The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  “It is simply impossible in the midst of a war to mix the races on the same ship, and if he had thought on the subject for a half minute, he would have known it,” Knox said. “I can only fight one war at a time, and the one on our hands now is big enough without introducing a race war besides.” A frustrated Knox wondered whether Willkie had any compunctions when he read about a riot that left five or six men dead at Fort Dix. “That would be a nice thing to initiate right now in the close quarters in which men have to live aboard, wouldn’t it,” Knox asked sarcastically.22

  He also felt that Willkie’s attacks were disingenuous and politically motivated, which particularly irked Knox, a Republican serving in the Roosevelt cabinet.

  “The slightest inquiry on his part would have disclosed that we were working hard on the problem and had practically arrived at a decision when he burst into print,” he said.

  The solution to which Knox referred was announced April 7, 1942, during an impromptu press conference Knox had called in Washington. The Navy would for the first time in history open the general-service ratings to black men. They would train as quartermasters and engineers, learn how to navigate a ship, and repair a boiler.

  The General Board, upon which Knox relied, had devised a plan that offered the “least disadvantages and the least difficulty of accomplishment as a war measure,” having finally realized that it would be “unwise and inadvisable” to keep resisting the president.23

  The board still thought it a terrible idea and, taking another shot at their commander in chief, said this should only be done “if it is determined by higher authority that social economic and other considerations require the enlistment of men of the colored race in other than the messman branch.”24

  It wanted final say as to how many enlistees would be accepted under this new program, but Roosevelt overruled the admirals, telling Knox, “This is a matter to be determined by you and me.”25

  This was a historic moment, but also one soured by needless caveats and dripping with reaffirmed prejudice.

  The board recommended that black chief petty officers outrank only other black men—not whites—to avoid having blacks superior in rank to whites.

  Admiral Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, said black men should be relegated to construction battalions, known as Seabees, and to shore stations, where they would work on the docks. If absolutely necessary, they were to be put on yard craft.26 This arrangement could for the most part avoid mixing the races or having black men in charge of white men.

  King’s biographer charitably referred to the admiral’s attitude toward African Americans as one of “benevolent ignorance.” He had little personal contact with black men and was influenced by the stereotypes he heard on the radio and read in books, all of which seemed to comport with what Ely and other military minds had said for decades.

  King often repeated racist jokes and referred to older black men as “darkies” and younger black men as “boys” and, occasionally, “niggers.”

  So King was not especially eager to integrate the fleet in any meaningful way and told Knox as much.27

  Training would of course remain segregated, which the General Board both insisted upon and lamented because “to divert any part of the training effort to the development of Negro crews or Negro battalions would not produce a return in effective fighting units commensurate with the adverse effects on the training program and the efficiency of the fleet.”28

  Segregation required duplication of mess halls, sick bays, instructors, housing, and recreational facilities. It was a luxury and a waste of manpower that the Navy could ill afford, but was kept in place because the top brass still believed that integration would at best “adversely affect morale, and at worst, result in serious racial conflict and bloodshed.”29

  Knox told the reporters gathered at the Navy Department that he’d need three months to ready a segregated camp. Following King’s recommendation, Knox ordered the Navy to accept for the general service no more than 277 black men per week and classify them as apprentice seamen. Anyone else who enlisted would serve in the construction battalions, or as messmen, meaning black men would still make up a disproportionate share of laborers and servants. Rated enlistees would serve ashore or on small local-defense craft. No black man who earned a rating would be allowed on a warship—thus African Americans would be denied the chance to test their mettle in battle. Aboard ship, black men would still be relegated to messmen duties. African Americans already serving as messmen were denied the ability to transfer because there was a shortage of servants.30

  “The whole thing will be carried along in a cordial spirit of experimentation,” Knox told reporters. “It is not contemplated they will be commissioned.”

  The secretary assured Massachusetts senator David Walsh, chair of the Naval Affairs Committee, that any discussion about African American officers remained a long way off.

  “As you know, the arrangements for the enlistment of Negroes in the Navy, aside from the messman branch, are just in the making,” Knox said. “We will have to develop a considerable body of Negro sailors before we can even approach the problem of the Negro commissioned officer.”31

  He told New Jersey senator William Smathers that “the experience of many years, has demonstrated that [Negro petty officers] cannot maintain discipline among men of the white race over whom they may be placed for the purpose of advancement. It is to be expected, therefore, that members of the Negro race serving as officers in the Navy would face the same difficulties. It is impracticable to so assign officers to particular duties which would make it possible that, in the case of Negro citizens appointed as officers, they would command only members of their own race.”32

  Knox’s press conference was a public relations disaster, for he appeared to only begrudgingly accept a black man’s role in the Navy, to limit his contributions to menial labor, and to continue the segregation that so insulted African Americans.

  The new policy was dismissed as a “mere palliative which doesn’t begin to reach the fundamental issues,” and a “weak and futile gesture which can in no way claim to pacify the resentment and indignation of the mass of Negroes.”33

  “If Secretary Knox feels that it is necessary to cater to the prejudices of the Navy officials in order to win this war for ‘Freedom,’ then it would be wiser for him to keep quiet,” the Philadelphia Tribune told its readers.34

  The Pittsburgh Courier said it was hard not to “feel disgusted at the tricky, evasive hypocritical manner in which the Secretary of the Navy has dealt with this problem.”35

  While some prominent African American organizations such as the National Negro Congress commended Knox for what they saw as a first step, and the Navy did receive many congratulatory letters, most were appalled that the Navy could not bring itself to treat white and black sailors as equals. At best, this was progress of a stuttering sort.

  The Washington chapter of the NAACP called the plan a “deliberate insult to all defenders of democracy” and asked the president to fire his Navy secretary. “The demonstration of the Nazi attitude by a cabinet officer strikes at the very roots of our American system,” James E. Scott, the president of the local chapter, wired to Roosevelt. “This blow to the morale of the Negro people will be deeply appreciated in Berlin, Rome and Tokio [sic].”36

  The National Urban League’s publication, Opportunity, said the Navy had passed up a historic chance, and instead had chosen “to affirm the charge that Japan is making against America to the brown people . . . that the so-called Four Freedoms enunciated in the great ‘Atlantic Charter’ were for white men only.”37

  “Such as it is, this order is a victory for sustained agitation begun and carried on by the Pittsburgh Courier,” an editorial in the paper said. “But in all frankness it must be stated that fundamentally this order marks a setback in race relations in the United States because it strengthens the vicious institution of segregation, the root and source of all the ills the Negro suffers in th
is country. It merely extends the borders of segregation and we have too much segregation already. It is a source of sorrow, amazement and shame that in time of war when the United States has suffered defeat after defeat and the fate of civilization hangs in the balance that a high government official should so abjectly surrender to reactionism.”38

  It wasn’t only the black press that found Knox’s policy lacking. The New York Times editorial board lamented the continuing discrimination “for which no warrant can be found in the constitution, the statutes or the Democratic traditions of the United States.”39

  The black press found it notable that “even so conservative a newspaper as The New York Times expresses editorial dissatisfaction in stronger words than it has ever used in commenting on racial questions.”40

  A. Philip Randolph thought the new rules were worse than if the government had made no announcement at all because this “accepts and extends and consolidates the policy of Jim-Crowism in the Navy as well as proclaims it an accepted government ideology that the Negro is inferior to the white man. White America must understand that the Negro . . . resent[s] the stigma of inferiority and the status of vassals which Secretary Knox has affixed to them,” Randolph said.41

  The dismay from the black community over Knox’s timid stance was matched by the horror in the white community, terrified that the secretary had gone too far. Martin Keefe, a retired Marine living in Connecticut, begged his senator to “protest this move to the limit.” And a letter signed “just a marine” said that nearly all members of the Navy and Marine Corps “resent this and consider [it] another communistic move by the communistic New Deal.”42

  All Knox could do when responding to howls of protest from civil rights leaders and bigots was to assure all his critics that his decision had not been made in haste.

  “I know that many loyal citizens of our country would misunderstand this action,” he told Connecticut Senator Francis Maloney, “but I can assure you it was taken with first consideration given to the best interest of our country and the service.”43

  He thought it false and “not in the best interests of the Negro race” for leaders to say that the policies were inconsistent with the nation’s democratic ideals. “That all theoretically possible steps are not taken at once cannot reasonably be condemned as undemocratic,” he said.44

  He and Assistant Navy Secretary Ralph Bard tried to make the case that gratitude would go further than griping.

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Bard told the Conference of Negro Churches. “You can’t just turn everything upside down in five minutes. The more lack of cooperation there is, the tougher it’s going to be for the service as a whole and for your people.”45

  Knox decided that the Navy’s experiment with black men would begin at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, on the shore of Lake Michigan just north of Chicago.46 An isolated section along Morrow Road at the very northwest corner of the station had camps that offered plenty of room for segregated facilities. Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, reckoned that using these existing facilities would make the segregation less conspicuous than if the Navy picked a new site and built segregated camps from scratch.

  On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr., a nineteen-year-old from Galveston, Texas, who had graduated from high school five days earlier, became the first black man to report to Camp Morrow.47 The doors were now open—if only a crack—but black men were not rushing to enlist in the Navy. During the first three weeks, only 1,261 black men volunteered, and 58 percent of those men had been rejected for physical and other reasons.

  Jacobs thought the recruitment troubles were because the Navy was not doing enough to publicize its new open stance, but the bureau’s historians assured him that it was simply black men’s “relative unfamiliarity with the sea or the large inland waters and their consequent fear of the water” that kept them from enlisting.48

  The historians could hang their racist trope on misinterpreted statistics. Of the recruits who reported to Great Lakes, roughly two-thirds of white men could pass the swimming tests, compared to only one-third of black men. Much of this result could be traced to the South’s rules that kept black men from swimming at beaches or in public pools, but to many Navy men, it confirmed their fear that recruiting black men was a waste of time and effort.49

  The real reason black men remained wary of the Navy was because they surmised, not incorrectly, that they’d still be treated as the “vassals” that Randolph described. More than 75 percent of readers polled by the Pittsburgh Courier in the fall of 1942 said they did not believe the Navy “offers the American Negro greater opportunity to serve his country than the Army.”50

  As a result, better-educated black men were far more likely to join the Army. Only about 20 percent of young African Americans in the nation had less than four years of schooling. At Great Lakes, it was 30 percent. Consequently, test scores for black men in the Navy consistently ran about ten points behind those of white men. If given more training the black men could equal white men in shop work but remained behind in advanced mathematics and theory subjects, providing fodder to those who thought they were inferior. In reality these differences were an indictment of the “separate but equal” school system that would be challenged a decade later. The eleven states that made up the Confederacy, plus Kentucky, accounted for 91 percent of those requiring, and profiting from, remedial literacy courses, but, as was the case with the swim tests, not everyone in the Navy was inclined to take such a progressive view.51

  Instead, the poor test scores were among the reasons the Navy gave for insisting on segregated training camps.

  In an attempt to address the recruiting challenge, the Navy assigned black men to work at recruiting centers in black communities across the country. Among them was Dennis Denmark Nelson II, who joined the Navy on June 5, the same day as Carmen, though with much less fanfare. Nelson, a thirty-four-year-old with a neatly trimmed mustache and receding hairline, was a prominent Fisk University sociology professor who had already made a name for himself in Tennessee.

  A decade earlier, Nelson, then attending Fisk University and working with the Bethlehem Center, a Christian institution for black boys, started Nashville’s first black Boy Scouts troop, Troop 65. Nelson was “untiring” in his recruitment and soon there were more than one hundred boys participating from across the city. W. J. Anderson, a Scouts executive, called Nelson “an unusually capable scoutmaster,” and asked him to come to Cincinnati to become a Scouts council executive.52

  It made sense then for the Navy to assign Nelson to the Nashville Navy Recruiting Station, in a community where he already had relationships with many draft-age Boy Scouts. Petty Officer First Class Nelson spent his first eighteen months in the Navy telling potential recruits, uncertain what branch to choose, that the Navy’s technical schools offered some of the best training in the world, and in most cases that training was easily adapted to civilian life, offering a chance for employment when the war ended.53

  Even as black men began to enlist in the Navy in greater numbers and take advantage of the new training offered, African American leaders were pushing to remove the barriers that placed a ceiling on their race’s advancement.

  In July, the presidents of land grant institutions petitioned Secretary Knox to allow black men into the V-1 program, which combined college courses and officer training. The Navy had blocked all the historically black colleges from the program and was prohibiting black men who were attending integrated colleges from enrolling.

  “Obviously, it is a callous, profligate waste of intelligent manpower to take a man who has had (or can get) several years of college mathematics, physics and allied subjects and start him as an apprentice seaman,” the college presidents wrote to Knox. “Such a policy of exclusion has caused and will cause more and more colored men to wonder whether the recent action of the Navy in making it possible for colored men to enlist in the Navy other than [as] messmen . . . is to remain a
feeble gesture. . . . Such doubts and fears certainly are not conducive to high morale.”54

  A committee appointed by the college presidents told Addison Walker, Bard’s special assistant, and Dean Baker, the head of the Navy training program, that ambitious black youths would enter the Army “under the superior opportunities offered . . . to become officers” instead of the Navy, “knowing that the officer program in the Navy is an illusion or practically a closed door.”

  The V-1 program, they pointed out, would take at least two or three years to graduate a black officer, and if the war actually lasted into 1944 or 1945 the “Navy would need officers so badly that the color of the officer would be immaterial.”55

  Knox didn’t care.

  The Navy was not ready to train black officers, and he told anyone who protested that black men should first “prove themselves on the present levels and the present opportunities.”56

  The new black sailors were doing just that. According to a report to the Educational Planning Officer at Great Lakes, “The Negro students make up for their poorer background to some extent through their greater earnestness and effort.” It seemed obvious to many recruits that the Navy was offering unprecedented opportunities to learn a skill or a trade, the very opportunities that Randolph and White had said were so crucial to the advancement of their people.57

  The white world was taking notice. The Chicago Daily Tribune told its readers that the Navy has “warmed to the Negro because the colored sailor has turned out to be a gentleman.”58

  Black men, despite what the General Board had predicted, could make worthy sailors after all.

  CHAPTER 7