Louise Jefferys Morse doesn’t distinguish between colors very well. That’s got nothing to do with her age and everything to do with who she is as a nurse, alumnus, and a person.
Raised and trained in the days of segregation, Morse became fascinated with racial inequalities and then steely in her determination to fight them during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She made it her mission to provide the same level of care to the poor and the disenfranchised as to the better–off, at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and elsewhere. Her activism has never wavered, through service as a head nurse at JHH’s Phipps and Osler units after graduation, at a Honolulu, HI hospital forwealthy patients, through marriage and a move to Princeton, NJ with math professor Marston Morse, and through service to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and those In need anywhere in the world. (Well into her 90s, she continued to write letters on behalf of the human rights organization Amnesty International.)
The Princeton Committee of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award at her 100th birthday in 2010. Though not as active today, according to her daughter, Louise Morse still recalls as strongly as ever the Hopkins Nursing experience.
