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Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: December marks the 100th anniversary of the appointment of the FBI’s first African-American special agent.

James Wormley Jones, the son of a former slave, was the first in a long line of trailblazers who contributed to the FBI’s investigative expertise and rich history.

Following Jones’ path was Dr. John Glover, the highest ranking African-American leader in FBI history.

At a recent ceremony celebrating the milestone, Glover said…

Dr. John Glover: As we stand at this really, really historic time in the history and in the life of the FBI, and as we reflect upon our service to the nation, our service to the FBI, let us do as we have done in the past. Try to make the world a better place, try to make the FBI an even better organization, more effective, more diverse.

Halpern: Diversity is one of the FBI’s eight core values.

African-American employees make up 11.3 percent of the workforce, the highest of any minority population at the FBI.

Only 4.6 percent of special agents are African-American, but Director Christopher Wray says the percentage of new African-American special agents has steadily increased since 2014.

Christopher Wray: And we’ve got lots of initiatives in place to keep the momentum going, to keep recruiting talented African-American special agents, and to keep creating opportunities for them to succeed.

Halpern: One of those initiatives is a mentoring program that pairs a senior executive with a mid-level employee of a different gender, ethnicity, or race.

Another is the FBI's Diversity Agent Recruitment program, which actively seeks to include people of all races, genders, and backgrounds into the Bureau's special agent workforce.

With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.