Commemorating A Norfolk Booker & Her History-making Service Career

By Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter Emeritus
New Journal and Guide

This year, the class of 1966 of Norfolk’s historic Booker T. Washington High School (BTWHS)  will be observing its 60th Anniversary.

In 1966, Virginia was slowly complying with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which declared racially segregated public schools illegal. By this time, Virginia and other southern states, to slow desegregation, used various  ruses not  to do so until the early 1970s.

After desegregation, many high schools built to serve Blacks during segregation, were closed.

But  BTWHS and Portsmouth’s I.C.  Norcom, are the only two remaining in  Hampton Roads.

These historic schools produced several generations of individuals whose careers deserve recognition during Black History Month including Evelyn Fields and her classmate former Norfolk Councilperson Paul Riddick, among others.

For five decades,  Fields, now 77, was a pioneering officer of the line in the  National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

She was born on January 29,1949, the oldest of five children. Her father was a civilian employee at the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, and her mother was a teacher.

She attended Liberty Park Elementary School. She said her fourth and fifth grade teacher sparked her interest in math and science. After BTWHS she enrolled at Norfolk State University  (NSU) where she earned a BS degree in mathematics.  As a  freshman, she said,  she was  one of only four or five female math majors.

Fields began her career with NOAA in 1972 as a civilian cartographer at NOAA’s Atlantic Marine Center in Norfolk. At that time, women were not allowed on NOAA’s ships, but she did participate in shore-based research parties for data collection.

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She worked in this position less than a year before NOAA began recruiting its first female commissioned officers. Fields was commissioned an ensign  in 1973 and was the first African American woman to join the NOAA Corps.

Fields served as an operations officer on the NOAA Ships Mount Mitchell  and Peirce and executive officer of the survey vessel NOAA Ship Rainier.

In January 1989, Fields was chosen by NOAA’s Selection Board to serve as commanding officer of the NOAA ship McArthur an oceanographic and fisheries research vessel based in Seattle, Washington.

Fields was the first female officer to command an NOAA ship and the first African American. She was also the first woman to command a ship for an extended assignment.

In July 1990, Fields was selected to take part in the U.S. Department of Commerce Science and Technology Fellowship Program.

Field’s hydrographic knowledge and skills contributed to preparing nautical charts for the U.S. Navy to use during the 1991 Gulf War.

In 1995, at the rank of Captain, Fields became Director of the Commissioned Personnel Center (CPC), which is responsible for  the personnel system in support of the NOAA Corps officers. She entered this new leadership role as the CPC was in the midst of a government-wide Presidential initiative to reduce the size of government, being told to reduce the office staff by half from around 25 to 12 and the NOAA Corps from 401 to 299.

Eight months into her role, the Administration announced a plan to disestablish the NOAA Corps, converting the work of the NOAA Corps to civilian jobs.

In 1997, Fields became the acting deputy director of NOAA’s National Ocean Service, where she improved and streamlined the nautical chart making process.

She was nominated as director of the NOAA Commissioned Corps and NOAA Corps Operations by President  Bill Clinton on January 19, 1999, confirmed by the Senate on May 6, 1999, and promoted from captain to rear admiral, upper half. Fields was the first woman, and first African American , to hold this position.

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While serving in the roles as both director of the NOAA Corps and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, she was responsible for NOAA’s fleet of 15 research vessels, 14 aircraft, and over 700 commissioned NOAA Corp officers and civilians.

During her twenty-five years of commissioned service, RADM Fields served in a variety of billets, both staff and operational. All but two of her assignments on land and at sea were within the National Ocean Service and related to nautical charting.  Deployments included both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, specifically the Gulf of Mexico,  Mexico, Carribean, and Alaska waters.

After an  exchange program, she was responsible for reviewing, critiquing, and determining whether the hydrographic survey data submitted by Atlantic Marine Center field units was complete and adequate for final acceptance into the processing system.[10]

In 2003 Rear Admiral Fields retired and now resides in Florida.