Johney Brooks

Brooks joined the United States Air Force in 1951, during the Korean War, and was honorably discharged in 1953.^[1] She was a chemist in Los Angeles, taught high school in Los Angeles and Compton,^[3] worked as a school administrator in Sacramento^[4][5] and Pomona,^[6] and was an assistant professor at Humboldt State University.^[1]

From 1969 to 1971, Brooks taught science teachers for USAID in Uganda.^[3] From 1982 to 1985,^[7] she was the appointed director of Peace Corps work in Gambia.^[8][9] She worked at the Bahá'i World Centre in Haifa. She held embassy posts in Tunisia, Niger, Sierra Leone, Guyana, Turkmenistan,^[10] and Papua New Guinea.^[1]

Brooks was an adherent of the Bahá'i faith.^[11][12] She had two children:^[3] her daughter Alexis Brooks de Vita is a professor of English at Texas Southern University,^[13] and her son W. Abdullah Brooks is a public health physician on the faculty at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.^[14] Brooks died from complications of a stroke in 2016, in Lake Katrine, New York, aged 83 years.^[1]