‘A Forbidden World’

Despite racism and discrimination, the first Black graduate of the School of Nursing at the Medical College of Virginia prevailed and went on to inspire those who followed

by

“What, during her student years, were the thoughts and feelings of the first and only Negro who had been graduated from our basic baccalaureate nursing program?”

So begins a 1967 article in Nursing Outlook, a prominent nursing journal, recounting a 1965 panel discussion with Charlotte Anne Wynn Pollard. In 1960, Pollard had become the first Black graduate of the School of Nursing at the Medical College of Virginia, which today is part of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Pollard’s answers, both simple and nuanced, to 23 questions asked by faculty members capture the pain of the racism and discrimination she experienced in the cafeteria, classroom, wards and dorms. The article changed Pollard’s name and omitted the college, but both the article and a transcript are archived at VCU’s library, along with other papers belonging to Professor Edward Peeples, a well-known social justice advocate who died in 2019.

The panel was meant to inform faculty of how their treatment helped Pollard feel both comfortable and uncomfortable, as well as how the school’s climate made her feel accepted and rejected. It came as two more Black students were about to enroll and MCV’s segregationist practices threatened the institution’s federal funding. Faculty members were leading the effort to deepen their colleagues’ understanding of their own prejudices.

“A lot of times, I felt like I was in a no-man’s-land,” Pollard said in a 1985 recorded interview with a retired School of Nursing faculty member. “I felt that I didn’t belong to anybody.”

In a 1996 nursing sorority profile, Pollard — who by that time had decades of experience as a psychiatric nurse — answered the article’s question succinctly: “I was in a forbidden world during my whole experience.”

Early Inspiration

Pollard was born in Richmond in 1935 to Vivian Wynn and her husband, Richard, a custodian at MCV. An only child, she was pushed by her mother to achieve academically and to participate in their community. 

In the 1985 interview, Pollard said that much of her early life revolved around the First African Baptist Church located on College and East Broad streets, steps from MCV. “I was born two blocks from that church,” she said. “There was a residential area there, and so a lot of the people would come to that church. It seems as though my whole life has been centered a lot right there in that area.” 

She also recalled the impact of seeing the student nurses from MCV’s segregated St. Philip Hospital every Sunday at her church. “Seeing those nurses might have made some impression on me to be a nurse.”   

Young Charlotte Wynn’s achievements were published in local Black newspapers. In 1953, the society pages recorded her teen leadership role at the Richmond branch of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, her introduction as a debutante and her straight-A record at Armstrong High School, which came with recognition and numerous scholarships.

Her 1954 high school yearbook was a testament to Pollard’s academic strength and leadership skills, as she was voted most studious girl and student government president. Next to her senior portrait, she listed her many accolades and an aspiration to study chemistry. 

“She should have been a doctor, but it was the 1950s and she was a Black woman,” recalls her son, Donald Pollard Jr., a Comcast executive based in Atlanta.

Pollard’s senior year was also one of dramatic social change. Years of legal work by the NAACP fighting against segregation in education culminated in a favorable ruling in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Black community in Richmond supported the fight with rallies and drives for NAACP membership and voter registration. 

On April 1, 1954, NAACP chief council Thurgood Marshall gave speeches at Virginia Union University and Virginia State College (now a university) to drive up NAACP membership. The VSC newspaper touted the future Supreme Court justice as the legal champion of many cases, including Sweatt v. Painter, a landmark 1950 Supreme Court case in which the University of Texas was ordered to admit an African American student, Heman Sweatt, to its law school. In a unanimous decision, the court found that Texas had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because the supposedly “separate but equal” Black law school was vastly inferior in tangible and intangible aspects to the white law school. The ruling established that separate facilities are inherently unequal, making way for the Brown v. Board decision argued by Marshall. 

During Marshall’s speeches to the capacity crowds at the schools, he addressed the college-age members of the audience specifically. “We are heading into an integrated society,” Marshall was quoted as saying. “Today you must plan to be in competition with everyone, because opportunities are wider and responsibilities are tougher.” 

Marshall’s message was typical of the positively pragmatic tenor printed on the pages of the Richmond Afro-American newspaper about the future for Black students as the Supreme Court decided segregation by race was illegal, even as Virginia leadership resisted mixing races in classrooms. 

Headlines from 1954 in the local paper captured the turbulent times, but also set a tone for a positive future with a weekly series on the last gasps of Jim Crow laws in education and reports of schools that were integrating successfully. One such article,“Va. Medical College has graduated 20 since 1951,” explained that “The Medical College of Virginia bowed to the decision of federal courts in accepting its colored students. College officials took the position that the institution was obligated to accept qualified colored students and thought it unwise to refuse admittance to those who could meet entrance requirements.” The article, however, doesn’t say if the students were openly welcomed.

Journey to MCV

After graduating from Armstrong High, Pollard accepted a scholarship to Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, then a small, all-female, Christian school. She stayed for a year, majoring in chemistry with medical aspirations. Wheaton’s 1955 yearbook shows that she was the only Black student.

Pollard returned to Richmond in 1955 and studied chemistry for two years at VUU. In a 1985 interview, she said, “Somewhere along the way, I had the idea that I wanted to be a nurse, but I was encouraged to have a baccalaureate degree in nursing.” She expressed interest in attending the University of Maryland, but a counselor suggested she save the out-of-state tuition and attend MCV instead.

When Pollard visited the School of Nursing registrar’s office to inquire about studying nursing there, the administrator encouraged her to enroll at the St. Philip School of Nursing, which offered a diploma. “And I said, ‘No, I want a baccalaureate degree.’ She said, ‘You’re in the right place. Have a seat.’ That was the beginning,” Pollard remembered. She transferred to MCV in the summer of 1957.

In the beginning ... I didn’t even realize; I was just going to school. I never thought about the fact that this was integration.

—Charlotte Anne Wynn Pollard

That year was marked by direct conflict over equal education. In Arkansas, nine Black students at Little Rock High School faced violent mobs while attending a segregated school. Just months later, Virginians elected Attorney General Lindsey Almond, a strident segregationist, as governor. Political opposition to school integration — known as Massive Resistance — was well underway. As Almond took office, however, that strategy would shift toward school closures, state-controlled pupil assignments and other tactics as integration increasingly became the law of the land.

Pollard was not the first Black woman to become a nurse, nor was she the first to study at MCV. St. Philip Hospital had opened in 1920 to treat nonwhite patients, and its nursing school had long provided a professional path for Black women. Other programs in Virginia granted diplomas, too, such as the Hampton Institute, the Piedmont Sanitorium and Norfolk State University.

She was, however, the first Black student to enroll in the School of Nursing. Pollard said in 1965, “In the beginning ... I didn’t even realize; I was just going to school. I never thought about the fact that this was integration; I just wanted to go. I remember telling [the registrar] when I came, ‘I just want to be a nurse and this is the school nearest to me.’”

‘You don’t belong here’

Once Pollard chose her path and entered MCV, however, the exclusions began. “There was some outright rejection, such as failure to speak, people who would move away physically. Though there were painful situations, they were clear indications as to where I stood,” Pollard told the faculty in 1965.

During her first summer at MCV, Pollard says a nurse in the cafeteria told her, “You don’t belong here,” and pointed her toward the St. Philip cafeteria.

In 1965, Pollard also analyzed the cruelty of segregation and the Jim Crow caste system in place in Virginia. “I felt so sensitive that I didn’t want to admit to anybody that I was afraid or angry so, here, I would push back the real feelings,” she said.

While there were several instructors whom she felt she could go to for academic help, she wasn’t comfortable seeking their emotional support. “I think I ventilated most on one of my dormmates over at St. Philip Hall, rather than the instructor,” Pollard said. “It wasn’t because I didn’t feel that the instructor would understand; it was my inner feeling that, maybe, I would be considered a baby.”

Outside the classroom, Pollard connected with her classmates only through music and religious clubs. “There was lack of freedom of movement,” Pollard said in 1965. “Here, again, was a reinforcement of an old, buried feeling. … Are my manners bad, would I miss the event, or just what is it, why is it? I know in reality that this was not my personal deficiency but, again, a part of our society. This is a constant reminder of ‘difference’ and a suppressed feeling of not being acceptable. … This is a blow at self-esteem and self-confidence.”

In the 1985 oral history, Pollard recalled the hurt she felt when a nursing school administrator told her she was excluded from social events with her classmates. “I remember crying and saying, … ‘Well, what did I do?’ Always I thought, ‘What did I do?’ And she said, ‘You did not do anything.’ And I thought maybe I had been disrespectful. She said, ‘No, it wasn’t anything you’d done.’”

Pollard told herself she didn’t need to attend the social affairs she was excluded from because she was engaged to Donald Pollard, a student at VUU, where she could socialize freely. “But I know it was a rationalization, because it still hurt that I couldn’t be with my classmates,” Pollard said.

She attributed her strength to a variety of sources, including her St. Philip dormmates, her parents, the First African Baptist Church congregation and herself. “I once was packing my clothes; I was about to leave, and the girls on the hall said, ‘Now, you know you’re not going. You stay here; you go on and fight it out,’” Pollard recalled.

In her final year, her classmates made her feel included during a public health rotation when they all brought bagged lunches so they could eat together, picnic-style, to avoid the restaurants that were discriminatory and barred her.

Pollard graduated in 1960 and married Donald the same week. Her professional trajectory, however, was more complicated. Barred from working in pediatrics at MCV because she was Black, she pivoted to psychiatric nursing and quickly became a head nurse. Her son says it was a choice his mother made to fill an important need in her community.

Despite the hurt she had experienced, Pollard stated in interviews that she did not want to dwell on the past, urging the faculty in 1965 to look introspectively and focus on the future.

For Nicole Parsons-Pollard, a three-time VCU graduate and a provost at Georgia State University, her mother-in-law’s words from 60 years ago remain relevant. “There are people in the world who would have us forget that segregation existed and that it was harmful — not only to those marginalized but to the majority population as well,” Parsons-Pollard says. “They would have us all act like none of this happened and that what did occur was so long ago that it’s not relevant at all. It’s relevant because Anne was hopeful, and my hope today is challenged.”

Followed Footsteps

When Pollard graduated in 1960, MCV’s doors were not opened to other Black students. Leadership in Richmond and Virginia continued to resist school integration at all levels.

In 1960, Florence Jones-Clarke, a Petersburg native and historian for the Central Virginia chapter of the National Black Nurses Association, was a high school senior planning to go into nursing. That same year, the MCV Board of Visitors decided to stop accepting students at St. Philip and to close the segregated nursing school in 1962.

A 1960 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the closure stated that the School of Nursing was for white students. Jones-Clarke was encouraged to study out of state at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. “I already knew that I couldn’t go to MCV,” Jones-Clarke says. “They had St. Philip. That’s where young people of color went. You didn’t even give MCV any consideration, a school that was predominantly white. You didn’t even think about that.”

At North Carolina A&T, Jones-Clarke earned a baccalaureate degree that — as Pollard found — led to leadership opportunities that included teaching.

No Black nursing students would earn nursing credentials from MCV or VCU (created in 1968 by the merger of MCV and the Richmond Professional Institute) for nearly a decade after Pollard graduated. But when they did matriculate to the School of Nursing, Pollard herself welcomed the next Black students.

Sharon Jones Frazier, a retired Fairfax County public health nurse who earned her baccalaureate in nursing in 1969, remembers Pollard personally making her feel welcome. “Miss Pollard was like a mentor to me,” Jones Frazier says. “She was a wonderful person, wonderful nurse. When I came to MCV, I went to her home, had dinner, went to her church with her, and she was there if I wanted to talk to her about anything that was happening at school — a nice family and a good person.”

Thelma Johnson, a retired nurse educator and assistant director of critical care nursing, graduated from VCU in 1970 and still lives in the Richmond area. She recalls Pollard as a friendly presence during her studies, which were marked equally by scholarship and some hijinks. Johnson was touched that Pollard attended her graduation. “She was the epitome [of a strong nurse] to me. When I graduated, she was there and she said, ‘You did it!’ And I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I did.’ She was an inspiration for me. [I thought] she did it, [then] I can do it.”

Sense of Healing

A graduate degree from the University of Maryland positioned Pollard to work as a nursing instructor who designed the psychiatric rotation curriculum for the nursing programs at area community colleges.

By 1996, Pollard was working as an experienced certified psychiatric nurse at Charter Westbrook Hospital and also introducing concepts that were revolutionary in Richmond. “I work primarily with ‘inner healing,’ with the spiritual dimensions of the unique individual,” she said in a magazine profile. “I teach the art of silence, deep breathing, and relaxation, to discover a peaceful place within.”

Her son and daughter-in-law recall that she was ahead of modern health food trends, eating granola and seeds sourced from specialty stores. She loved Hawaii and greeted callers on her answering machine salutation with “aloha.”

Devoted to helping others in psychiatric nursing, her career also included working in home health care for psychiatric patients and efforts to prevent child abuse. Her company, Health Unlimited, focused on stress management and holistic health.

She died in 2001 from lung and brain cancer at 66 years old.

‘It’s history’ 

For Pollard’s family, and the Black nurses who knew her, her words and voice document the ongoing struggle for equity and inclusion in higher education and in nursing.

“It’s history. It’s what actually happened,” Johnson says. “Sharing that with others is something that people should know about. We need to know about that to make things better in the future, because you are doomed to repeat yourself if you don’t learn something out of it. Things are not always equal, but you can try to make it that way.”

Frances Montague, president of the Central Virginia chapter of the National Black Nurses Association, still sees acceptance of Black nurses, who make up 6.3% of the workforce today, as an issue. “When you start to work individually, one-on-one with the patients, we still have some of the same things: whether or not a patient wants you to take care of them, whether they think that a Black nurse is actually capable of providing for them,” Montague says. “There are still times when leadership higher up would choose the associate degree white nurse over the bachelor’s degree Black nurse.”

She also mourns the lack of Black faculty in nursing schools, another key to helping minority students see themselves reflected and accepted.

In 2023, Black students made up 20% of VCU’s School of Nursing student body, and the school had an extensive diversity plan. Earlier this year, however, VCU’s board of visitors voted to eliminate the Division of Inclusive Excellence in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order labeling diversity efforts as discriminatory and calling for their elimination.

“I’d like to think that my alma mater, VCU, is better than it was in the past and will continue to strive toward inclusive excellence,” Parsons-Pollard says. “Charlotte Anne Wynn Pollard was one of many people who moved the institution beyond its history.”