Richard Brookshire can tell you the cost of broken promises in numbers that will make your stomach drop. But before he helped launch the Black Veterans Project, he was once a military brat trying to figure it all out.
His father enlisted in the Army and quickly deployed to the front lines of the Vietnam War. After returning, he stayed in and met Brookshire’s mother, a Haitian immigrant and fellow soldier, during the 1980s.
The couple married after his mom processed out of the Army, and Brookshire was born at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Just a few years later, the family moved to Fort Hood, where his father deployed to fight in the Gulf War. His parents later divorced, and his mother raised him alone briefly, first in Haiti before settling in South Florida.
“I went to middle and high school in Coral Springs and went off to college. I got a full ride to go to Morehouse, the only all-Black male college in the world, which was a huge honor and a very transformative experience,” Brookshire told We Are The Mighty. “I was there for a year, and then decided to go back to school in Florida and spent a year at Florida A&M University, which is the top HBCU in Florida, and then dropped out.”
In Brookshire’s words, he was trying to find his way in the world as a young gay first-generation college student. His mother relocated to the Orlando area, and he moved in with her as he tried to figure out his next move. It was 2008, and Barack Obama was running for president.
“I ended up canvassing for him, and when he won, like for so many, it was just a very transformative moment for me,” Brookshire recalled. “I was thinking about a way to pay for school and a way to kind of grow up a little bit… and looking, I think, naively to the military in some sense for a sense of manhood and you know, guidance.”
By 2009, he was a trained medic stationed in Germany with the 170th Infantry Brigade and a soldier, working under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy.
Brookshire later described some of his experiences in The New York Times Magazine.
“Not only was I closeted because the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was still in effect, but I was one of just a few black people in my platoon of 40 soldiers. I think my company of a couple of hundred had maybe 10 black soldiers—most of the others were Midwestern white guys. There were so many microaggressions and so much racism and homophobia. A gay soldier had been discovered in the unit before I got there, and he was beaten with a bat in the shower.
In September of 2010, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed. Not long after, Brookshire deployed to Afghanistan.
“The army, in a lot of ways, was a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous experience,” he added. “I got to serve alongside Americans from all cross sections of the country.”
Upon his return, he was promoted to NCO rank and transitioned from active duty to the New York National Guard.
“One of the more transformative experiences that I had coming out of Afghanistan was the month that I got back, I found out that Trayvon Martin was killed in the same town that I canvassed for Obama in,” Brookshire shared. “He looked like one of my cousins.”
During this time, Brookshire enrolled in Fordham and finished his undergrad in political science before transitioning to Columbia to earn his master’s in pubic administration.
He admitted he was struggling with reconciling his service and time in Afghanistan once he made it back to the States.
“As I took off the uniform and transitioned, I essentially went through an existential crisis,” he explained.
Feeling hopeless and not receiving the mental health care he needed from the VA or elsewhere, he attempted suicide.
“When I survived that, I really wanted to try to understand how my story connected to the historical pattern, right? Veterans at large, but certainly Black vets disproportionately, have come back after serving the country and not getting access to the care and concern and compensation they deserve,” Brookshire said.
It was here that he and other veterans he met during graduate school worked together to create and build the Black Veterans Project in 2018.
“The VA had released a minority veterans report maybe the year or two before we had started the project, and the way that they were contextualizing accessibility didn’t compute with what I was seeing on the ground,” he explained
Though originally built to create a community for black veterans, it evolved into so much more. In 2020, they worked alongside Yale to FOIA the data around Black veterans as it relates to disability compensation. They had to litigate, and it took almost three years to receive the data.
They were gutted by the results.
“We got back that data for the first time in the history of the department, and it substantiated what Black vets had long suspected, and what kind of was the impetus for the project was that there were sustained and systemic disparities in disability compensation just in the last 20 years,” Brookshire explained.
“At one point, disparities were as much as 29% less likely for a Black veteran who would apply for PTSD compensation to get that compensation and care for PTSD, even at a 0% rating,” he continued. “Because of a failure to intervene, about 100,000 Black troops were denied PTSD compensation and care to the tune of somewhere between $2 to $3 billion in lost compensation.”
With their work, they were able to compel the Biden administration to have a government accountability office study completed on racial disparities in PTSD compensation.
“We’ve taken all of what we’ve collected and the data and the evidence and have collaborated with Yale Law School to drive forward this historic legal case that is arguing that the VA has been grossly negligent in addressing a pattern of discrimination since the 1940s.”
“It survived the motions to dismiss in the spring of 2024 in its position to become the first-ever race-based class action against the VA sometime next spring,” Brookshire shared. “We’re also working with Harvard Law School, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, because they’ve been able to find the use of basically race-based algorithmic formulas in the determination of lung disease.”
The Black Veterans Project looks to the future as staunch advocates and policy changemakers. Brookshire is proud to be Co-CEO alongside Kyle Bibby, but emphatically states that the work is only possible because of the incredible team working alongside him.
“So much of this work has been built out of me not waiting for anyone to give me an opportunity or give me permission to do it,” Brookshire said. “It came from me feeling like I saw an injustice and deciding to figure out how I might be able to make a difference about it.”
Learn more about the Black Veterans Project, and its work at BlackVeteransProject.org.
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