Zandra Flemister, 1st Black woman in Secret Service

It took the Secret Service nearly a century to hire its first Black special agent, Charles L. Gittens, in 1956. Another 15 years would pass before the organization brought on its first female agents, and still a few more years went by before Zandra I. Flemister became the first Black woman in that role in 1974.

Flemister, who died Feb. 21 at 71, was unaware of the milestone until she was sworn in. She was “a trailblazer who dedicated her life to service and inspired a future generation of agents,” Kimberly Cheatle, the agency’s director, said in a statement after Flemister’s death.

But from her first days on the job, Flemister, who grew up in Connecticut, endured acts of racism and discrimination that would ultimately drive her from the agency she had so eagerly hoped to serve. She was often relegated to undesirable roles within the agency, which is tasked with investigating forgery, counterfeiting and other financial crimes in addition to protecting the president, vice president and other dignitaries and their families.

Flemister was on duty at the Washington field office when a fellow agent once gestured to her and remarked, “Whose prisoner is she?” — a comment, she later recalled, that left her “embarrassed and humiliated.”

A superior told her that if she wished to be assigned to more prestigious, higher-paying security details, she would need to abandon her Afro-style haircut. Flemister complied. But when she was placed on protective duty, she felt that she was there “solely for exhibition,” she recounted, as the “‘show’ African-American female agent that the Secret Service rotated around to different details to make it appear racially diverse.”

Once, she told a friend, a colleague taped an image of a gorilla over Flemister’s photograph on her official ID card. During visits to the United States by the presidents of Senegal and Grenada, Flemister said she heard white special agents refer to both leaders using the n-word. Suspects in criminal investigations were openly described with the same epithet. When Flemister reported such incidents to a superior, no action to her knowledge, she said, was taken.

“I remained in the Secret Service because I wanted to be a trailblazer for other African-American women,” she wrote years later in an affidavit filed in support of a class-action lawsuit, initiated in 2000, that alleged rampant racial discrimination within the Secret Service.

“With my requests for transfers to career-enhancing squads consistently denied, my credibility and competency constantly questioned, and the common use of racial epithets in my presence,” she wrote, “I saw the handwriting on the wall: because of my race I would never be allowed to have a successful career in the Secret Service.”

Flemister left the agency in 1978, taking a pay cut to join the Foreign Service. During more than three decades with the State Department, she served on postings around the world, including as consul general in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Washington as the senior State Department representative at the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.

In her early 50s, Flemister began to experience memory loss that was the first sign of early-onset dementia. She retired from the State Department in 2011 and had descended so deeply into her illness that she was unable to follow the developments in the discrimination lawsuit brought against the Secret Service.

The lead plaintiff in the case was Ray Moore, an African American special agent who served in the Secret Service for 32 years, protecting eight U.S. presidents and former presidents. He was denied promotions more than 200 times, he said, despite stellar reviews.

More than 100 Black special agents and former special agents eventually joined the lawsuit. They alleged that African Americans regularly lost out on promotions to white colleagues with less experience or lower performance evaluations. Racist jokes and racist slurs, they said, were openly told and used.

Flemister was not a plaintiff in the case, which addressed conduct by the Secret Service in the 1990s and 2000s. She offered her affidavit to demonstrate the long history of racism within the agency, according to her husband, John Collinge.

In 2017, the Secret Service agreed to a $24 million settlement. The agency admitted to no wrongdoing or institutional bias but pledged to overhaul its promotion process.

“The strength of the Secret Service is predicated on the diversity and experience of our workforce,” Cheatle, the current director, said in the statement about Flemister.

Zandra Iona Flemister was born Nov. 21, 1951, in Frankfurt, in what was then West Germany. Her father was a U.S. Army sergeant, and her mother worked for the U.S. government as a microfilm technician. The family soon moved to France, where Flemister attended a French preschool.

Flemister was roughly 5 when her parents separated. She moved to the United States and grew up in Connecticut, taking ballet and piano lessons and attending civil rights demonstrations with her mother, who brought her to the 1963 March on Washington.

Shortly before she entered high school, Flemister and her mother moved to a white suburb of Hartford where, Flemister recalled, they received threatening calls at night from neighbors who resented their presence.

Drawing on what she described as her family’s “wealth of perseverance,” she managed to make her way into the social circles of her high school and joined, among other groups, the international club.

Flemister enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, where she received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1973, according to her husband, and traveled to the Soviet Union and Mexico as part of her studies.

After graduation, she worked briefly as a buyer for a department store. But because of her parents’ work, she wrote years later in a biographical sketch, “it was government service for which I had prepared, and to government service I was destined to go.” She applied for the Secret Service after meeting a recruiter at a job fair.

Flemister helped protect Susan Ford, President Gerald Ford’s teenage daughter, and took pride, according to Collinge, in “her skill at safeguarding [the first daughter] during dates without being obtrusive.” She also provided protection for Amy Carter, the daughter of President Jimmy Carter, sitting as discreetly as possible at a desk in the back of Amy’s classroom at Thaddeus Stevens public elementary school.

In other Secret Service duties, Flemister did what she described as a “disproportionate” amount of undercover work because of her race. She experienced sexual harassment as well as racial discrimination, reporting that during overnight assignments male agents would knock on her hotel door to proposition her.

“As a female in the ’70s, it was tough to be in federal law enforcement to begin with,” said Cheryl Tyler, who joined the Secret Service in 1984 and protected George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, becoming the first African American woman permanently assigned to a presidential security detail. “Being a Black female ... in an elite organization, you had to have some tough skin.”

The retention rate among African American women in the Secret Service was so low that by 2001, The Washington Post reported, not a single Black female special agent had remained in the service long enough to reach retirement.

In the State Department, Flemister became a specialist in consular affairs, among other fields, with postings in capitals that included Buenos Aires, Madrid, London and Seoul. She received a master’s degree in military logistics from the National Defense University in 2003 and attained the rank of senior Foreign Service officer.

“When Zandra and I joined the State Department, there were very few women and an even smaller number of Black women,” Joyce Barr, a 37-year veteran of the Foreign Service and former ambassador to Namibia, said in an interview. “It was very, very challenging because people assumed that you were only there because of your gender and your skin color and that you were inherently ineffective — that’s the way they would approach you.”

In 1981, Flemister and Collinge were married in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where he was stationed with the Foreign Service. He later worked at the CIA.

Collinge confirmed his wife’s death and said she died at a care center in Kensington, Md., of respiratory failure that was a consequence of Alzheimer’s disease.

Besides her husband, survivors include their son, Samuel Collinge, both of Bethesda, Md.

Moore, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Secret Service, said in an interview that Flemister “should get more recognition.”

“Her story needs to be told,” he said, “so that young people, especially young Black females, can aspire to be the next Zandra Flemister.”

Zandra Flemister, who died Feb. 21 at 71, was unaware of the milestone until she was sworn in. She was “a trailblazer who dedicated her life to service and inspired a future generation of agents,” Kimberly Cheatle, the agency’s director, said in a statement after Flemister’s death.