The nurses who held the tuberculosis wards at Sea View Hospital are behind glass now, in a museum case, a book and an oral history archive. Curlene Gaynelle Jennings Bennett was one of them, and she was alive in her own house on Staten Island until September 29, 2026, when she died at 89.
She was born in Columbia, Tennessee, and came to Staten Island as a child. At St. Peter’s High School she was the only Black student in her class. She enrolled at the Bellevue School of Nursing in Manhattan at seventeen and graduated in 1957, and a Bellevue graduate already working at Sea View, Annie Eliza Giles, offered her the job.
Sea View was the city’s tuberculosis hospital. Bennett worked its wards from 1957 to 1958, and she was the only Black Bellevue graduate there at the time. She said she had no hesitation about treating the patients. What she disliked was the drug. She described administering streptomycin as “like injecting glue.”
She did not stay long the first time. “As a young nurse, I wanted to get more active,” she said, and she left for public health nursing, working Department of Health clinics as a school nurse and in well baby, tuberculosis and social hygiene clinics.
In her twenties she moved to Liberia and married there. Her husband was a business manager for President William V.S. Tubman. She worked at a mining company clinic in Sanniquellie, ran well baby clinics, taught mothers nutrition and infant care, and had three of her children during the four or five years she stayed.
She came back and kept going. She was head nurse at Beekman Downtown Hospital in Manhattan. As an assistant director she helped set up a head injury unit at the Susan Smith-McKinney Rehab Center in Brooklyn. She specialized in neonatal care as a public health nurse. She raised five children in Mariners Harbor.
And she went back to Sea View. She retired from it in 2002 as assistant director of nursing, closing a career of nearly fifty years at the hospital where she had once been the only one.
Maria Smilios recorded her stories for “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.” The Staten Island Museum put her in its 2023 exhibit, “Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital,” and took her oral history the same year.
Her family and friends gathered in her honor. “I would love to say that our mama was and still is an inspiration to not just her family,” her daughter Leah Bennett said. “Her celebration of life reflected her legacy of love.”
