The first African American woman to attain a general officer rank in American military history, Brig. Gen. Johnson-Brown was appointed in 1979 as chief of the Army Nurse Corps with the rank of brigadier general.
Maj. Gen. Marcelite Jordan Harris retired in 1997 as the highest-ranking female officer in the U.S. Air Force and the highest ranking African American woman in the Department of Defense.
During World War II, Ruth Lucas enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and became one of the few Black women to attend what is now the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. She transferred from the Army to the Air Force in 1947, where she stayed for the remainder of her military career.
Namahyoke Curtis, known as Namah, was a prominent African American nurse in late-19th-century Washington, D.C. During the Spanish-American War (1898), the Surgeon General assigned her to recruit other Black women to serve as U.S. Army contract nurses.
In May of 1854, 90-year-old Elizabeth Mason, a “free woman of color” from Campbell County, Virginia, appeared before a local Justice of the Peace to apply for a military widow’s pension.
Catherine “Kitty” Payne was an enslaved woman in the U.S. in the 1800s
Singer often called the “Queen of the Blues”
When Vernice Ferguson became the first African American to lead the Veterans Administration (VA) Nursing Service in 1980, she inherited the largest nursing service in the nation, overseeing 60,000 professionals.
Long-time advocate for books and reading, she served 34 years in Veterans’ Affairs, including as Tuskegee librarian
Dr Angela Yvonne Davis is a prominent political activist, scholar, and author.