Louise Lomax was born in January 1920 in Nottoway, Virginia, to James and Annie Shepperson Lomax. She received her high school diploma in 1938 from Ingleside-Fee Memorial High School, a segregated boarding school in Burkeville, Virginia. Her maternal grandfather sent her and other grandchildren to study at this school. Lomax continued her studies at the Saint Philip Hospital School of Nursing, a segregated nursing school that was part of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. She graduated in September 1942 and passed her nursing examinations in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C.