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.
Capt. Ortiz, who grew up in Puerto Rico, served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and was killed by mortar fire in the Green Zone of Baghdad on July 10, 2007. She was the first Army nurse killed in combat since the Vietnam War.
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.
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.
One of the first Native American women to enlist in the U.S. military, who joined the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.
American champion of veterans and women in the military
Nurse and nursing administrator, Major Alice Appleford was a highly decorated war heroine who continued throughout both war and peace time to be a role model for women.
Florence Finch aided United States military intelligence and the Philippine resistance movement during World War II. She provided supplies to prisoners of war (POWs) in Manila when the Japanese occupied the island, and she survived arrest and interrogation.