by Dan Goldberg
If restriction of blacks to the messman branch was discrimination, the board added, “it was but part and parcel of a similar discrimination throughout the United States.”
The memo then offered three reasons why racism existed in the nation and must be replicated in the Navy: a white man will not accept a black in a position of authority over him; a white man considers that he is of a superior race and will not admit the black man as an equal; and a white man refuses to allow the black man intimate family relationships leading to marriage. “These concepts may not be truly democratic, but it is doubted if the most ardent lovers of democracy will dispute them, particularly in regard to intermarriage.”
That no one had suggested, hinted, or even mentioned marriage seems not to have bothered the authors of the report, though it is indicative of the pervasive fear of miscegenation that permeated the military and society at large.
Although the board strongly recommended that the current policy stand, and based that recommendation on expert testimony, it also stated that “the negro problem is political” and an outgrowth of the need to “gain the support of the negro vote.” “If, in the opinion of higher authority, political pressure is such as to require the enlistment of these people for general service, let it be for that.”22
Even Knox had to laugh at the arrogance of that last line, a “prize sentence,” he told Roosevelt.23
It was a shot at the president, who, in defying the General Board’s recommendation, would be putting political considerations over military objections.
Roosevelt’s feelings about the report, its racial undertones, its treatise on mankind’s flaws, and its implicit threat, were made obvious just six days later when he wrote a terse note to Knox saying the General Board’s work was unsatisfactory.
“Officers of the U.S. Navy are not officers only but are American citizens,” he wrote. “They should, therefore, be expected to recognize social and economic problems which are related to national welfare. . . . It is incumbent on all officers to recognize the fact that about one-tenth of the population of the United States is composed of members of the Negro race who are American citizens.”
Roosevelt agreed that “to go the whole way at one fell swoop would seriously impair the general average efficiency of the Navy,” but he was certain that there were some tasks black men could perform without disrupting cohesion aboard ships.
“I ask you to return the recommendations of the General Board to that Board for further study and report.”24
Knox thought the president was making a mistake. The fleet was still hobbled from the Japanese attack and about to fight a two-ocean war.
He told his friend Gifford Pinchot, who had served in Teddy Roosevelt’s administration, that he was “seriously embarrassed by the effort among a small class of negroes against the Navy.”
So many Navy recruits hailed from Southern cities “where the prejudice over the color line is inbred” that mixing crews aboard ship would certainly provoke trouble.
“My serious job right now is to have an efficient Navy to fight this war,” Knox said. “To do that, I can’t have crews that are impaired in efficiency because of racial prejudice. . . . Somehow, some way, some day, we will have to meet and solve this problem, but I submit to you that during the progress of the most dangerous war in which we have ever engaged is not the time to take up a problem so filled with dynamite as this one.”
But Knox had also grown very fond of the president. Less than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, in front of the entire cabinet, had heartily congratulated Knox for his trip to Hawaii and his “excellent handling” of the situation.
The cabinet all agreed that Knox’s trip had been a success and had demonstrated to the nation that the government would not whitewash any mistakes.
Knox, who still felt personally responsible for the failure, was speechless, too overcome with emotion to do more than mutter “Thank you.”
That night he went home and wrote the president, the man whose implicit socialism he once considered a threat to the republic, that those two words weren’t enough.
“I didn’t want to let it go at that,” he said. “I want to tell you that it is the finest decoration I could ask for, or have. . . . It is a source of immense satisfaction to me to have a small part in aiding you to bear the fearful load of responsibility which is yours.”25
So, despite his misgivings over allowing black men to train as more than messmen, Knox, on February 14, dutifully relayed the president’s message to the General Board.
“The President is not satisfied with the alternative suggested by the recent decision,” he wrote. “He thinks that some special assignments can be worked out for Negro enlisted men which would not inject into the whole personnel of the Navy the race question.”26
Pinchot thought the president was on the right track and told Knox as much. Knowing of the “very widespread and serious dissatisfaction among Negroes,” he suggested “token appointments might be extremely valuable at this stage of the game to neutralize, so far as possible, the very serious discontent in about one-tenth of our population.”27
Knox thought that a terrible idea. The Navy would never find enough qualified black men to operate a war vessel, he told Pinchot, even “if you had the entire Negro population of the United States to choose from.”
Besides, Knox said, black men must be limited to messman duties, because that “enables us to quarter the negroes together on the ship and limit their advancement to ratings within that branch, thus avoiding the promotion of negroes to command white men, a thing which instantly provokes serious trouble.”
Pinchot understood better than Knox the grassroots groundswell of discontent that would surely hamper the war effort as much as would integrating ships, if not more so, but his pleas fell on deaf ears and the results were, at least to Pinchot, predictable.
The race question that Knox so hoped to avoid was about to explode.
CHAPTER 6
“A CORDIAL SPIRIT OF EXPERIMENTATION”
On the very same morning that Secretary Knox asked the General Board to redo its report, the Pittsburgh Courier, following up on James Thompson’s letter, announced a Double V campaign on its front page, and within a month the newspaper was routinely running several Double V stories, photographs, and drawings. A Double V symbol was printed in the upper-left-hand corner of the Courier’s front page, containing the words “Democracy. Double VV Victory. At Home—Abroad.” Between two large V’s was an eagle.1
The campaign went the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of viral. Soon, all of the other major African American newspapers adopted the slogan, as did Eleanor Roosevelt and two prominent Republicans, Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey (the latter of whom would win the nomination for president in 1944 and 1948). House Majority Leader John McCormack, the novelist Sinclair Lewis, and Hollywood’s Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Gary Cooper all lent their support. Prominent black Americans were photographed flashing the Double V sign, including Marian Anderson, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Joe Louis’s wife, Marva.
The message was simple—a true victory over tyranny would not be won by the surrender of enemies. It would only be achieved by a renunciation of undemocratic principles everywhere: Europe, Asia and, most important, the United States.
The idea was summed up by one African American in North Carolina who said, “No clear-thinking Negro can afford to ignore our Hitlers here in America. I consider a man foolish who kills out mosquitoes in the street, and allows himself to be eaten up in his own bed by bed bugs.”2
The Negro Baptist Council designated Easter Sunday, 1942, as National Negro Double Victory Day. A week later, the Courier printed a drawing of two people standing on a hillside looking upward at Christ, who is emerging from a cloud holding a V in each hand.
The Courier recruited two hundred thousand Double V members, making it one of the largest black groups in the United States. There were Double V bumper stickers, buttons, sw
eaters, and beauty pageants.3
The campaign aggravated federal officials who believed that black editors were making too much of segregation, riling up readers when the nation needed unconditional loyalty.
A free press was a privilege, George Barnes, a top aide at the Office of Facts and Figures, told his boss. “The Negro press is flagrantly abusing the privilege every day. Much of the material they print violates every tenet of honest journalism.” he said. “As long as the Negro press is permitted to continue its present practices with impunity, we can expect very little improvement in morale of the Negro population.”4
Jonathan Daniels, Roosevelt’s wartime consigliere on racial matters, told the president that the desire among African Americans to use the war effort to further equality was disastrous and called the Double V campaign extortion.5
Daniels’s father was Josephus Daniels, who had served as secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson and had been Franklin Roosevelt’s boss when the latter served as assistant secretary. Indeed, it was the elder Daniels who, in 1919, had moved to exclude black men from the Navy. Two decades later his son spoke for many in the White House when he said that he was “extremely disturbed” about the state of the “negro-white relationships” because he saw the “rising insistence of negroes on their rights now” conflicting with the “rising tide of white feeling against the negroes.”6
Any threat to segregation—be it from black troops, Northern white liberals, or the Roosevelt administration—only made Southerners cling to it more desperately.
While many black men wondered whether the war was worth fighting if nothing changed at home, many Southern whites wondered whether the war was worth winning if anything changed back home.
“There’s no white man down here going to let his daughter sleep with a nigger, or sit at the same table with a nigger or go walking with a nigger,” Lloyd E. Foster, secretary of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, told the newspaper PM. “The war can go to hell, the world can go to hell but he ain’t going to do it.”7
Alabama governor Frank Dixon refused to sign a contract with the federal government to sell cloth made in prison because the contract contained an antidiscrimination clause. “The war emergency should not be used as a pretext to bring about abolition of the color line in the south,” he said.8
The White House was regularly reminded by the Southern voters, whom it needed to maintain a governing coalition, that treating black men as equals in the armed forces was not only bad policy but also bad politics.
In an eerily prescient letter, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, told Roosevelt that support for equal rights would ruin the Democratic Party in the South. The Fair Employment Practices Committee, he said, was making black men “impudent, unruly, arrogant, law breaking, violent and insolent. There is no doubt that federal agencies have adopted policies to break down and destroy the segregation laws of . . . the entire south,” Connor wrote to the president as one loyal Democrat to another. “Unless something is done by you we are going to . . . witness the annihilation of the Democratic Party in this section of the nation, and a revival of organizations which will . . . destroy the progress made by law abiding white people. . . . Don’t you think one war in the south is enough. Help us before it is too late.”9
The pundit Westbrook Pegler called the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender “reminiscent of Hearst at his worst in their sensationalism, and in their obvious, inflammatory bias in the treatment of news they resemble such one-sided publications as the Communist Party’s Daily Worker and [Father Charles] Coughlin’s Social Justice.”
Pegler, whose syndicated column reached more than six million readers, would later be known for his opposition to the civil rights movement and writing for the John Birch Society. But in the early 1940s he was one of the most influential men in America. In 1941, he finished third in Time magazine’s Man of the Year poll, behind Roosevelt and the Russian leader Joseph Stalin. Now, he was saying the two leading African American newspapers were “dangerous . . . particularly in their appeal to colored soldiers whose loyalty is constantly bedeviled with doubts and with the race-angling of news.”10
The Chicago Defender’s editors believed Pegler’s attack was “inspired by some of his friends in the Navy department who want to smear the Negro Press, and intimidate Negro editors,” and dismissed his editorial as the “emotional outburst of a disordered mind or the yapping of a stinking wet mutt.”11
But Pegler and the Navy were not the only critics of the black press. The editorial slant had become so consistently critical that the War Department asked the Justice Department to consider indicting editors and publishers for sedition, and military intelligence said the black press appeared at times “to achieve the same result as [an] outright subversive publication.”12 FBI agents came to the offices of the Pittsburgh Courier “day in and day out” and recommended indicting its editors.13
To forestall that possibility, John Sengstacke, the owner of the largest chain of black newspapers in the country, and Charles Browning, who worked in the Chicago Defender‘s Washington office, went to meet with Attorney General Francis Biddle. They, like the editors who had come to Washington the previous December, expected a welcoming reception. After all, Biddle was one of the most progressive members of Roosevelt’s administration on the question of race.
And like the editors who came to Washington in December, Sengstacke and Browning were wrong.
They were brought to a Justice Department conference room and arrived to find Biddle and an assistant sitting at a table upon which several black newspapers were displayed. The papers headlined the racial tensions in Fort Dix, New Jersey, and Tuskegee, Alabama.
These kinds of stories were hurting the war effort, Biddle said, and if the black press didn’t take on a more obsequious tone he was “going to shut them all up.”
Looking at Browning, Biddle fumed over the Defender’s report of nine black soldiers who, while traveling through Alabama, had to wait twenty-two hours to eat because white restaurants and railroad stations refused them service. The paper’s articles “came very close to sedition,” he repeated.
Sengstacke stared back at Biddle, holding his gaze to make sure that the attorney general understood that the next words out of his mouth were well considered and supremely serious.
“You have the power to close us down,” Sengstacke said, “so if you want to close us, go ahead and attempt it.”14
Biddle backed down, and over the next hour the men hammered out a detente. The attorney general promised he would not indict black publishers and Sengstacke said the black press would be “glad” to cooperate if reporters could have regular access to high officials such as Knox.
The black press was far from Knox’s only critics. African American parents were writing to their congressmen, the Navy, even to the president to protest a policy that deemed their sons unfit to serve. J. E. Branham, a realtor from Cleveland, was dismayed to learn that his seventeen-year-old son, so eager to fight for his country, could do nothing more than wash dishes or scrub pots and floors in the kitchen and dining areas.
“It seems to me that that is a very cold and ugly situation,” he said.15
Branham sent letters to the president, Senator Robert Taft, and his congressman, Martin Sweeney, who told Knox that “it would be a fine thing for the nation if boys of this type were given special training in Naval schools.”
Addison Walker, a special assistant to Assistant Navy Secretary Ralph Bard, told Sweeney, “The Navy recognizes the loyalty and patriotism of the colored people in this country and is not unmindful of its responsibility to encourage the Negroes’ desire to contribute their energy, skill and enthusiasm.” Walker said the department was considering how best this could be accomplished and promised an announcement would be forthcoming.16
Walker was writing several letters like that every day as the General Board deliberated on how to appease the president without condo
ning conditions it felt would be ruinous to naval efficiency.
The cautious replies and stalling tactics were inadequate and infuriating to the thousands who turned on their radios each night and heard of the sacrifices that must be made in a war to defend democracy.17
Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee, said the Navy’s policies made a “mockery” of democratic principles.18 Speaking at the Commodore Hotel in New York City during an inaugural dinner for the Freedom House, an organization founded to grow support for America’s involvement in the war, Willkie demanded the ideals espoused in the president’s own calls for democracy be carried out in the president’s own Navy. “Don’t you think that as American citizens, we should insist that our government and Navy Department eliminate the bar that prohibits any American citizen from serving his country?”19
Willkie called out the hypocrisy embodied by the fact that Joe Louis was allowed to raise money for the Navy but not fight for it. “He was preparing to fight in an Army uniform,” Willkie told the two thousand guests. “He couldn’t have been preparing to fight in a Navy uniform for his skin was black.”20
When a reporter asked what could be done about the Navy, Willkie pointed his index finger and said the branch’s insistence on limiting black men to the messman branch was “damn foolishness. . . . An order by the President or the Secretary of the Navy would dispose of the Navy’s color bar—just like that,” he said, and then snapped his fingers.21
Knox was furious when he read that in the papers. It wasn’t so simple, and he thought it “puny and unpatriotic” to oppose the administration in the midst of a war. Willkie’s attacks “were perfectly unjustified and unwarranted and especially his last one on the Negro question,” Knox told his friend Paul Scott Mowrer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent and the editor of the Chicago Daily News.