"I went by myself to the first day. It was a class of more than 50," McCready said. (The friend with whom she had applied had decided not to pursue further schooling and married.) "Nobody spoke. Nobody said, 'Hi, come and join us.' Nobody said, 'Come and join us in the cafeteria.' But the dietary aides, who were African-American, were beaming at me."
On the first day, a white nurse advised her, "If you don't pray, you won't get out of here, because nobody here is for you."
McCready took the advice. "I thought to myself, 'If God intends for me to get out of here, nobody here can stop me.' "
She attended lectures and did her homework. McCready encountered resistance from the school's dean, who set up a dorm room for her in a former office separated by a floor from rooms of white nursing students.
"I never minded being alone," McCready said. "Even when I was a Dunbar student, I'd be in the library, quietly reading."
Even though McCready made it through nursing school, she still faced a segregated Baltimore. When state nursing board examinations were administered at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, she felt she could not eat at that school. She hailed a cab with several other black nursing students, went to Pennsylvania Station's lunch counter, which she knew served blacks, then hastily returned to the school to resume the exams.
McCready graduated in 1953 and became a Baltimore public health nurse. Willing to try something new, she moved to New York City and joined the staff of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where she went on to become a head nurse in the post-operative room.
Her family was musical - her brother was a church organist - and she took courses at the Peabody Conservatory in the late 1950s. In New York, she served as a private-duty nurse while pursuing a degree at the Manhattan School of Music. She wound up teaching, becoming Raven Symone's private tutor when the child actress was part of the cast of The Cosby Show. She sang in the Metropolitan Opera chorus for its 1985 production of Porgy and Bess with Grace Bumbry and Simon Estes.
"It's been quite a life," McCready said. "People tell me I should write a book."
