#BTBlackHistoryMonth – Secret service trailblazer had Bajan roots

One could not be faulted for believing that the name Charles LeRoy Gittens sounds very Barbadian.

There are, and perhaps have been, many by that name in the island. But this Gittens was born in the United States of America and has the honour of being the first black man to be enlisted into that country’s Secret Service.

Gittens was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 31, 1928, to a Barbadian father who was a contractor and who had emigrated to the USA in the early 20th century.

Gittens was one of seven children. He left his high school before graduation in order to enlist in the United States Army. He was promoted to lieutenant and was stationed in Japan during the Korean War.

Gittens earned his GED while serving in the Army. Following the end of the war, Gittens earned a bachelor’s degree from present-day North Carolina Central University. He completed the four-year academic program in three years, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Spanish In the 1950s, while teaching at a high school in North Carolina, Gittens was encouraged by friends to apply for a job in federal law enforcement. After taking a civil service test, he was recruited by the Secret Service. However, he almost never became an agent because he failed an oral entrance exam, according to a 1974 story in Ebony magazine.

“Can you imagine such a thing?” Gittens told Ebony. “The guy in charge had scribbled things down like, ‘speaks incoherently’ or ‘can’t be understood.’ Now a Boston accent is a pretty strange thing in Atlanta, Georgia — that much I can assure you. But that was really too much.”

Gittens implied that the real reason may have been racism. He was then given another test and passed. He joined the Secret Service in 1956 and was soon posted to its New York field office, where he was part of an elite “special detail” that targeted counterfeiters and other criminals across the country.

Gittens was then transferred to the Secret Service’s field office in Puerto Rico, where he guarded New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller during his 1969 trip to the Caribbean and Latin America Fellow former agent and author of the book “The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence”, Gerald Blaine, described Gittens as a “joy to work with”.

He said Gittens endured many hardships as the first black agent in the Secret Service.

“You know, at that time the Civil Rights Bill had not been passed.

And it was not an easy task working anywhere. Many times we’d go on trips and it would be very difficult. Many of the hotels did not allow blacks to stay. They had to take a lot of abuse at that time,” Blaine said.

Howard Ike Hendershot, another former agent, described Gittens as a man who was never daunted by racism.

“He was my first boss in the Secret Service. He acted like race was never an issue, in any shape or form.”
Though Gittens told friends he never felt discrimination from other agents or supervisors, he still faced it on the job. While guarding President Lyndon B. Johnson on a trip to Dallas, he and other agents entered a restaurant, and its manager initially refused to serve him because he was black, according to the Ebony story.

“The other guys were a lot angrier than I was,” Gittens told the magazine. “But the manager came out and apologised profusely.

And we eventually got served.”

Gittens protected other presidents and stood just a few steps from John F. Kennedy at New York’s Madison

Square Garden in 1962 when Marilyn Monroe serenaded him with a sultry version of “Happy Birthday”.

He also worked with Presidents Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1971, Gittens was appointed special agent in charge of the Washington field office, a prestigious posting in which he supervised about 120 agents.

Gittens — a founding member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives — also was tasked in the 1970s by the Secret Service with helping to boost the recruitment of minority and female agents.

The Service’s complement subsequently rose at that time to 3,525 minority and female agents, of which 299 were black.

“He was a great agent,” said Mark Sullivan, retired director of the Secret Service. “When you talk to people who worked with him, the one thing I hear is that he was just a regular guy. . . .

A lot of agents, black and white, have benefited from the things he has done. He led by example, and he set the standards for all of us to follow.”

Although regarded as a Secret Service trailblazer, Gittens earned respect from agents by hitting the streets.

His first marriage, of 28 years, to Ruth Hamme ended in divorce. His 10-year marriage to Maureen Petersen also ended in divorce.

Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Sharon Quick of Washington, and two stepdaughters.

After retiring in 1979, he joined the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations and became deputy director of the criminal division.

Gittens died of complications from a heart attack at the Collington Episcopal Life Care Community, an assisted living facility in Mitchellville, Maryland, on July 27, 2011, at the age of 82. (Adapted)