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American Black History Moments
African American Contributions to the United States of America
Clara Adams-Ender
Brigadier General United States Army
Clara Adams-Ender (née Leach; born July 11, 1939) is a retired United States Army officer who served as Chief of the United States Army Nurse Corps from September 1987 to August 1991. She was the first woman to receive her master's degree in military arts and sciences from the United States Army Command and General Staff College. She is also the first African-American nurse corps officer to graduate from the United States Army War College. When she retired, in 1993, she was serving as commanding officer of Fort Belvoir, in Fairfax County, Virginia. After retirement, in 2001 she published a memoir, My Rise to the Stars: How a Sharecropper's Daughter Became an Army General.
She had nine siblings. Her mother was Caretha Bell (Sapp) Leach. Her father, Otha Leach, was a sharecropper and the family lived in Wake County, North Carolina, on a tobacco farm. Leach attended high school at Fuquay Springs Consolidated High School and graduated when she was sixteen, as second in her class. She attended North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black university. While there, she was a participant in the Greensboro sit-ins.
Leach joined the United States Army in order to pay for her nursing school education. When she graduated, in 1961, she was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps.
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Hazel Winifred Johnson-Brown
Brigadier General United States Army
Hazel Winifred Johnson-Brown (October 10, 1927 – August 5, 2011) was a nurse and educator who served in the United States Army from 1955 to 1983. In 1979, she became the first Black female general in the United States Army and the first Black chief of the United States Army Nurse Corps. She was also the Director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing.
Hazel Winifred Johnson was born on October 10, 1927, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of Clarence L. Johnson Sr. and Garnett Henley Johnson. Johnson was one of seven children, she had four brothers and two sisters.[5] Her parents were farmers who made a living from livestock and selling fruits and vegetables.
As a child Johnson attended East Whiteland Elementary School with her siblings. She later attended Tredyffrin-Easttown Junior Senior High School, where she was considered an exceptional student.
At the age of 12, Johnson wanted to become a nurse. Johnson applied and was denied admission to Chester County Hospital School of Nursing for being black. She then moved to New York City to attend the Harlem School of Nursing in 1947. Johnson's nursing career started at the Harlem Hospital emergency ward as a beginning level staff nurse.
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