During the Harlem Renaissance era, the Lin-
coln School for Nurses was located at East 141st
Street between Concord Avenue and Southern
Boulevard in the Bronx. It was affiliated with the
Lincoln Hospital and Home. In 1926 the school
was sold to the city of New York, but the nursing
school was preserved as a private venue.
The Lincoln School played an important role
in the professionalization of African-American
women. Its graduates and teachers included Ivy
Nathan Tinkler, the first African American to be
appointed director, and Ada Belle Samuel Thoms,
an alumna who served for 18 years as assistant su-
perintendent of nurses and a pioneer activist who
worked to secure equal opportunities for African-
American nurses within the American Red Cross
and the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.
NELLALARSEN, who worked as a nurse before
and after she emerged as one of the most sophisti-
cated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, began her
nursing studies at the Lincoln School in 1912. One
of her teachers was Adah Thoms. Larsen com-
pleted her training in 1915 and graduated with 10
other classmates. She then worked for two years at
TUSKEGEEINSTITUTEas superintendent of nurses.
She returned to New York and to the Lincoln Hos-
pital in 1916 and worked for two years as a nurse.
Bibliography
Carnegie, Mary Elizabeth. The Path We Tread: Blacks in
Nursing, 1854–1990.New York: National League
for Nursing Press, 1991.
Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Re-
naissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled.Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Women in the Nursing Profes-
sion: A Documentary History.New York: Garland,
1985.
Thoms, Adah, and Belle Samuel. Pathfinders: A History
of the Progress of Colored Graduate Nurses.New
York: Kay Printing House, 1929.
Lincoln Theatre
One of the first two theaters established in
HARLEM. Located at 56–58 West 125th Street, the
Lincoln was an enormous venue that could accom-
modate some 1,000 patrons. The theater was the
first home to the Anita Bush Players Company and
featured African-American productions for its pri-
marily African-American audiences.
Fats Waller was the longtime house organist
who provided music for the silent films. The re-
vival performances of THEEMPERORJONESstar-
ring Jules Bledsoe were staged here. Ethel Waters
made her New York debut at the Lincoln, and in
1919 and 1920 FLORENCEMILLSappeared at the
Lincoln billed as “Harlem’s dainty, sweet singer.”
The Negro Playwrights Company leased the
facility in 1940. Its first production, announced in
the New York Times,was Theodore Powell’s play
Big White Frog,directed by Powell Lindsay.Lincoln University
The Pennsylvania university that in 1854 became
the first institution of higher learning for men of
African descent. Its presidents included Horace
Mann Bond. Within its first century, the school
graduated approximately one-fifth of all African-
American physicians and one-tenth of all African-
American attorneys.
Located in Chester County, Pennsylvania,
the school is some 45 miles southwest of Phila-
delphia and 55 miles north of Baltimore, Mary-
land. It became a coeducational institution in
1952 and in 1972 became one of Pennsylvania’s
state universities.
Some of its most accomplished graduates in-
cluded ARCHIBALDGRIMKÉ, the nephew of white
South Carolina abolitionists Angelina and Sarah
Grimké, and Thurgood Marshall, the first African-
American Supreme Court Justice. The school also
maintained strong links to African nations, and its
graduates include Nnamdi Asikiwe, a member of
the class of 1930 and the first president of Nigeria,
and Kwame Nkrumah, class of 1939 and the first
president of GHANA.
A number of influential Harlem Renaissance
writers and artists attended Lincoln. These in-
cluded WARING CUNEY, William Allyn Hill,
LANGSTON HUGHES,JAY SAUNDERS REDDING,
and EDWARDSILVERA. In his application to Lin-
coln, poet Langston Hughes made an earnest ap-
peal for admission. “I mustgo to college in order to
be of more use to my race and America,” wrote the
recently published and feted poet. Hughes gradu-
ated in 1929. The university’s Langston Hughes314 Lincoln Theatre