by Dan Goldberg
Hastie brought Hall’s case to Stimson, but the War Department did little to investigate.12
Gibson knew that “rancor and bitterness . . . were rife among black men to a degree whites couldn’t appreciate.”13 He needed to make the War Department aware of what this type of treatment was doing to black morale and what that might mean for the nation’s nascent defense efforts, so he brought men from the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the Baltimore Afro-American to Washington for roundtable discussions with representatives from the adjutant general’s office, the Bureau of Public Relations, the Morale Operations branch, and other military agencies.14
That the meeting took place December 8, one day after the Japanese attack, seemed fortuitous. Emotions were running high and the black pressmen arrived that morning assuming they would be welcomed, their complaints considered, and their grievances addressed. With the nation fighting a two-ocean war and in need of every man’s effort, surely, they thought, the segregation, humiliation, and violence would be a top concern.
They were wrong.
General George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, was scheduled to give opening remarks but could only meet for a few moments and said only that an African American unit might be formed.
The military’s official position was delivered by Colonel Eugene R. Householder, representing the adjutant general’s office. The military, he said, was a reflection of society. Segregation in the latter demanded segregation in the former.
“The Army cannot change civilian ideas on the Negro,” he told the black pressmen. “The Army is not a sociological laboratory. . . . Experiments, to meet the wishes and demands of the champions of every race and creed for the solution of their problems are a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.”15
The editors and publishers were horrified and told their readers that the insistence on segregation was “close to treason.”16
If black America was going to be asked to buy war bonds and sacrifice its boys on the battlefield, then it must “be a sacrifice for a new world which not only shall not contain Hitler, but no Hitlerism. And to thirteen millions of American Negroes that means a fight for a world in which lynching, brutality, terror, humiliation, and degradation through segregation and discrimination, shall have no place—either here or there.”
The military as it stood in December 1941 could not defend the world for democracy because it was so undemocratic. “A lilywhite Navy cannot fight for a free world. A Jim Crow Army cannot fight for a free world,” the editors of the Crisis said. “Jim Crow strategy, no matter on how grand a scale, cannot build a free world.”17
One month later, Crisis editors wrote that military regulations with regards to black men appeared little changed over the last century. “It will take more than the pat Army remark that it is not a ‘sociological laboratory’ to remedy this situation. The 1942 Negro resents and rebels against 1842 regulations. These must be rooted out whether they reside in the Mein Kampf of a Hitler or in a memorandum in the adjutant general’s office of the American Army.”18
The editorials both mirrored and reinforced the sentiment already pervasive in the black community during the first days of the war.
A survey of black residents in Harlem found that “resentment at Negro discrimination is fairly widespread throughout the Negro population.” Most of those surveyed said they’d be treated better or the same under Japanese rule than they would under the United States government, while only 11 percent believed conditions would improve for blacks if the United States won the war.19
Secretary Knox did not bother to attend the meeting at the Munitions Building. He spent that morning in a state of despair, horrified over what had happened at Pearl Harbor the day before, and feeling personally responsible. For Knox, the attacks on the base were not only a national disaster but a “personal tragedy gallingly flavored with failure.”20
Racial questions could not have been further from his mind.
He had already left Washington for what was to be a three-day trip to Hawaii, where he would personally conduct the first federal inquiry into the disaster at Pearl Harbor, when a telegram from the NAACP arrived asking whether “in view of the intensive recruiting campaign then underway, the Navy would accept colored recruits for other than the messman’s branch.” The Bureau of Navigation replied that “there had been no change in policy and that none was contemplated.”21
The day before Japan attacked, December 6, 1941, a committee that Knox had appointed six months earlier, tasked with investigating the Navy’s racial policies, advanced several reasons why black men must remain limited to the messman branch.
The report cited the “existence of racial prejudice . . . that cannot be ignored” and said “the close and intimate conditions under which men must live and work on board ship would make difficult, if not impossible, the maintenance of a high morale if the racial problem were injected into it.”22
It concluded, without any real evidence, that black men have lower health, educational, and intelligence ratings than white men, so in order to get 1,000 qualified black enlisted men, it was necessary to process 40,000, whereas 1,000 qualified white men could be obtained by processing 4,500.
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, protested directly to the president, demanding that the Navy “abandon its Jim Crow policy.”23
The president turned the matter over to the newly created Fair Employment Practices Committee and its chairman, Mark Ethridge, a liberal-leaning journalist icon from Mississippi—a short, round-faced, pink-cheeked man with a lyrical Southern accent.24 Ethridge had already been speaking with Ralph Bard, assistant secretary of the Navy, about what could be done for the thousands of African Americans such as John Reagan who were eager to defend their country but were wary of how the Navy treated black men because of the stories they read in the black press such as those told by the men on the Philadelphia, the Davis, and the Sampson.
Ethridge was getting nowhere with Bard, who described the black press as “resentful with occasional vitriolic outbursts.”25
The NAACP then turned to Lieutenant Edward Hayes, Knox’s special assistant and the man who had managed his 1936 campaign for vice president. They begged him to “use your influence to secure better treatment for Negroes who wish to enter the United States Navy in any department.”
“We are discriminated against in every way,” they wrote Hayes in a letter. “The government of this country expects all citizens to be loyal and the Negroes are loyal but underneath that loyalty there is a hurt. . . . Why should Negroes be relegated to menial labor in their allottment [sic] of tasks? Why should our Army and Navy officials follow Hitler in his racial prejudices?”
They had chosen to approach Hayes not only because he was close to Knox but because he had lived in Illinois “long enough to know that Negroes are the same as other people.” Hayes promised he’d try, but he had no more luck with Knox than Ethridge had had with Bard.26
Tensions were so high and black morale so low that Hastie, the highest-ranking African American in the War Department, proposed that black America’s leading lights gather in New York to discuss how they should respond to Japan’s attack, the military’s insistence on segregation, and the very real possibility that black Americans would be fighting to save Europe for a democratic ideal that did not exist in the United States.
Dozens of delegates representing seventeen leading African American social and professional organizations met on January 10, 1942, at the Harlem YMCA on 135th Street, a site that had profound meaning to the black community. This YMCA, completed a decade earlier, was the largest and best-equipped YMCA in the nation; it had been built because so many other YMCAs were for whites only. The C-shaped building was eleven stories of red brick set in Flemish bond, with neo-Georgian-style details. Considered one of the architect James C. Mackenzie’s finest achievements, it was a refutation of white privilege and was symbolic of the increasing wealth and soci
al status black men and women felt they deserved.
The delegates arrived on Saturday afternoon, walking up cast-stone steps, flanked by metal handrails and through ornate double doors.
The night before, Joe Louis had defended his heavyweight title only a few miles south, at Madison Square Garden, easily defeating the much larger Buddy Baer. Louis, who knocked out Baer in the first round, donated his $47,000 purse from the fight to the Navy Relief Fund.27 It wasn’t lost on any of the delegates that if Louis wanted to fight for the Navy in a uniform he’d only be allowed as a messman, whereas Baer, a white man, could serve in any capacity. Yet the Navy Relief Fund offered no objections to accepting a black champion’s check.
The delegates convened at 2:30 p.m. and met for more than seven hours. There was no disagreement—except on one point.28
The lone controversy was stirred by Hastie, one of the most famous men in the room. By the age of thirty-seven he had amassed a lifetime’s worth of accomplishments. He had made history as the first African American appointed to the federal bench, serving as a district court judge for the US Virgin Islands, a position he relinquished to become dean of Howard University.29 He had already served a stint in the Roosevelt administration, working as the assistant solicitor for the Department of the Interior. When he spoke, most knew to listen and consider his words well, but no one was quite prepared for what he was about to say.
“I believe today the American Negro is not wholeheartedly, unreservedly and all-out in support of the American war effort,” he told the crowd. “I think we should settle in our own minds whether the Negro is one-hundred percent for the war effort or whether he isn’t. If he is, we have one job. If he isn’t, we have another.”
Hastie, lowering his voice, then asked for a vote to see whether others shared his opinion.30
The conference was thrown into confusion “as if by a bomb shell.”31 Many sought to block the vote. Revealing black apathy might be seen as disloyal; antipathy could be seen as treason. And what would the Germans and Japanese think? Dissension would aid and comfort the enemy.
What Hastie was trying to do, he argued, was make the federal government aware of a very real problem, which it had created and perpetuated with policies conducive to neither morale nor battle efficiency. It was the very same effort Gibson had made one month earlier, to no avail, but whereas Gibson’s meeting had taken place without public scrutiny in a Washington government building, this gathering was public and would be reported to the nation.
After much shouting, Walter White convinced the delegates that more was to be gained from the truth than from cowardly silence. The nation needed to know what segregation had done to the morale of thirteen million black men and women.
The vote on Hastie’s question showed thirty-six delegates believed African Americans were not behind the war effort, five said they were, and fifteen remained silent. A reporter for the Chicago Defender, the most widely read black newspaper in the South, reported that those who abstained in fact sided with the majority.
The “incipient discrimination and segregation in all phases of the war, and the arrogant apathy of Washington officials have chilled the patriotic ardor of the Negro people,” the Defender told its one million readers. “When an enthusiastic black youth, thinking himself an American citizen, presents himself at the recruiting office, he is quickly turned down and often met with humiliation.”32
The conclusions reached in New York were by no means uniform, and plenty of prominent black voices felt it was wrong to equate Hitler’s Europe with Jim Crow’s South.
“It is true that we may have many internal grievances such as the infamous discrimination in the Navy and other departments,” wrote members of the National Voters’ League, the United Benevolent Society, Howard University’s Mu-So-Lit Club, and the Washington Bar Association. “We emphasize that these are internal or family differences, but the colored people of this country are now as they have always been, one-hundred percent in the defense and protection of their common country and it is unfair and a misstatement of facts for them to be pictured as a group of Achilles sulking while our country is being assailed.”33
But the conference had revealed that for most black Americans the calls to defend democracy rang hollow, while the German talk of a superior race sounded strikingly familiar.
This meeting succeeded where Gibson’s had not. The Roosevelt administration was both shocked and alarmed, having assumed it could count on every American to recognize the German and Japanese threats.
The administration might have been less surprised had those in power listened to civil rights leaders, the black press, or even Eleanor Roosevelt. All had been warning that the maintenance of morale among American blacks would be a problem.
The day before the Harlem gathering, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to the women of the Rector’s Aid Society at St. Thomas’ Parish, the Episcopal church where she and the president sometimes worshiped. Standing in one of the capital’s most fashionable churches, she told the women that “the nation cannot expect the colored people to feel that the U.S. is worth defending if they continue to be treated as they are treated now.”34
Eleanor, who often functioned “as an unofficial ombudsman for blacks,” understood better than most how stories of casual racism told a thousand times in a thousand cities were damaging the war effort.35
And nowhere was the unjust treatment more profound, she believed, than in the Navy, which continued to treat black enlistees as little more than the seagoing bellhops that the Philadelphia Fifteen had described in their letter.36
In the days following Pearl Harbor, the Navy embarked upon an aggressive recruiting campaign with newspapers, radios, and sound trucks on the streets calling for “patriotic, red-blooded young men to join the Navy and help Uncle Sam to hit back.”
But not black men.
In just one day some three hundred black men were refused enlistment in New York City. Some would return repeatedly to the recruiting office, hoping that the rules had changed, that the Navy had finally come to its senses. A forty-year-old pharmacist with a master’s degree from Columbia University applied six times, to no avail.
Often, men would call the recruiting office, list their educational achievements, and be told of the ranks and ratings open to them. But when it was discovered they were black, the recruiting officer would have to start all over again.37 These men wanted to fight, but the Navy let it be known that it wanted black men only as cooks, waiters, and valets.38
Ethridge, the chair of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, had told Knox that even if the Navy insisted on remaining segregated, the branch could still find more for black men to do—in the Caribbean or on harbor craft. But Ethridge had no real power. He could merely make suggestions.
Any change would have to be ordered from the top, and with war now raging and morale in the black community dangerously low, the president pushed. The same day that Eleanor spoke to the women at St. Thomas’ Parish, the president wrote to Knox insisting that the Navy “might invent something that colored enlistees could do in addition to the rating of messman.”39
Knox, still reliant on his admirals, turned the matter over to the Navy General Board, made up of admirals who acted in an advisory role, and asked for a plan to recruit five thousand African Americans for the general service.
When the General Board met on January 23 to discuss Knox’s request, high-ranking officers from various branches tried to outdo one another in describing the calamity that would certainly follow if black men were allowed to do more than serve breakfast, make beds, and clean toilets aboard a ship.
Major General Thomas Holcomb, commandant of the Marine Corps, which was the only branch of the military that had remained completely segregated, told the board that if he had to choose to fight with 5,000 whites or 250,000 blacks, he would rather have the whites.
Holcomb called the enlistment of black men “absolutely tragic,” and told the General Board that African Americans had every
opportunity “to satisfy their aspiration to serve in the Army.” Their desire to enter the naval service was largely an effort “to break into a club that doesn’t want them.”
“If we are defeated,” he said, “we must not close our eyes to the fact that once in they will be strengthened in their effort to force themselves into every activity we have. If they are not satisfied to be messmen, they will not be satisfied to go into the construction or labor battalions. Don’t forget the colleges are turning out a large number of well-educated Negroes. I don’t know how long we will be able to keep them out of the V-7 [officer training] class. I think not very long.”
Similar testimony was given by officers from the Bureau of Aeronautics, the Bureau of Yards and Docks, and the US Coast Guard.
One of the direst warnings came from Captain Kenneth Whiting, a sixty-year-old Massachusetts-born World War I hero who had trained with the Wright brothers in Ohio and was known as “the father of the aircraft carrier.” Whiting was responsible for the tenets of naval carrier aviation and told his colleagues that if black men were allowed to be more than servants, then one day soon they’d demand to be officers. “The sponsors of the program desire full equality on the part of the Negro and will not rest content until they obtain it,” he warned.
The lone voice of support for opening the general-service ratings to black sailors came from Rear Admiral Charles P. Snyder, the Navy’s inspector general, who thought his colleagues were being a bit hyperbolic. He conceded the need for a segregated training facility and acknowledged that this would be “troublesome and require tact, patience and tolerance,” but “we have so many difficulties to surmount anyhow that one more possibly wouldn’t swell the total very much.”
Snyder suggested that black men could play in the ship’s band, pointing out that “the colored race is very musical and they are versed in all forms of rhythm.” Snyder also suggested that black men might serve in the aviation branch, where the Army had reported some success, or on auxiliaries and other minor vessels such as transports. Besides, he said, this would allow the Navy to answer the criticisms coming from the black press.