This past August, 82-year-old Daisy Pruitt Swinton died in the Huntsville Hospital Intensive Care Unit after contracting COVID-19.
Sadly, but perhaps poetically, she died being cared for in the ICU that she’d dedicated her professional life to building and running.
Swinton, you see, was the first African-American ICU nurse manager at Huntsville Hospital. During her 40-year career, she was instrumental in helping build the ICU program at north Alabama’s largest hospital. She was nurse manager of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit for 18 years until she retired in 1997. No one since has held the position longer, according to Huntsville Hospital.
Today, which would have been Swinton’s 83rd birthday, Huntsville Hospital will dedicate a nursing scholarship in her name and hang her portrait in a place of honor at the SICU.
Swinton, born in 1938 in Madison County, was always a caregiver. As one of 11 siblings raised in meager, but loving circumstances, she was responsible for raising several of her younger siblings, said her daughter, Dawna Swinton Baker.
To Swinton, raising her siblings was a duty and an honor, not a chore, and caring for others would become her calling, Baker said.
“Very few people know their purpose in life and can begin to fulfill it before entering their teenage years, but my mother was blessed like that,” Baker said. “She would be overwhelmed with gratitude and emotion to be honored as a pioneer in the nursing profession, but I think she would also be amazed by all the attention she is getting. While we’re seeing her as superhuman, for her, what she did, how she lived, and how she cared was simply who she was naturally.”
Daisy Pruitt Swinton, who began her career in housekeeping at Huntsville Hospital, became the hospital's first African-American ICU nurse manager.
When Swinton graduated from Councill High School in 1956, she wanted to enlist in the Women’s Air Corps, but her grandmother wouldn’t allow it. Instead, she accepted a $100 scholarship from the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority (then a semester’s tuition) to attend Alabama Agricultural & Mechanical College, now Alabama A&M University.
In 1957, her second year in college, Swinton started working in housekeeping at Huntsville Hospital, and immediately knew she was destined for more.
Despite the obstacles that faced ambitious young Black women in segregated Alabama, Swinton doggedly pursued her medical education, all while raising five children with her husband, Harry Swinton. First she became a nurse’s aide, then a License Practical Nurse, finally earning her associate’s degree in nursing and Registered Nurse Certification from Calhoun Community College in 1975.
She was pictured in a newspaper photo of her graduating class -- one of only two Black faces among about three dozen nursing graduates -- but the accompanying article didn’t mention her name.
It didn’t matter. She would go on to make a name for herself.
Not long after earning her RN certification, she transitioned to caring for the critically ill in Huntsville Hospital’s new Intensive Care Units. There, she worked with Dr. Peter Yu, for whom the Surgical Intensive Care Unit is now named, to design and organize the new treatment areas and develop policies and procedures by which they would operate, according to Huntsville Hospital.
Last year, the Diversity & Inclusion Committee within the Huntsville Hospital System recognized Swinton’s contribution as a trailblazer for African-American nurses and leaders by joining with the Swinton family -- Harry Swinton Jr., Jeffrey Swinton, Lorelyn Swinton, Dawna Swinton Baker, and Marsha Swinton -- to create the Daisy P. Swinton Memorial Scholarship.
The scholarship is open to any Huntsville Hospital System employee or outstanding high school or college student who has been accepted into a nursing school or program. Baker, Swinton’s daughter, said it was important to the family to help young people who, like her mother so many years ago, dream of pursuing a nursing career.
“We want to really help people follow the journey that my mom took,” she said.
Want more?
For information, visit huntsvillehospitalfoundation.org/daisyswinton/ or email swintonscholarship@hhsys.org
Shelly Haskins writes about points of pride statewide. Email your suggestions to shaskins@al.com, or tweet them to @Shelly_Haskins using #AlabamaProud