Zandra Flemister, first Black woman in Secret Service, dies at age 71

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.

Ms. 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 Ms. Flemister’s death.

But from her first days on the job, Ms. Flemister 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.

Ms. 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.”

“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.

Ms. 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.

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 Ms. Flemister attended a French preschool.

Ms. 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.

She applied for the Secret Service after meeting a recruiter at a job fair.

Ms. Flemister helped protect Susan Ford, President Gerald Ford’s teenage daughter, and took pride 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.