Carrie Early Broadfoot was educated at Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia and moved to Raleigh in 1910. She became the Superintendent of St. Agnes Hospital which had been established in Raleigh in 1896 for the African American community. She joined the Red Cross and planned to go overseas during World War I. Instead she was directed to work at home to help control the influenza epidemic sweeping the country at the time.

In 1923, North Carolina opened a Negro Division of the State Sanatorium for tuberculosis patients and served of the Superintendent of the African American division of the Sanatorium as well as Directory of its African American nursing school. She directed this Division until the late 1930s. In 1920, she and four other North Carolina African-American nurses attended a meeting of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in Washington, DC. In 1923, these five nurses initiated the founding of the North Carolina Colored Graduate Nurses Association (later renamed the North Carolina Association of Negro Registered Nurses). Broadfoot served as its president for the next eight years. This professional organization continued until 1949 when it merged with the North Carolina Nurses Association.