In the closing months of World War II, as American forces pressed toward victory in Europe and the Pacific, the U.S. Navy still barred Black women from its Nurse Corps. That exclusion ended on March 8, 1945, when Phyllis Mae Dailey, a 25-year-old New York nurse, was sworn in as an ensign. She became the first African American woman to serve in the Navy and the first to hold a commissioned rank in the service. Born in New York City on March 12, 1919, to parents who had emigrated from the British West Indies four years earlier, Dailey trained at the Lincoln School for Nurses and later studied public health at Teachers College, Columbia University. She worked in a city hospital before the war. After Pearl Harbor, she applied repeatedly to military nursing programs. The Army rejected her on racial grounds. The Navy Nurse Corps, long closed to Black applicants, formally ended its exclusion on January 25, 1945, under pressure from advocates including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mabel Keaton Staupers of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Dailey had already applied. When the door opened, she walked through it. At her induction ceremony in New York, she told reporters she simply wanted to be “just another nurse accepted into the service” and to do a good job. She added that the barriers could not hold indefinitely: “You can’t keep us back any longer; the new world is coming.” Three other Black nurses—Edith Mazie DeVoe, Helen Fredericka Turner, and Eula Lucille Stimley—followed within weeks. By the end of the war, these four women were the only African Americans among the roughly six thousand nurses who served in the Navy Nurse Corps. Dailey remained in uniform after the war, advancing to lieutenant (junior grade) in 1948 and serving until her discharge in 1951. She then returned to civilian nursing education, teaching for the New York City Board of Education for more than two decades. She married, raised three children, and lived in Mount Vernon, New York, until her death in 1976 at age 57. Her commission arrived three years before President Truman’s 1948 executive order mandating the desegregation of the armed forces. In that interval, the presence of Dailey and the three nurses who joined her demonstrated that Black women could meet the professional standards of the Navy Nurse Corps and that the old exclusions had been administrative choices, not necessities. The change was limited and late; the Army Nurse Corps had already admitted hundreds of Black nurses by 1945. Still, the Navy’s step, once taken, did not reverse.