Historical Badass: Nursing Polar Ambitions

How many “firsts” have begun with the question why not me? New Yorker Barbara Hillary was in her early seventies, recently retired from fifty-five years of nursing, and had started taking vacation trips in the north, including dog-sledding in Quebec and photographing polar bears in Manitoba, where she learned that no Black woman had been to the North or South poles. Matthew Henson is often credited as the first Black man to reach the North Pole as part of Robert Peary’s 1909 expedition (whether they made it is disputed), and Ann Bancroft was the first woman to get there, in 1986. But an African-American woman?

“I couldn’t find any evidence of a Black woman who had been there,” said Hillary. “And the idea to go began to form. It was under my skin, I couldn’t shake it. You don’t just wake up and say, ‘The North Pole needs a little color. Let me go.’ It was a progression, a journey.”

A polar expedition was not a small goal for Hillary. She was