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Pioneers in Purple Scrubs

TCU’s first nursing students of color have made their mark in health care and opened doors for others to follow.

By TCU Magazine

February 22^nd, 2025

BY JENNY BLAIR

A grainy photograph in the Sept. 25, 1962, edition of The Skiff captures a crucial moment in TCU history. Two women are poring over papers, one of them white, one Black. Lucy Harris, then dean of the Harris College of Nursing, was enrolling Allene Parks Jones. That fall, Jones, Patsy Brown and Doris Ann McBride became TCU’s first Black undergraduates.

Notably, all three were nursing students.

At the time, the Civil Rights Movement was making national headlines while Fort Worth was grappling with a nursing shortage. Local doctors had appealed to the school to desegregate.

Jones and McBride graduated from TCU with nursing degrees the following year. After earning a master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, Jones returned to Fort Worth in 1968 to become TCU’s first Black faculty member.

Another early Black nursing student, Eddie Bernice Johnson, earned a TCU nursing degree in 1967. She leveraged the opportunity for an education into world-shaping power — and many more firsts — during a prestigious career in Congress.

“She said she came here because we were one of the few that was taking Black students,” said Suzy Lockwood ’83, associate dean for nursing and nurse anesthesia.

Dean Lucy Harris of Harris College of Nursing enrolls Allene Parks Jones in 1962.

WHAT IT WAS LIKE

Another Black nurse, Joyce Goff, graduated from Harris College with a nursing degree in 1973, having attended on a scholarship. The experience was challenging, she said — not least because she sometimes lacked money for groceries. “You are really a minority because you’ve got a pool full of folks with money and everybody was white around you.”

Nearly everyone, that is. Jones, as a faculty member, provided crucial mentorship, Goff said.

Hortencia Laguna ’76 attended segregated schools in Fort Worth, an experience she said gave her thick skin. Already a nurse upon matriculating, she attended Harris College on a scholarship while raising five children.

“In the barrio, nobody was going past high school. She was on her own little island,” said Laguna’s middle child, Barbara Lara.

No one treated Laguna differently because she was Hispanic, Laguna said, though white students did not try to befriend her either, which led to some sense of isolation. “I often wondered, ‘Why are the Hispanics not here?’ ”

Lara said her mother was nurtured by a network of colleagues. “She did find a lot of support there. … She had good memories of the people there.”

“WE NEED YOU IN NURSING”

Nursing has roots in a centuries-long tradition of healing and midwifery by women of color, including Indigenous, Latina and enslaved women.

“That’s always been a part of who [Black women] are,” Goff said. “When people got sick, we were the ones who put together all the roots and all those potions to help make them better.”

Yet racism tainted nursing education in the United States from its earliest decades, according to a report by the National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing. In the early 20th century, nursing underwent a process of professionalization that excluded traditional practitioners.

As nursing education programs began to affiliate with universities, trainees of color continued to be kept out via quotas or outright exclusion. Instead, historically Black colleges and universities started nursing programs, and nurses of color began their own professional organizations.

Segregation in nursing education ended in the 1950s in much of the United States but persisted in the South until the 1960s. Private schools held out because they could, and for a time that included TCU. The main campus did not desegregate until 1964.

But the nursing school blazed the trail. In 1962, in a city with far too few nurses of any color, amid requests for action from Black doctors, and after years of friction with doctors who thought nursing education belonged in hospitals, not universities, the TCU Board of Trustees approved Harris College of Nursing’s request to admit students without regard to race, color or creed.

That fall, Jones, Brown and McBride took their seats alongside their fellow students.

Today, the nursing school accounts for much of the racial and ethnic diversity at the now-multidisciplinary Harris College, Lockwood said, though the work toward true inclusion is ongoing. “We want them to know: We need you in nursing,” she said. “Health outcomes are better if you’re being cared for by people who are like you.”

The first nurse to serve in Congress, Eddie Bernice Johnson earned her degree from TCU in 1967. Public Domain | Franmarie Metzler

ECHOES DOWN HISTORY

TCU-trained nurses went on to make their marks — both locally and nationally.

Laguna became the first Hispanic nurse in the Fort Worth Independent School District in 1979; the work allowed her to stay home during the summer with her children.

That was important to Lara, who recalls being unhappy while her mother was studying for her degree. “I was a teenager, and I was so jealous,” Lara said. “Now I can appreciate the person she was. Any time anybody needed anything, Spanish-speaking or medical, she was right there. She was always in the community wanting to help people.”

Laguna’s nursing career included medical trips abroad, including to her late father’s birthplace in Panuco, Veracruz, Mexico. “How proud he would be if he knew I was going back to his hometown to help his people,” she said.

Laguna retired in 1998, having founded a nursing dynasty: Lara also became a nurse, as has Lara’s daughter.

As TCU’s pioneering Black student and faculty member, Jones mentored generations of nursing students during her three-decade teaching career; her portrait graces the Annie Richardson Bass Building today. She died in 2015.

Johnson, who died in January 2024, became the first nurse elected to Congress in 1992; she represented the 30th Congressional District of Texas for two decades. Johnson was also the first Black woman to win elected office in Dallas, the city’s first Black state senator since Reconstruction and the first Black woman to head the House Science Committee, according to The New York Times.

Goff went on to earn master’s degrees in education and in health law and a doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution. She forged a prestigious 26-year career with the U.S. Public Health Service, investigating outbreaks of anthrax, polio and Ebola. She retired with the rank of captain.

“I called Allene Jones, and I said, ‘I want you to know that I just made the cover of two nursing magazines, and I want you to know that it’s because of you and what happened to me at TCU,’ ” Goff said. “ ‘What I’ve gotten from TCU is the foundation on which I built my career, where I am today.’ And I thanked her.”

Hortencia Laguna attended TCU on scholarship while raising five children. Photo by Percise Windom

At TCU, Joyce Goff found a mentor in Allene Parks Jones. Goff built a prestigious 26-year career with the U.S. Public Health Service, retiring as a captain. Photo by Percise Windom

© 2026 TCU Magazine

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