This February, SEIU Local 1000 is shining a special spotlight on
a collection of Black leaders whose recent accomplishments and
impact will inspire today’s generations and many more to
come. These leaders, who are shattering glass ceilings and
making history in their respective fields, stand on the shoulders
of pioneers who came before them, from Shirley Chisholm and John
Lewis to Maya Angelou and Mary Ellen Pleasant.
Kamala Harris – first Black, first South Asian
American and first woman Vice President
On Jan. 20, 2021, Kamala Harris became the first Black, first
South Asian American and first woman Vice President of the United
States.
Harris, who was born in Oakland, California to an Indian mother
and Jamaican father, spoke about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan
Harris, in her first speech as vice president-elect.
“When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn’t
quite imagine this moment,” Harris said. (Shyamala came to the
U.S. in 1958 to study biochemistry.) “But she believed so deeply
in an America where a moment like this is possible.”
“So, I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women —
Black women, Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women —
who throughout our nation’s history have paved the way for this
moment tonight.”
Harris is also the first vice president to have graduated from a
historically Black college or university (HBCU), Howard
University, and credits her “sense of being and meaning” to her
time as a student there. Harris is also a member of the oldest
historically Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
And she was the first Black American to serve as California’s
Attorney General from 2011 to 2016. In 2016, she was elected
as a Democrat to the United States Senate for the state of
California.
Harris also helped others make history in December 2021 when she
hired the first all-woman senior staff for the U.S. vice
president’s office.
— Cory Stieg
Rosalind Brewer – Walgreens’ CEO and the only Black
woman to currently lead a Fortune 500 firm
In March 2021, Rosalind Brewer, Starbucks’ former first Black and
first woman chief operating officer (COO), began a new position
as CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance. This makes her the only
Black woman currently leading a Fortune 500 firm and just the
third Black woman in history to serve as a Fortune 500 CEO.
As Walgreens’ CEO, Brewer is responsible for improving the
company’s revenue amid the pandemic and tasked with overseeing
the drugstore chain’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
Brewer previously spent four years at Starbucks in 2017 as COO
and five years serving as the CEO of Sam’s Club, which is owned
by Walmart. Prior to that, she spent 22 years working for
manufacturing company Kimberly-Clark, where she started her
career as a scientist and eventually worked her way up to being
president of the company’s Global Nonwovens Sector in
2004.
As a longtime executive in corporate America, Brewer has been
transparent about the challenges she’s faced as one of very few
Black women in the C-Suite.
“When you’re a Black woman, you get mistaken a lot,” she said
during a 2018 speech at her alma mater, Spelman College.
“You get mistaken as someone who could actually not have that top
job. Sometimes you’re mistaken for kitchen help. Sometimes people
assume you’re in the wrong place, and all I can think in the back
of my head is, ‘No, you’re in the wrong place.’”
– Courtney Connley
Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett – lead scientist on the
Moderna Covid-19 vaccine team
At a December 2020 event hosted by theNational Urban League, Dr.
Anthony Fauci had one very important thing to say about the
Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, aka “mRNA-1273,” approved by the FDA
for emergency use that month.
“The first thing you might want to say to my African-American
brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be
taking was developed by an African-American woman,” Fauci said.
“And that is just a fact.”
Indeed, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a 35-year-old viral immunologist
and research fellow in the Vaccine Research Center of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the
lead scientist on the team that developed the Moderna Covid-19
vaccine. She built on her six years of experience studying the
spike proteins of other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS in order
to design the vaccine within two days of the novel coronavirus
being discovered. (Spike proteins sit on the surface of
coronaviruses and penetrate human cells, causing
infection.)
“I like to call it the plug-and-play approach,” Corbett said in a
virtual National Institute of Health lecture in October 2020. Dr.
Corbett has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Basically, the idea [is] that we had so much knowledge based on
work from us and from other labs previously that we were able to
pull the trigger on vaccine development and start the ball
rolling toward a phase 1 clinical trial.”
— Cory Stieg
Victor J. Glover, Jr. – first Black astronaut to live
and work at the International Space Station for an extended
stay
When NASA astronaut Victor Glover arrived at the International
Space Station (ISS) — roughly 250 miles above earth— on a SpaceX
Crew Dragon Capsule in November 2020, he settled in for a
six-month stay to become the first Black astronaut to live and
work on ISS for an extended period of time. (Of the more than 300
NASA astronauts who have been sent to space, only 14 have been
Black Americans.)
“It is bittersweet, because I’ve had some amazing colleagues
before me that really could have done it, and there are some
amazing folks that will go behind me,” Glover, who is serving as
pilot and second-in-command on the crew, told The Christian
Chronicle in November 2020. “I wish it would have already been
done, but I try not to draw too much attention to it.”
Before becoming a NASA astronaut, Glover was a commander and test
pilot in the U.S. Navy, where he flew 2,000 hours in over 40
aircraft and 24 combat missions. Glover got his bachelors in
general engineering from California Polytechnic State University
in San Luis Obispo, California and received multiple related
graduate school degrees, including a masters in flight test
engineering from Air University and a masters in Systems
Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School.
– Catherine Clifford