In remembrance of Veteran’s Day and the Black women who served this country, Our Time Press reached out to Wendy Charece McClinton, president, and CEO of Black Veterans for Social Justice, headquartered in Brooklyn.
Wendy was in the Army for ten years, straight out of high school. She served in Desert Storm and was stationed at the Pentagon, Korea, Hawaii, and Washington DC offices. She graduated from the United States Army Logistical Management College and Stanford University Graduate
School of Business. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s in theology and is a frontline advocate assisting Black women veterans.
“When I joined Black Veterans for Social Justice in 1997, I was the only female veteran in the organization. Men dominated it,” she told Our Time Press. “After a while, women began to come in for services. As women began to come in, there was a cry and a need for women to work with women.”
Wendy saw the need for more women in the agency working peer-to-peer with other veterans. “Because veterans tend to work better when they work with their peers,” she said. “So that’s when we started to see that we were going to start hiring these women veterans to work with women veterans and to work within the agency.”
Our Time Press was invited to talk with three Black women veterans who grew up in Brooklyn and traveled the world with the armed forces. There were life victories and tragedies. All found a career and mission with Black Veterans for Social Justice.
When Stephanie Copley joined the Navy, her long-term goal was to be an entrepreneur. In the Navy, she was a Petty Officer Third Class, a logistic specialist, and an aviation supply specialist. Her job was to order, restock and secure military supplies for a squadron. She had top-secret clearance.
“I picked the job because I wanted to run my own business, and I need to understand how inventory, procurement, and logistics worked,” she said.
Stephanie was a 16-year-old teen mom raising her daughter with the help of her family. “When you had children, you deployed one year on and one year off. She explained that I was deployed to Afghanistan, Portugal, Dubai, Greece, Italy, and Bahrain. “The most grueling time was traveling through the Suez Canal to get to Afghanistan. Then we are faced with pirates and cargo jackets, and you have weather like monsoons. We even lost two pilots on a flyover.”
After leaving the Navy in 2008, she opened a hair salon. But, she had a financial crisis when she lost her salon after three years, and there were no programs to help. “I hit rock bottom,” she said. “I feel we don’t have enough entrepreneurship endeavors for female minority veteran women who don’t want to go into engineering, science, and technology. Everything is so masculine. It’s helmets to hard hats. Not boots to stilettos.”
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