Catholic sister nurses in Selma, Alabama, 1940-1972.

This study analyzes the activities of religious sister nurses as they confronted racism in the American South from 1940 to 1972. Selma was chosen as a case study because, in the 1960s, events in that southern town marked a turning point in the civil rights movement in the United States. This is a story about the workings of gender, race, religion, and nursing. The sisters' work demonstrates how an analysis of race in nursing history is incomplete without an understanding of the roles that a number of Catholic religious women took in reaching out to African Americans in the Deep South.