Charlotte Rhone: Nurse, Welfare Worker, And Entrepreneur

Charlotte Rhone, a pioneering African American nurse born in Craven County, North Carolina, at the end of the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, grew up in a society shaped by the harshly discriminatory Jim Crow laws enacted in her home state and in others across the American South. Her choices in education and employment were severely limited because of these racist policies, but Rhone's tenacity, flexibility, and intelligence overcame many obstacles that oppressed poverty-stricken African American women in turn-of-the-century rural North Carolina. She went on to use her education and skills for the good of her community well into the 1950s.