to pass educational and licensing standards for nursing.[2] Gibson worked to desegregate nursing as a profession.[4] She was involved in 1948 to help desegregate the American Nurses Association.[1]

Gibson died in 1952 at the age of 98.[2][1]