Retired Army Brig. Gen. Clara Adams-Ender of Lake Ridge rings church’s Freedom Bell

Brig. Gen. Clara Leach Adams-Ender (U.S. Army, Retired) of Lake Ridge, a “Living Legend” of American nursing and a pioneer of military equality, “Let Freedom Ring” March 4, when she visited Williamsburg’s historic First Baptist Church and rang its restored Freedom Bell, silent from the period of segregation until this year.

Adams-Ender, 76, is the daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper and the first African-American woman to command a major Army installation.

She is also the first nurse corps officer to graduate from the Army War College and the first woman to earn a Master’s Degree in military arts and sciences from the Army’s Command and General Staff College.

She served as chief of the Army nurse corps and in 2013 she was named a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nursing.

Adams-Ender was quoted in a news release as saying, “It is the experience of a lifetime to visit the historic First Baptist Church on the year of its 240th anniversary, to meet with its congregation and to ‘Let Freedom Ring. I thank them for their gracious welcome and congratulate them on their centuries of perseverance. I know that the bell’s message of healing, justice and peace is resonating around the nation and world.”

“That a ‘Living Legend’ like Brig. Gen. Adams-Ender would join us today is a humbling tribute to our congregation’s history to the symbolic power of the Freedom Bell,” said the Rev. Dr. Reginald Davis, pastor of First Baptist Church.

“Her story affirms our faith, and each of us draws great hope from her presence today, when she showed us all that our Freedom Bell will not again fall silent.”

“Each of us who has the honor of meeting Brig. Gen. Adams-Ender today is both humbled and inspired by her historic achievements, but also by her remarkable warmth and humility.  These are marks of the selfless and compassionate service of the Army nurse corps that she so ably led,” said Mitchell B. Reiss, president and CEO of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

“She is a model of courageous leadership for all people, and we are deeply grateful that she joined us today to share the critical message of freedom and quality, which we all embrace and that the Freedom Bell embodies.”

Adams-Ender is the first nurse and woman in Army history to be awarded the Expert Field Medical Badge.

She served as assistant chief and later chief of the department of nursing at the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, where she was also promoted to colonel.

She became the first nurse corps graduate of the U.S. Army War College in 1982. She later became the first African American to serve as vice president and chief of the department of nursing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

In 1987 she was promoted to brigadier general and named chief of the Army Nurse Corps and chief of Army medical personnel.

Following that assignment, in 1991 Adams-Ender was named commanding general at Fort Belvoir and deputy commanding general of the Military District of Washington, becoming the first army nurse and African-American woman ever to command a major army installation.

Following retirement from in 1993, she became an author, educator, consultant, global advisor and was elected full participating member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nearly four million nurses practice in the United States, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and roughly 50 hold the American Academy of Nursing’s “Living Legend” title.

Founded secretly in the year of America’s independence, First Baptist Church persevered during enslavement, Revolution and Civil War and is one of the country’s oldest African-American houses of Baptist worship.

Its 130-year-old bell hung silent in its belfry from the days of segregation, through its restoration last year by Colonial Williamsburg conservators and the congregation’s challenge for freedom-loving people to visit and ring the bell throughout February for hope, peace and justice.

By the church’s registry, during Black History Month more than 4,000 people rang the bell in a house of worship that seats fewer than 300. On social media, the hashtags #LetFreedomRingChallenge and #WhyIWillRing appeared more than 100,000 times on Twitter and were seen by more than 7 million people on Instagram.

The Let Freedom Ring Challenge was made possible in part by a generous grant from sponsoring partner the Ford Foundation of New York.