Hulda Margaret Lyttle

Hulda Lyttle was born in Nashville in 1889 and entered the first class of the George W. Hubbard Hospital Training School in 1910, graduating in 1913 with the school's first class. In 1915 she was the first African American to pass Tennessee's nursing license exam. She became superintendent of Hubbard Hospital in 1923 and dean of Meharry's School of Nursing in 1938, then retired in 1943. In June 1946 the student nurses' residence was named Hulda Margaret Lyttle Hall, which was listed on the National Register in 1998. She married S. M. Frazier in 1954.

What the plaque says

Hulda Margaret Lyttle 1889-1983 In 1913, Hulda M. Lyttle was one of three graduates in the first nursing education class of Meharry's G. W. Hubbard Hospital. In 1916, Lyttle returned to Meharry as Director of Nurse Training. Between 1921 and 1938, she served as superintendent of the hospital and of nurses, and director of the nursing school. In May 1938, Lyttle was appointed dean of Meharry's School of Nursing, the medical school's first African-American female dean of an academic division and one of the first African-American deans of nursing in the United States.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — steps away
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.2 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.4 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.6 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Fisk University — steps away
• Fisk Memorial Chapel — steps away
• Fisk Jubilee Singers — steps away
• Arna Wendell Bontemps — steps away