U.S. Representative Val Demings

Representative Val Demings (1957- ), police officer and politician. Valdez Venita Butler was born and raised in a poor neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, the daughter of a custodian father and domestic servant mother. She became interested in law enforcement at her racially segregated junior high school, and she earned a degree in criminology from Florida State University in 1979, becoming the first member of her family to finish college. After college she worked as a social worker before joining the police department in Orlando. There she steadily rose up the ranks while also earning a master’s in public administration from Webster University Orlando. In 2007 she was appointed chief of the Orlando Police Department, becoming the first woman to serve in this position. Demings served as chief for four years and was credited with helping to bring the city’s crime rate down. In 2012 she resigned to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking to represent Florida’s 10^th congressional district as a Democrat. This district included the greater Orlando area and since its creation had been represented entirely by white men, all but one of whom were Republicans, even as it became more liberal and ethnically diverse. Although Democratic voters held a slight majority across Florida, after the 2010 census Republicans redrew the congressional districts to help ensure that they would retain power. Voting rights groups sued on the grounds that this violated state law, and in 2014 a judge agreed and ordered that several districts, including the 10^th, be redrawn. Two years later Demings ran the seat again and won with 65% of the vote, becoming the fourth black woman and the eighth African American overall to represent Florida in Congress. She ran unopposed for reelection in 2018, part of an electoral wave that saw the Democrats win control of the House and thus also a majority on all House committees. This included the Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Judiciary committees on which Demings serves. Utilizing her law enforcement background, she quickly became a leading voice for gun control. In 2017 she advocated for the Gun Violence Restraining Order Act, which if passed would have better enabled law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from people who had been found to be a risk to themselves or others. She called for the repeal of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows civilians to use deadly force when they feel threatened and has led to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and other minority males. After the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in south Florida, which caused more fatalities than any other school shooting in American history, she rejected Republican proposals to arm teachers, saying that this would “[shift] the pain, the hurt, and the guilt to school staff who will find themselves out skilled and outgunned in active shooter situations.” One year later a Saudi national killed three people and injured eight others at a Pensacola naval base, and Demings co-sponsored a bill that would create stronger background checks for foreign nationals, stating “It’s simply common sense that people shouldn’t be able to get a gun anywhere, anytime. Nearly every American agrees with this basic principle, yet the gun lobby has left federal gun laws riddled with loopholes.”

Demings’ seat on the Judiciary Committee, though, has led to her involvement in some of the most consequential events in the history of the United States presidency; specifically, Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. In 2018 Congress heard testimony from Robert Mueller, who had investigated the events of 2016, and Demings asked “Isn’t it fair to say that the president’s written answers were not only inadequate and incomplete, because he didn’t answer many of your questions, but where he did his answers showed that he wasn’t always being truthful?” That investigation ended without clear proof of direct involvement by Trump, but a year later evidence of other possible wrongdoing emerged. Congress had allocated $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, but in 2019 witnesses and documents showed that Trump had refused to send the money or meet with Ukraine’s president unless he looked into discredited allegations of corruption by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden; in other words, that the president had illegally used taxpayers’ dollars as leverage to get foreign help against one of his political rivals. The House began the impeachment process, which as per the Constitution and Congressional policy began with investigations by various House committees, then a vote by the Judiciary Committee on whether or not to write articles of impeachment, then a vote by the entire House on whether or not to impeach, and finally a trial in the Senate with several House members serving as impeachment managers who would present the evidence and make their case. During the Judiciary Committee’s voting deliberations, Demings tweeted that “I am the descendant of slaves, who knew that they would not make it, but dreamed and prayed that one day I would make it. So despite America’s complicated history, my faith is in the Constitution. I’ve enforced the laws, and now I write the laws. Nobody is above the law.”

The committee wrote two articles of impeachment: abuse of power, related to the Ukraine activities; and obstruction of Congress, related to his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. The House then voted to approve both articles, making Trump only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, following Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Because there were no African Americans in Congress in 1868 and because no black House members voted in favor of impeaching Clinton in 1998, Demings and her black Democratic colleagues were the first African Americans to ever cast a vote to impeach a president. When Senate Majority Leader and Trump ally Mitch McConnell declared that he would work closely with the White House during the trial, Demings demanded that he recuse himself; in her words, “The moment Senator McConnell takes the oath of impartiality required by the Constitution, he will be in violation of that oath. He has effectively promised to let President Trump manage his own impeachment trial. The senator must withdraw.” She was also chosen as one of seven impeachment managers; she is one of three women, one of two African Americans, one of two from a southern state, and the only one who is not an attorney. Because there were no women in Congress in 1868 and because no women were selected as managers in 1998, Demings is also one of the first three women to ever serve in this role. The trial is currently underway. During her presentation of evidence before the Senate, she asserted “As a career law enforcement officer, I have never seen anyone take such extreme steps to hide evidence allegedly proving his innocence. And I do not find that here today. The president is engaged in this cover-up because he is guilty, and he knows it.” Although she was largely unknown outside her district before the investigations began, her experience as a police officer, her tough public image, and Florida’s importance in the Electoral College have led some in the Democratic Party to see her as a potential vice-presidential nominee. She has declined to comment on this speculation, but in a recent speech she said “Only in this nation can a little black girl – from Jacksonville, Florida, the youngest of seven children, grew up in a two-bedroom, wood-frame house, mother cleaned houses for a living and father was a janitor who went to work every day – grow up to be the first woman to serve as chief at the Orlando Police Department and doggone it, be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown

Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown (1927-2011), nurse and educator. Hazel Winifred Johnson was born in the eastern Pennsylvania town of West Chester and grew up on a farm in nearby Malvern, one of seven children and part of the only black family in the area. Her parent’s strict childrearing practices and her responsibilities in helping to run the farm and care for her younger siblings helped her develop a sense of discipline that proved greatly useful later in life; “I was always a planner, she recalled, “I was always one that wanted to get things taken care of and in order.” Although she grew up during the Depression, her family’s ability to raise a wide variety of crops, including tomatoes that they sold to the Campbell’s soup company, kept them out of poverty; “We didn’t know anything about being hungry. We knew everything about not having any money,” she humorously remembered, “but we didn’t know anything about being hungry.” When their neighbors antagonized them with racial slurs, her parents told her that “You’re not that. Don’t even consider it. Someone else has a problem. That’s their problem; they don’t know who they are, and if they have that kind of insecurity, don’t buy into being insecure too.” A local nurse inspired her to pursue a nursing career, but when she applied to the nearby Chester School of Nursing, she was told that its program “we’ve never had a black person in our nursing program, and we never will.” The nurse who had inspired her helped her gain admission to the Harlem School of Nursing, from which she graduated in 1950. She then worked in the hospital’s emergency ward for three years, helping drug addicts and other members of the economically deprived neighborhood, before moving to Philadelphia, where she took courses at Villanova and worked in the cardiovascular ward at the Veterans Administration Hospital, rising to the rank of head nurse in three months.

In 1955 a military recruiter noticed Johnson-Brown’s organizational skills and encouraged her to join the U.S. Army, and she agreed to do so because it would give her the opportunity to travel. Her first assignment was in the surgical ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, followed by an obstetrical unit at Camp Zama in Japan. She briefly returned to civilian life at the VA hospital in Philadelphia before reenlisting in 1958. Upon resuming her military career, she served hospitals in Washington State and San Francisco while finishing her bachelor’s degree and earning a master’s degree in nursing education at Columbia University. She was also initiated into Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She was teaching at the hospital in San Francisco when the U.S. escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War, sending half a million troops and thousands of support personnel. One of them was meant to be Johnson-Brown, who was scheduled to work with a new type of portable hospital, but a lung infection prevented her from going. The nurse who was sent in her place was later killed in an attack. Johnson-Brown instead worked in supervisory roles at hospitals in Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington D.C., and Japan, including serving as project director at the U.S. Army Research and Development Command. In these roles she helped train nurses heading to Vietnam and developed new sterilization techniques that reduced surgical infections. This work remained vital even after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 due to the 150,000 veterans returning home with injuries. In 1976 she was named director and assistant dean of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing while also completing a Ph.D. in educational administration from Catholic University. In 1978 she was named chief nurse at a hospital in South Korea, but that assignment ended a year later when President Jimmy Carter nominated her to become the sixteenth chief of the Army Nurse Corps. She was confirmed to this position and simultaneously promoted to brigadier general. This made her the first African American to hold this role, the first chief to hold a doctoral degree, the fourth to hold the rank of brigadier general, and the first black female general in Army history.

While serving chief of the Army Nurse Corps from 1979 to 1983, General Johnson commanded 7,000 nurses in the Army National Guard and Army Reserves, eight Army medical centers, fifty-six community hospitals, and 143 clinics around the world. She helped to create scholarships and a summer nursing camp for ROTC nursing students, improved quality control at treatment facilities, encouraged Army nurses to pursue graduate degrees and to conduct and publish research, created management opportunities for nurses, and initiated a conference to help nurses help plan the future of the Corps. She later reflected on the leadership skills needed to manage such vast operations by stating “I never really thought about it as power. I thought of it more as being able to accomplish my job.” Although the armed forces had been officially desegregated several years before Johnson-Brown began her four decades of service, racism and sexism were still major obstacles. Her ability to solve problems and refusal to accept mistreatment earned the respect of most of her peers, though, and for the rest her message was “You have a problem, and you really need to think about dealing with it, because I’m moving on, and one of these days I might be your boss, so it might be smart to not be stupid.” On one occasion at a hot dog stand in Philadelphia, the server ignored her and her mother while attending to white customers who had come later, and when the food was finally delivered, she turned it away, saying “Now you eat it.” Johnson-Brown ended her military career in 1983, having received the Distinguished Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal with Oak Cluster, and Army Nurse of the Year award. She became an administrative consultant for the American Nurses’ Association, later rising to director of its office of governmental affairs. She also served as a professor in the nursing schools at Georgetown and George Mason University, co-founding the Center for Health Policy to help nurses become more involved in this aspect of medical care. When the U.S. went to war again in 1990 through Operation Desert Storm, the 63-year-old retired general volunteered to work in the surgical ward at the army hospital in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. She retired from teaching in 1997 but continued to serve on numerous university and health administration boards until Alzheimer’s disease took its toll. After her death in 2011, Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. An administrator at the Chester hospital that had once turned her away declared that she “demonstrated individual perseverance to rise above the many barriers facing African American women and men in the last century. We all have much to learn from her life. It is also important to be reminded of how far our society has advanced in the past 70 years, and the work that still lies before us.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

Grant Fuhr

Grant Fuhr (1962- ), hockey player. Fuhr was born to a white teenage mother and adopted by a white couple in Spruce Grove, a small town near Edmonton in the province of Alberta. His parents were initially concerned that they would not be able to instill a sense of racial pride in their son, but as his mother later said, “We asked him to be fair in his judgments, to not judge a person – or himself – on social or economic standing, but on their honesty and integrity.” He began playing hockey at the age of five and immediately took to goaltending, later recalling, “There was something about the equipment I liked and something about the challenge.” Ironically, growing up in a predominantly white area benefited his future career; if he had lived in eastern Canada, he probably would have been steered towards basketball. In 1981, the Edmonton Oilers made him the 8^th overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft. Fuhr quickly established himself as one of the best goaltenders in hockey history. During his ten seasons in Edmonton, he was named to the All-Star Team five times, becoming the first black player so honored, and the Oilers won the Stanley Cup championship five times. He was especially dominant during the playoffs, giving up less than three goals per game during these games, and he was also skilled at getting the Oilers' high-scoring offense started; in 1984, he set the single-season record for points scored by a goaltender. His best overall year was 1987, when he led his country to victory in the Canada Cup (an international tournament that featured the six best hockey nations in the world), won another Stanley Cup, finished second in MVP voting, and was awarded the Vezina Trophy as the best goaltender in the league.

In the early 1990s, Fuhr began struggling with injuries and substance abuse and was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs, part of the dismantling of one of the greatest dynasties in NHL history. After moving on to the Buffalo Sabres, a team that had previously experienced little success, he led them to the second round of the playoffs in 1994. That year he was awarded the William M. Jennings Trophy for giving up the fewest goals of any goalkeeper in the league; due to his continuing injuries, he shared the award with his backup Dominik Hasek, who under Fuhr’s mentorship developed into a fellow all-time great. While playing for Buffalo, however, he was also denied membership in a nearby country club that had admitted several of his teammates, and although the club denied that racism was a factor, someone burned a swastika onto one of the golfing greens. The club eventually apologized to Fuhr and offered him a membership, which he rejected. In 1995 he signed with the St. Louis Blues, and despite his many injuries, he set NHL records by playing in 76 consecutive games and 79 games overall. In the playoffs that year, he suffered serious knee injuries that ended his season. He continued on for several more years, becoming the third winningest goaltender in Blues history and also playing for the Calgary Flames, where he earned his 400^th career win and mentored a fellow black Canadian and goalkeeper Fred Brathwaite, before retiring in 2000. His 403 career wins made him eighth all time in NHL history and currently ranks him fourteenth, and his 92 playoff victories and 31 shutouts also rank among the all-time greats. In 2003 he became the first black player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. During his induction speech, he reflected that “It’s an extra special honor to be the first man of color in the Hockey Hall of Fame. It just shows that hockey is such a diverse sport that anybody can be successful in it, and I’m proud of that.” He has become a role model for the NHL’s increasing number of black players, stating that he is “flattered” to be in this position. Nearly two decades after his retirement, only seven other black players have followed him in being named to the All-Star Team. He is also ranked 70^th on The Hockey News’ list of the 100 all-time greatest hockey players, and in 2003 his number 31 was retired by the Oilers. A year later, he became the goaltender coach for the Phoenix Coyotes, working alongside head coach and former teammate Wayne Gretzky, who has often stated that Fuhr is the best goaltender of all time. He served in that position until 2009 and since 2014 has been co-owner and director of golf at a country club in California. In 2015 he wrote his autobiography Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion, and in 2019 he became the subject of the documentary Making Coco: The Grant Fuhr Story, in which he summarizes his successes and challenges by stating simply “You make bad choices and you can still succeed in life even if you make bad choices. You have to live and learn.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.