Brigadier General Clara Adams Ender - My Rise to the Stars

Clara Leach Adams-Ender is a retired US Army officer who was Chief of the United States Army Nurse Corps from September 1987 to August 1991. She was the first woman to receive her master's degree in military arts and sciences from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. She is also the first African-American nurse corps officer to graduate from the United States Army War College. She was one of ten children born of a sharecropper’s daughter in North Carolina. Her family was too poor to send her to college, so she joined the army which paid for her education.

General Adams-Ender is a pioneer for women in the military and also for being an African American woman who reached the rank of Brigadier General and was the chief commander during the Gulf war of 22,000 army nurses. Clara was Vice-President for Nursing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from 1984-87. During 1991-93 she was Deputy Commanding General, Military District of Washington and was responsible for an annual budget of 250 million and 5000 personnel. When she retired, in 1993, she was serving as commanding officer of Fort Belvoir She has a book about her life, titled My Rise to the Stars: How a Sharecropper’s Daughter became an Army General.

After retirement, she started a consulting company. She is the former president of Caring About People with Enthusiasm. In 1996, she was named one of Working Woman magazine's 350 women who changed the world. She has been the recipient of the a Legion of Merit award, the United States Army Distinguished Service Medal with an oak leaf cluster, a Commendation Medal, a Meritorious Service Medal with three oak leaf clusters, the Roy Wilkins Meritorious Service Award, and the Gertrude E. Rush Award for Leadership.