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 turnof-the-century rural North Carolina. She went on to use her education and skills for the good of her community well into the 1950s. For more than a decade after the Civil War, Union troops occupied the former Confederate States to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which had abolished slavery, ensured citizenship and due process under the law to newly freed former slaves, and gave African American men the right to vote and run for office. Formerly enslaved people were then free to enroll in public schools, enjoy parks and other public places, own property, and start businesses. However, because the outcome of the 1876 U.S. presidential race between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden was fiercely disputed, the two political parties struck a deal known as the Compromise of 1877 to end the standoff. 3 Congressional Democrats allowed Hayes to be declared president; in return, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. Without federal troops to keep the peace, racial bigotry and violence ensued. An incident that would have far-reaching consequences occurred in 1892 when an African American man, Homer Plessy, refused to give up his seat to a white man on a train in New Orleans, as he was required to do by state law. Plessy was arrested. His lawyers argued that the Louisiana law separating African Americans from whites on trains violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, and by a vote of seven to one, the justices ruled against Plessy, allowing states to enact segregation laws as long as public facilities were “separate but equal.” Thereafter, until the 1960s, schools, playgrounds, and hospitals across the South remained segregated—but rarely, if ever, were they equal.