Page 85 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

was dead,” Stanley said. “There was just this incredible disbelief in what
we were seeing. And we looked back at our car, and there were medics
there, and they had Roz out. It was then we realized that she’d been hit,
too—she didn’t even know it; she hadn’t felt it. Then people were saying,
‘Get down; get down!’”
There was a sniper, and he was still in the area.
Police surrounded the gunman, who was armed with a .45 caliber pis-
tol and a satchel filled with ammunition. When he refused to put down
his gun, the officers shot and killed him. All told, the sniper killed two and
injured five innocent African Americans who were walking or driving
through the neighborhood that afternoon, including one young man
strolling home from work with a bag of groceries in his arms. Roz Stanley
would never walk again—she was paralyzed by the gunshot—and she and
her family would have to adjust to the fact that she would spend the rest
of her life in a wheelchair.
The Marine Corps gave Stanley plenty of time off and helped the
young couple move into a wheelchair-accessible home on the Naval Acad-
emy campus so that Stanley could always be close to home. The corps even
offered to release him from his obligation at Annapolis if he wanted to
leave, but he chose to stay even though he had experienced discrimination
there. “The Marine Corps wasn’t perfect, but nothing is. There was bias
there just like everyplace else. For example, there were fewer than a hun-
dred black officers out of 21,000 officers in the Marine Corps, and not one
black general or even a full colonel,” Stanley explained. “I was dealing with
stereotypical thinking, but it was just a function of the times. I knew if I
wanted to be promoted, I’d have to work five times as hard as the other
guys, so I put all my efforts into working hard. I just didn’t want to waste
energy dealing with the issue of race. But I love the Marine Corps. They
treated us with great compassion, and things change—that’s one of the
most beautiful parts about American society.”
Things have changed, but there’s still much room for improvement:
Recent statistics are only slightly better than they were back in Stanley’s
day. An Associated Press article from July 2008 reported that only 5.6 per-
18
cent of all general officers or admirals in the U.S. military are black. It is

18 Lolita C. Baldor, “After 60 Years, Black Officers Rare,” Associated Press Impact, July 23, 2008.

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