Mabel Keaton Staupers papers

This collection pertains to the nursing career of Mabel Keaton Staupers. It includes correspondence, clippings, speeches, programs, invitations, and photographs. Correspondence of note includes several telegrams sent when she was named as a recipient of the Spingarn Medal in 1951, including notes of congratulations from Grace Nail Johnson and Lillian Smith. Also included are programs of events for which Staupers was commencement speaker, conference discussant, or honoree. Event programs of note include the 1950 Meharry Day at Meharry Medical College, in which Staupers was the honoree and featured speaker. Other documents reflect her involvement with the New York University Institute on Postwar Reconstruction and the Harlem Tuberculosis and Health Committee.

Photographs depict Staupers receiving the Sojourner Truth Award in 1947; with other nurses at the Harlem Hospital Residence upon her return from the first post-war biennial convention of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses; presenting scrolls from the NACGN to charter members; and chatting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Clippings and some correspondence relate to the Bethune Memorial, although the papers otherwise minimally reflect the working relationship between Staupers and Mary McLeod Bethune. Her involvement with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) is also reflected minimally. Correspondence between Dorothy I. Height and Staupers relates to their work on behalf of the NCNW's Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Fund Drive to erect a statue in Bethune's honor.

Other materials in the collection include collected clippings and ephemera on the independence of Staupers' native Barbados, including the December 1966 Super-Dance in Celebration of the Independence of Barbados held at the Hotel Americana in New York.