By Tia Muma and Soraya Thorne-Smith
During the 1940s, Marisse Scott fought against de facto segregation and racial prejudice in Ontario’s education system and paved the way for future Black nursing students. Across Canada, Black Canadians encountered various forms of segregation in public services (schools, hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries) that affected their everyday lives; additionally, rampant anti-Black sentiment depicted black people as ignorant, backwards, criminal, and immoral. Despite these practices and beliefs that relegated Blacks in Canada to the status of second-class citizens, Marisse Scott became one of the first Black woman to graduate from a nursing school in Ontario. Scott had to go through a lot on her journey to graduate, starting with facing rejection and segregation in her hometown. However, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Guelph, she was able to complete her schooling and continue her work in healthcare.
In her hometown of Owen Sound, Scott applied to nursing school, but was quickly rejected. Scott had graduated from Owen Sound Collegiate and Vocational Institute with Honours in 1946, and, as the superintendent of St. Joseph’s Hospital said her “qualifications are high.” So why was she denied? Reasons for an applicant to be denied ranged from bad grades to under qualification and paperwork. The simple answer Scott received was because she was “colored,” and they “don’t accept colored girls.” According to newspapers at the time, she was also denied admission to the nursing school because the hospital “feared that patients would be traumatized by a black nurse at their bedside.” Even though, at St. Joseph’s Hospital, there was a patient that was eager to have her as a nurse: “I hope I’m the first person to whom she brings a breakfast tray” (Toronto Daily Star 1947).
In 1881, St Joseph’s Hospital started off as three nuns that dedicated themselves to taking care of the sick, injured, and homeless. Their area of care was originally called the Gate House because of its nearness to a big gate. A new building was constructed in 1862, in fact the pit of the elevator shaft is a part of the basement of the old building. The building staff grew in numbers as the patients did, and eventually the building became what it is today. In 1947 when Scott trained in the hospital, she would have lived in the hospital itself until a year before her graduation when a separate residence was built. At the time that Scott was training at the hospital a private room cost $5, much different from today.
Eventually, after some publicity from surrounding newspapers in Ontario and other areas in Canada, Scott sent in an application to St. Joseph’s Hospital at the suggestion of a priest at her local church in Owen Sound (Toronto Daily Star 1947). She was accepted into the Hospital Nursing School and graduated in 1950, becoming one of the first Black women to graduate from a nursing school in Ontario. Her graduation and the publicity that her case gained also disturbed the notion that Canada was a “racism-free space.”
During the 1940s and 50s, many white Canadians viewed Black people as immoral, lazy and criminal. These white supremacist beliefs maintained forms of de jure and de facto segregation in Ontario and beyond, which resulted in Black men and women struggling to find employment in universities, government institutions, and hospitals. Scott’s success in nursing school and the publicity that came with it showed that Black people were “fit” for the kinds of jobs that were exclusively “white positions,” disrupting notions of Black racial inferiority. Scott, and the individuals at St. Joseph’s Hospital who admitted Scott to the nursing programs and taught her, pushed against these racial barriers to open up new opportunities for Black women and girls to be able to achieve their own dreams.
Scott’s experience of racial discrimination in Owen Sound encouraged her and others to challenge barriers in the education system. Her story was a call for equal access and opportunity to education for all Black Canadians. In admitting Scott to its nursing school, St. Joseph Hospital was a leading institution in lowering the colour bar and standing for equal access for all. Rejecting the dominant belief that nursing should be a strictly white profession, St. Joseph’s Hospital was the site of an influential turning point for Black Canadian Civil Rights. Guelph was home to a woman, Marisse Scott, who would be a trailblazer for a new generation of Black nurses, and an institution, St. Joseph Hospital, that was a model for integration in nursing.