Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney was born May 7, 1845, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Charles Mahoney and Mary Jane Seward Mahoney-freed, formerly enslaved persons who had moved to Boston from North Carolina; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney, at the age of 33, was accepted as a student nurse at the hospital-based program of nursing at the New England Hospital for Women and Children; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney was 1 of 4 students, of a class of 42, who completed nursing at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1879; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney devoted her time and efforts unselfishly to the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and was installed as the Official Chaplin; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney’s motto was, Work more and better the coming year than the previous year. ; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney delivered the first annual keynote speech of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and established the Mary Eliza Award, which today continues as the Mary Eliza Mahoney Award bestowed biennially by the American Nurses Association; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney supported the suffrage movement and was the first Black professionally trained nurse to receive retirement benefits from a fund left by a Boston physician to care for 60 nurses, who received 25 dollars every 3 months as long as they lived; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney served as the director of the Howard Orphanage Asylum for Black children in Kings Park, Long Island, in New York City from 1911 until 1912; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney died on January 4, 1926, at the age of 80, after 3 years of battling breast cancer; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney’s gravesite is in Woodlawn Cemetery, Everett, Massachusetts, and the headstone on her grave states, The First Professional Negro Nurse in the U.S.A. ; Whereas Mary Eliza Mahoney was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976