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.