Barbara Atkinson-Liggins

Often resistance to prejudice and discrimination by ordinary Black people during the Jim Crow era in the South has gone unnoticed in history books. Barbara relates several stories in her narrative about her parents’ unheralded resistance. She writes of her mother walking out of a store with her head held high, her girls in tow, and vowing in earshot of the White store attendant never to return after being treated in a racially disrespectful manner.  Barbara also describes her father as one who was not so calm after prejudicial or discriminatory treatment. Her father’s roaring exclamation and demand to a White gas station attendant, “I am not your uncle and never call me that again!” left the family a bit nervous but proud at the same time.

Barbara received her Bachelors of Science degree in nursing from Tuskegee University, the first college in the State of Alabama to offer a Bachelor of Nursing degree. She later earned a Masters of Nursing and a Certificate in Nursing Administration from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, where she says she constantly had to prove her competence because of having an undergraduate degree from an Historically Black University.

Barbara believed what her professors told her, that is, any work environment would be lucky to hire a Tuskegee nurse. That gave her confidence to enter and compete in many professional environments.

Despite having her competence challenged along her educational and employment journey because she had graduated from Tuskegee, Barbara became one of only a few Black nursing administrators in the nation’s Veterans Administration Hospital system. The Tuskegee nurse rose to the top.