Andrea Motley Crabtree — The First
1982 · U.S. Army · Living Record
She grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, watching her father and grandfather — both veterans — and decided early that the military was where she belonged. The world had other opinions. “A lot of people didn’t think the military was a good thing for women,” she would later say. Andrea Motley Crabtree enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1977 anyway.
In 1982, she arrived at the U.S. Navy Deep Sea Diving and Salvage School in Panama City Beach, Florida. She was one of eight soldiers and more than twenty other students — mostly Navy — reporting for a three-month program that would award the Army Corps of Engineers’ Military Occupational Specialty 00B: diver. She was the only woman in the class. She was the only Black person in the class. She already knew what that meant. “I was Army, going to a predominantly Navy environment. I’m female, to a predominantly male environment. I’m Black, to a predominantly White environment.”
The physical demands of the course were not metaphorical. Students had to pass a rigorous health and fitness assessment that disqualified many candidates before training even truly began. Those who remained had to demonstrate they could rise from a seated position while wearing the Mark V deep sea dive suit — a 198-pound iron-and-canvas apparatus that had been the standard for U.S. military divers since World War II. Rise from seated. Walk to the ladder. Descend into the water. Climb back out. The suit did not care about your intentions.
At the end of the three months, out of the entire combined class of soldiers and sailors, only eleven people earned the diver badge — two soldiers and nine sailors. Andrea Motley Crabtree was one of the two soldiers. She became the first woman in the history of the United States Army to earn the Army Diver Badge. She became the first Black female deep-sea diver in any branch of the U.S. military. Donna Tobias had broken the Navy’s barrier in 1975. Carl Brashear had become the Navy’s first Black master diver in 1954. Crabtree stood at the intersection of both of those histories and wrote a new one.
There were approximately 39 divers total in the entire United States Army at that moment. All of them had been men. Now one of them was not.
As a Second Class Diver, she was trained to work underwater performing maintenance, construction support, salvage operations, and hazardous tasks requiring hydraulic tools and underwater welding. The work was dangerous, skilled, and demanded complete trust in the diver beside you. She had earned the right to be trusted. She had done exactly what was asked. She wore the badge.
Her portrait — painted in 2017 by the acclaimed artist Henry Taylor, based on a photograph taken at the dive school that year — now hangs permanently in Gallery 508 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It also appears at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Gregg-Adams, Virginia. Taylor’s composition places her posture in conversation with the tradition of Old Master portraiture — a Black woman in a 198-pound dive suit, looking back at history with the same directness history so rarely extended to her. She has also been the subject of works by artist Tavares Strachan, exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery.
She loved diving. That is the whole of this entry and the seed of the next one. She loved it, she was good at it, and she earned every inch of it. “I was happy to be there,” she said. “Happy to be in that suit.”
→ See also: Andrea Motley Crabtree — What the Army Took Back (Persecution · Living Record · 1985)