Hired as a special agent in 1974, she was hailed as “a trailblazer” at the agency. Discrimination led her to leave for a career in the State Department.
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.
Suspects in criminal investigations were openly described with the same epithet. When Ms. 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.
In her early 50s, Ms. 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.
Ms. 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, Ms. Flemister and her mother moved to a White suburb of Hartford where, Ms. Flemister recalled, they received threatening calls at night from neighbors who resented their presence.
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