Marie began working at the TCH (Tyler County Hospital) in 1954 as a maid scrubbing floors, cleaning bed pans, then promoted to the kitchen. It was hard work.
Just as racial integration came to southeast Texas, Iona Conner encouraged Marie to enter Lamar University’s (Beaumont, Texas) nursing program. Marie reflected, “Mrs. Conner said ‘They are letting Black people go.’ She said she would bring the application.”
Among the first five black women to enter Lamar’s nursing program, Marie was the only one to stay. The racial hatred drove the other four away.
Several parents of Lamar students threatened Marie, and one day they forced her to leave town. Marie had to park off campus, where a police officer would be waiting, and then escort her to school. Another would escort her out every day. When she graduated from Lamar in 1957, the school administrators did not even put a date on her diploma. She was the first African American nursing graduate from Lamar.
Marie became the TCH’s first African American nurse in 1958. “It was still hard,” Marie said, “we had to say ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ to every white person, no matter how old they were. Even to a baby and a little child. I could not eat until everyone else had left the dining room. Also, the white nurses would go and sit down, often, and I had to mop the floor.”
“For 35 years, I was a midwife. I saw the second generation come, delivering the baby of a mother I had delivered. Some say the count was over 2,000 babies.”
“One time in Spurger, way back in the woods, a couple had no money at all. The new father went to the neighbor’s garden and got some tomatoes out of the garden. Then out of his deep freeze, he got some string green beans. Got some green beans and tomatoes for delivering a baby.”
“Black or white ... so many were so poor. They needed someone to help them get that baby into world."
PreciousHeart
www.preciousheart.net/message/2012-Moye.pdf
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