Nancy Leftenant-Colon was the first black woman to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps after it was desegregated after World War II and a famous Tuskegee Air Force pilot Sister, she died on January 8 in Amityville, New York, at the age of 104.

Leftenant died peacefully at the Massapequa Center Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Amityville, where she spent the past year, her nephew Chris Leftenant told NPR All live there.

"Aunt Nancy lived a long and happy life," said her niece, Cheryl Leftenant.

Leftenant-Colon graduated from Amityville Memorial High School in 1939 with dreams of becoming a nurse. She attended Lincoln School of Nursing in the Bronx, the first school in the United States to train black women to become nurses, according to New York Public Library archives.

She worked at a local hospital before joining the United States Army Nurse Corps in January 1945 as a reservist. According to her biography on file with the Tuskegee Airmen, she was initially assigned to Lowell Hospital in Massachusetts, where she cared for soldiers injured in the conflict in Alabama.

The following year, she was assigned to the 332nd Station Medical Group at Rockburn Army Air Base, Ohio. There, she teamed up with famed flight surgeon and Tuskegee Airman Vance H. Marchbanks Jr., and the two delivered and saved the life of a premature baby girl , the baby girl weighed just 3 pounds, had vitamin K deficiency and was not expected to survive.

The local hospital only accepted white patients at the time and refused to allow black mothers to give birth there, so the two gave birth to their children on their own. Leftenant-Colon said she gave the babies vitamin K, while Marchbanks designed an incubator-type device for newborns. The child survived.

"I don't know how I did it, but I did it," Leftenant-Colon said in a 2023 interview with NPR. "I got to help save that baby's life. It had a big impact on me."

Zuo Colon said she received a card in the mail decades later.

When President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order ending racial segregation in the military in July 1948, Colon saw it as an opportunity to gain regular status in the Army Nurse Corps, but because of her race , a status she had been unable to achieve before. She applied and got it.

In 1952, a few years after the military disbanded the 332nd Fighter Group, home to the military's first black pilots known as the "Tuskegee Airmen," Zocolon became a flight nurse in the U.S. Air Force. After retiring in 1965 with the rank of major, she eventually returned to Amityville and served as a school nurse at her alma mater, Amityville Memorial High School, from 1971 to 1984.

She married Air Force Reserve Captain Bayard Colon, who died in 1972. The couple has no children.

"It's a good life," Leftenant-Colon said in 2023.

Leftenant-Colon, whose nickname was "Lefty," was born on September 29, 1920, in Goose Creek, South Carolina, about 15 miles from Charleston. She was one of 12 children born to James and Eunice Leftenant. James was a freed slave, and Eunice Leftenant loved to smoke a pipe. (James had a 13th child, a girl, with his first wife).

Zuo Colon said neither of her parents attended beyond sixth grade, but they instilled in their children the values ​​of education, public service and hard work. The family moved north to New York as part of the Great Migration, where millions of black Americans fleeing Jim Crow segregation moved for a better life in the Northeast, Midwest, and West.

When Leftenant-Colon's family arrived in Amityville, Long Island, they had little money but managed to scrape together enough lumber from around town to build their five-bedroom home in 1923. Eunice stayed at home to raise the children.

“My parents were poor, but we were happy,” Leftenant-Colon said in 2023.

In 1989, she became the first female national president of the Tuskegee Airmen. Her brother, Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, was one of 355 Tuskegee Airmen deployed to North Africa and Europe during World War II.

(On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Leftenant was flying a P-51C Mustang to escort a B-24 bomber when he collided with another pilot's plane in mid-air. The latter parachuted out before the plane crashed and became a prisoner of war. According to military records Leftenant was last seen flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet when his plane crashed near Austria. His remains were never found.

"My parents raised a happy family," Zuo Colon told NPR.

Leftenant is survived by a sister, Amy Leftenant of Amityville, and many nieces and nephews.