by Dan Goldberg
To everyone who has been told, “No, your idea isn’t worth a book.”
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 “We’re sending you up to Great Lakes.”
CHAPTER 2 “Don’t put your time in Negroes.”
CHAPTER 3 “I just don’t believe you can do the job.”
CHAPTER 4 “We are discriminated against in every way”
CHAPTER 5 “Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship?”
CHAPTER 6 “A cordial spirit of experimentation”
CHAPTER 7 “As good as any fighting men the US Navy has”
CHAPTER 8 “You are now men of Hampton.”
CHAPTER 9 “I feel very emphatically that we should commission a few negroes.”
CHAPTER 10 “You can make me an officer, but my parents made me a gentleman.”
CHAPTER 11 “His intelligence and judgment are exceptional.”
CHAPTER 12 “You forget the color and you remember the rank.”
CHAPTER 13 “There is that salute you never got.”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photos
CHAPTER 1
“WE’RE SENDING YOU UP TO GREAT LAKES.”
Jesse Arbor, a cheeky and irreverent twenty-eight-year-old, was sweeping for mines off the coast of New England and helping direct ships to their berths in the fall of 1943 when he learned he’d been selected to serve aboard the USS Mason.
The Mason, an Evarts-class destroyer escort, was going to be the first warship in US history to boast a black crew. He would finally see real action on the open sea, not just operate off the coast.
“My chest flew wide open because I was so proud,” Arbor recalled.1
Arbor was just a tad over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and powerful thighs that gave the two-hundred-pound football stud surprising agility. He had enlisted in the Navy the year before, only a few months after it was announced that black men could try for a general-service rating, the first time the Navy allowed them to do more than cook, clean, and serve white men aboard ship. Black men could now train as gunner’s mates, machinist’s mates, quartermasters, and electricians.
After twelve weeks of boot camp, where Navy customs and regulations were so drilled into his consciousness that they became second nature, Arbor had spent sixteen weeks at quartermaster school. He studied navigation, flashing-light communications, sextants, compasses, steering, and other nautical skills at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, in Great Lakes, Illinois, close to where his parents lived, in Chicago.
He was a middling student at Great Lakes, graduating in April 1943 as a quartermaster third class, the lowest rating for new navigation experts. His first assignment was at a receiving station in Boston, where he spent August and September aboard the USS Bulwark, an Accentor-class coastal minesweeper, a relatively small ship designed for protecting harbors and bays. The crew left between five-thirty and six every morning and spent eight hours sweeping for mines in the cold, choppy waters off New England.
This could be dull work, but it was still considered a plum gig for a black man at the time. Many black sailors with the same training spent their days waxing floors in the barracks, washing pants, and cleaning toilets, a reminder of the racism that governed social relations in twentieth-century America as it fought for democracy abroad.2 Though black men had been training for the general-service ratings for more than a year, the Navy had thus far limited their assignments to shore establishments or guarding the coast.
But the Mason was no minesweeper. This was a warship that would patrol the Atlantic, fending off German U-boats.
This was where the action was.
By the end of 1942, U-boats had sunk nearly 1,200 US merchant vessels attempting to supply Great Britain with military equipment, food, and fuel. The supply lines were key to winning the war, and the Navy developed destroyer escorts such as the Mason to combat German submarines. The destroyers carried depth charges and antisubmarine weapons known as hedgehogs. They had mounted three-inch, fifty-caliber guns, as well as anti-aircraft guns. They had sophisticated tracking equipment that used high-frequency radio, radar, and sonar.3
No black man had ever worked as a quartermaster on a ship like this.
The height of Arbor’s ambition was to be a quartermaster aboard the Mason, where he could play an active role in defending his country. Maybe, one day, he could even earn a promotion to chief quartermaster.4 That he would help break a color barrier by serving on the first warship with a black crew only added to his excitement.
Arbor’s bags were already packed when orders suddenly changed. He was told that he would not be going aboard the Mason. He wasn’t told why.
He could barely contain his rage, and the news that he had been given leave for Christmas did little to assuage his disappointment.
When Arbor returned to Boston from a trip home to Chicago, the first thing he did was wash his clothes. To pass the time, he started playing poker with some of his Navy buddies. Sitting in his skivvies, Arbor heard someone say that he needed to report to the officer of the deck. Annoyed, he didn’t even look up.
“Hell, I just left there,” he said.
No answer.
When Arbor finally raised his head, he realized he was addressing a commander.
He stood at attention.
“Sir, I don’t have anything to put on. In a few minutes, it will all be out of the washing machine, and then I’ve got to dry something.”
The officer turned and left.
Arbor sat down, but before the next hand was dealt, another officer appeared.
“Jesse Arbor, you’re wanted by the officer of the deck on the double.” Arbor realized no one was interested in his laundry. He borrowed a uniform and rushed out. On the steps, he was met by a captain who handed him a sealed brown envelope.
“You have ten minutes to get your seabag lashed up,” he said. “There’s a car sitting down below to take you to Back Bay Station. In thirty-five minutes, you’re going back to Chicago.”
That wasn’t enough time to pack so Arbor didn’t bother. He grabbed, borrowed, and stole what he could—bell-bottom trousers, an undress blue jumper, and a peacoat that didn’t quite fit.
His mind was racing. Why was he being sent back to Chicago? Was he in trouble? He remembered that he had once been in a car accident on the corner of Fifty-First and South Park. He had been driving an old Pontiac and he wrecked a doctor’s Packard. Maybe he was being sent back to answer for that.
When Arbor arrived at Chicago’s Union Station, a Beaux Arts masterpiece near the Loop, a sailor greeted him and the two drove thirty-five miles north, to Great Lakes, the headquarters of the Ninth Naval District. Arbor was shown to a barracks, where a couple other black men were waiting.5
John Reagan also had hopes that he would finally see some action. He had been in the Navy for eighteen months, an electrician’s mate of some repute who had impressed his superiors at Hampton Institute in Virginia, home to a segregated training station led by Lieutenant Commander Edwin Hall Downes.
Reagan had spent 1943 aboard the USS Firefly, an auxiliary minesweeper stationed out of Naval Base Point Loma, California. At the end of the year, he was ordered to Norfolk Naval Operating Base, in Virginia, so he could be an electrician aboard the Mason.
Back in Virginia and brimming with excitement, Reagan ran into his old boss, Downes, who by then had been promoted to commander. Downes asked Reagan what he was doing back in Virginia. Reagan stuck out his chest and declared, “I’m going aboard this DE [destroyer escort] as an AC electrician’s mate. I’m going to get a ship at last.”
“The hell you are,” Downes replied. “Come over here to the personnel of
fice and get your orders changed. You come over to my quarters at the school this afternoon or this evening, and I’ll tell you a little bit about what’s going on.”
Reagan followed up with Downes, but the commander was coy.
“We’re sending you up to Great Lakes for a special class and it’s something that you’ll like. You’ll be glad you’re going. It might lead to something you never suspected.”6
James Hair suspected little when he was told to report to Great Lakes. He had been working out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a quartermaster on a tugboat, the USS Penobscot, and enjoying the life of a young, single sailor in New York City.
A shore-to-ship call came: “Transfer James Hair to 90 Church Street immediately upon docking.” The massive building between Vesey and Barclay streets near New York’s City Hall served as the headquarters for the Third Naval District.
Hair reported and announced himself. He was given little regard, just a large brown envelope sealed with red wax, a train ticket, and no explanation. He was told to proceed immediately to Great Lakes Naval Training Station and report to Commander Daniel W. Armstrong, a white officer in charge of the segregated Camp Robert Smalls. The camp had been designated for black men almost two years before, to accommodate the Navy’s new enlistees after Pearl Harbor.
Hair hustled uptown to Penn Station and, exhausted, fell asleep while waiting at the gate. The next sound he heard was a porter yelling, “All aboard!”
Hair grabbed his gear and ran along the narrow platform toward the departing train, which was beginning to pull away. He screamed at the porter, at anyone who could help, as he tried to jump aboard the moving train before he ran out of platform. Just before he did, he threw on his bags and climbed inside. Breathless, Hair found a seat as the train headed west under the Hudson River and into New Jersey before making its way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
The train pulled into Chicago after midnight, and Hair arrived at Great Lakes at around 1 a.m. The officers there didn’t know what to make of this young man. Hair couldn’t provide much help. All he knew was that he had orders to see Commander Armstrong. But Armstrong was asleep, and no one was going to wake the commander for a confused black man clutching a brown envelope. Hair was sent to sick bay, the only area where there was a bed available, and was told he could see Armstrong in the morning.7
When the sun rose the next morning, Sam Barnes was given an order he did not understand: Armstrong had ordered him to the main side—the white side of the station, where senior officers worked. The only time African Americans were ordered to the main side was when they were in trouble. Barnes racked his brain wondering what he might have done wrong. Nothing came. Barnes, a petty officer third class stationed at Great Lakes, was popular with his superiors and appreciated by his peers. He had never been disciplined. Why, he wondered, was Armstrong ordering him to the main side?
Barnes arrived to find several other black men waiting. He knew a few from Camp Robert Smalls. He recognized Reginald Goodwin and Lewis “Mummy” Williams (Williams got the nickname because of a grammar school book report on King Tut; it suited him because of his quiet nature). They were standouts, same as he was. He didn’t recognize the other black men, and judging by the looks on their faces, they had no more idea than he as to why they had all been summoned.
Armstrong, a tall, handsome, aristocratic-looking man with an upright gait and an immaculate uniform, looked the men over.
“Do you know why you are here?” he asked.
Silence.
“Well, the Navy has decided to commission Negroes as officers in the United States Navy, and you have been selected to attend an officer indoctrination school.”
The statement was matter-of-fact, unemotional.
No allotment was made for the weight of history it carried, no moment spared to mark its significance. There were no kind words of congratulations, no expressions of encouragement.
Along with Arbor, Reagan, Hair, Sam Barnes, Goodwin, and Williams, ten other black sailors had been summoned from training schools and shore installations across the United States to be informed, coldly, that they had been chosen to break the Navy’s most rigid color barrier.
Phil Barnes, Dalton Baugh, and George Cooper had worked at Hampton Institute.
Augustus Alves, J. B. Pinkney, Charles Lear, Graham Martin, and William Sylvester White had been stationed at Great Lakes.
Frank Sublett had been at Naval Section Base, Lockwood Basin, in Boston, and Dennis Nelson had been at a recruiting station in Nashville, Tennessee.
The men stared at one another, wondering whether Armstrong had lost his mind.
But no one said a word.
Armstrong ordered the men to return to Camp Robert Smalls and head to Barracks 202, where they would meet their executive officer and instructors.
“But before you go,” Armstrong said, “in order to be considered for officer candidate, you must be at least a chief petty officer or a petty officer first class. So, all of those who are neither as of this moment are first class.”8 There was a moment of elation. The sudden promotion meant an instant boost in pay. But the giddiness was brief. Whatever illusion any of these sixteen men might have had about the Navy entering some new era of racial harmony was shattered the moment the door to Barracks 202 swung open.
When the men peered inside, they saw sixteen cots, sixteen foot lockers, and one long table with sixteen chairs—the kind men sat around at chow. The spartan setting made plain just how the Navy intended to integrate the officer corps.
A white officer looked from the room to the men and said, “This is it.”
“What do you mean?” asked George Cooper, a Hampton man and sheet-metal whiz who had worked with Commander Downes for nearly two years.9
“This barracks in which you are now sitting is going to be your school.”
The men’s hearts sank in their chests. Great Lakes was home to an elite service school with plenty of equipment that could aid their training. But they’d see almost none of that. They would train separately, drill apart, and eat alone, essentially under house arrest for the crime of being black. The officer corps was ready to be integrated. Great Lakes Naval Training Station was not. This experiment was a secret. They were to tell no one. They were to have no contact with anyone, white or black, save for their instructors and family members.
“That was sort of a letdown off the bat,” Cooper remembered.
The sixteen men sat together that first night, a wintry Saturday, inside a cold barracks, contemplating the weeks ahead and the magnitude of their responsibility.
CHAPTER 2
“DON’T PUT YOUR TIME IN NEGROES.”
It was January 1944. There were nearly 100,000 black men in the Navy. If any of them were ever to rise above the rate of petty officer, if any were ever to command a ship or graduate from the Naval Academy, if any were ever to lead white men in battle, then this radical experiment with these sixteen officer candidates would have to succeed.
This training program was the culmination of a four-year campaign to have the Navy live up to the democratic ideals the United States was preaching and defending around the globe. Men and women of all races, from all over the country, were demanding a better, freer, more democratic world, not only for allies in Europe and Asia, but for themselves and their children in America. Thousands had marched and protested, written letters and signed petitions, beseeched their congressmen, and begged the president, all so that black men could serve equally in the US Navy, a branch that had historically been so hostile to people of color. Those men and women were met at every turn by an intransigent bureaucracy that was far more concerned with efficiency than with equality, by a Navy secretary who was certain that integration would bring disaster, and by admirals who were adamant that worthy black men could not be found in the whole of the United States.
Because of that history, many in this first group remained cynical and kept up their guard, not yet willing to believe the Navy wou
ld really allow black officers. But each man swore he’d give it his all—for his own sake, for the countless souls whose sacrifice made this moment possible, and for all the black men yet to come.
“We believed there were people who hoped we’d fail,” Sam Barnes recalled. “We were determined to succeed in spite of the burden that was being placed on our shoulders.”1
Barnes wasn’t wrong to distrust the Navy. Less than two years before, Navy Secretary Frank Knox had threatened to resign before so much as integrating the sleeping quarters aboard a ship or allowing black men into the Navy’s general service, where they would work alongside white men. Knox and his admirals insisted that African Americans should only serve as messmen, servants derided as little more than “seagoing bellhops.”2
It had been less than a year since Knox told President Franklin Roosevelt that he opposed accepting black men from the draft, fearing that doing so would force the Navy to resort to mixed crews aboard a ship, an outcome he deemed foolish in the face of a two-ocean war.
And it had been only two decades since an Army War College report had concluded that black men could hold no position that required leadership, courage, or intelligence. A generation of military policy was based on this so-called exhaustive study of how black men had performed during World War I. Released in 1925, The Use of Negro Manpower in War asserted that black men were genetically ill equipped to serve. “In the process of evolution, the American Negro has not progressed as far as other subspecies of the human family,” wrote Major General Hanson Edward Ely in the War College report.3
In reality, black men had displayed a courage that heartened allies and terrified enemies. So successful was the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Black Rattlers of the New York Army National Guard, that the French referred to them as Men of Bronze.
The Germans knew them by another name: Hellfighters. They were on the front line for 191 days and never had a single soldier taken prisoner nor had they surrendered a single foot of ground to the enemy.4