The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  “AS GOOD AS ANY FIGHTING MEN THE US NAVY HAS”

  Among the very first men to take advantage of the Navy’s new open policy was Graham Martin, a reserved twenty-five-year-old from Indianapolis who had just completed a master’s degree in education.

  A buddy of Martin’s, Edward France, had enlisted in the Navy a few weeks before and was already leading a company. Maybe Martin could lead one too, he thought. Besides, anything was preferable to the Army for a germophobe like Martin, whose skin crawled at the thought of cradling a rifle while belly-crawling through muck and mud.1

  He had been drafted into the Army in April but begged a deferment, telling the draft board that what little money he had was already committed to paying the fees for his final semester at Howard University. He asked that he be allowed to graduate.

  “You stay there,” the board replied, “and we’ll contact you again.”

  With his master’s degree in hand, Martin knew the Army would soon come calling. But before it could, he was on his way to Great Lakes Naval Training Station.

  The segregated Camp Morrow at the northwest corner of the station was an all-too-familiar scene to Martin, who throughout his life had been told that he was inferior, incapable of competing with whites, despite all his success in the classroom and on the football field.

  His earliest years had been spent in Tobacco Port, a small Tennessee town near the Cumberland River and the Kentucky border.

  His parents, Charlie and Carrie Lee Martin, were tobacco farmers who needed every hand they could get. Their fourth and final child, a boy they named Graham Edward, was born January 18, 1917, and not long after he left the womb he found himself in the field pulling large, fat green worms off the tobacco plants.

  For his labors, Graham received a penny from his father. Charlie Martin was much older than his wife, already in his sixties when Graham was born. He was a superhero to his young son, a man who possessed almost magical powers.

  Graham long remembered the day when he and his dad were coming home from the fields. Up in the tree, two squirrels were chasing each other atop the branches.

  Run home and get me my shotgun, his father said.

  Graham was just a small boy, and by the time he returned it was dusk. It seemed all you could see were shadows. Charlie Martin raised his shotgun, fired one shot into the tree, and down came two squirrels.

  Dinner that night would be fresh.

  Graham was only six years old when he saw his father struggling for breath that would not come. The child was led out of the room but peeked back over his shoulder for a final look at his gasping hero.

  That was the last Graham saw of Charlie Martin. Soon he’d be saying goodbye to Tobacco Port as well.

  His mother, fearing she could not maintain the family farm, moved with her youngest son to Indianapolis, while Graham’s three older siblings remained in Tennessee. In Indianapolis his mother would later earn a reasonable living during the Great Depression, thanks to the Roosevelt administration’s WPA, which employed her to stitch blankets for the Army.2

  Carrie Lee Martin and her youngest son were part of a wave of African Americans migrating to Indianapolis, a city that, like Chicago, was seeing a black boom. The black population of Indianapolis increased from 35,000 in 1920 to nearly 44,000 by 1930, amounting to 12 percent of the city’s population. The influx strained the infrastructure. The housing stock and the schools could not keep up. The public services pie was the same size, but the slices were getting thinner and the white folks weren’t too happy about it.

  It is no coincidence that as the Martins and thousands of other black families moved in, the Ku Klux Klan grew exponentially, so that by 1924, more than 40 percent of the native-born white males in Indianapolis claimed membership.

  The fifty thousand dues-paying Klan members in Indianapolis provided the organization with a tremendous war chest of tens of millions of dollars, which helped them buy local politicians.3

  Klan-backed candidates won control of the city council, the Board of School Commissioners, and the Board of County Commissioners. They invented a scandal to remove a recalcitrant and uncooperative governor and replace him with the more malleable Edward L. Jackson, who had served as Indiana’s secretary of state. Jackson had the title of governor, but the power belonged to a pudgy, sharp-dressing demagogue named David C. Stephenson, appointed the Klan grand dragon of Indiana.

  In 1922, Klansmen in the Indiana General Assembly created Klan Day at the state fair, where events included a nighttime cross burning. Four years later, the city council passed a zoning ordinance meant to prevent blacks from moving into a home without the consent of the block’s white residents. The ordinance was declared unconstitutional, but there were other ways to ensure blacks knew they weren’t welcome.

  It was common for mobs of men, sheets over their heads, to terrorize blacks, Jews, and Catholics. They tarred women accused of prostitution, flogged people in public, and left burning crosses in their wake. Billboards in town read “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here.”4

  This was the Indianapolis that young Graham Martin entered, a Klan-controlled, rigidly segregated town, growing too fast to accommodate the arrival of families fleeing agrarian life.

  The Irish stayed in the southeast corner; the Italians and Greeks were to the east; the Jews lived south of downtown. Blacks lived on the northwest side of the city, a neighborhood anchored by Indiana Avenue, where the melodies of jazz musicians perfecting their craft provided a neighborhood soundtrack.5

  It was a very different upbringing from the one Sam Barnes had in Oberlin and John Reagan experienced in the Englewood section of Chicago, towns and neighborhoods where race remained in the background. Everywhere Martin looked in Indianapolis, he was reminded that blacks were second-class.

  Like Reagan, Martin lacked a positive male role model and soon ran into trouble, joining gangs, breaking windows, sneaking into movie theaters, and stealing from shops. When he was twelve he went into a store, walked behind the counter, grabbed cash from the cigar box, and ran.

  A police officer chased him to a dead-end alley.

  The officer drew his weapon.

  Martin froze.

  “I wouldn’t shoot you,” the cop said, “but maybe somebody else would because you’re big for your age. You are going to get yourself killed.”

  The courts were becoming familiar with Martin’s antics. A local judge before whom the preteen had already appeared for breaking windows and shoplifting remanded him to a home for orphans, reasoning that if his mother had to work all day, the young man could benefit from more adult supervision.6

  The Indianapolis Asylum for Friendless Colored Children had been founded in 1869 by Quakers who saw the need for an institution to care for the children of destitute freed slaves. Most of the children were not orphans. Like Martin, they either came from single-parent homes or had parents who had to work all day to make ends meet and had no time to look after their children.

  The orphanage was there to provide the structure that parents could not. The girls helped in the laundry, sewing room, nursery, and kitchen. They were taught to make paper, rag rugs, and baskets.

  The boys helped in the kitchen, engine room, shoe shop, carpentry, cement shop, and print shop. They made their own toys, built cabinets for tools, and repaired their own shoes. They had their own magazine, Orphan’s Home, which they printed themselves. When the weather was nice, the boys gardened.7

  Martin hated the orphanage at first and even ran away a couple times, but he eventually warmed to the structure and opportunities offered, relishing the positive reinforcement he received for doing well at school.8

  Children who lived at the Indianapolis Asylum attended PS 37, a segregated elementary school across the street. After school and completing his chores at the orphanage—making his bed, cleaning the floor, washing the dishes—Martin could be found behind a stack of books, his head down and his eyes darting across the page.9 He proudly told the staff that he
was going to be a teacher and spent his time educating himself, in the belief that he would one day educate others.

  Martin attended Crispus Attucks High School, which had been built soon after he and his mother arrived in town. Indianapolis high schools had been integrated for fifty years following the Civil War, but the Klan had put an end to that in 1927. The black community protested, arguing that segregating students would require removing black children from schools where they were already enrolled, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. No one in the white world was really interested in their opinion.

  Crispus Attucks High School, an unadorned brick building at the corner of West and Twelfth Streets, was built as a segregated school in the worst part of town, where it was surrounded with garbage dumps.10 When its doors opened on September 12, the Klan organized several parades throughout the city to celebrate. Just a few miles from the school, on Washington Street, “row after row of masked Klansmen, marching slowly to the beat of muffled drums, took an hour to pass.”

  Black children marched into class, sat down, and opened their books.

  That year, Arthur Trester, commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, denied Crispus Attucks High membership in the IHSAA. The school, he said, did not admit white students, so it wasn’t technically a public school. Trester, who was referred to as the czar of the IHSAA and would later be inducted into the National Basketball Association Hall of Fame, told the black students that his hands were tied.11

  Trester’s ridiculous position humiliated parents and teachers, but it also provided an unparalleled opportunity for black students such as Martin, an all-state tackle on the football team.

  The players had to travel around the South to find other schools to play against. Young black boys, many of whom were too poor to leave the county, were exposed to a wider world for the first time. Football gave those students a chance to see St. Louis, Tulsa, and Lexington, and as they sat on the bus, towns and farms rolling by, they could for the first time picture a life outside Indianapolis.

  By the time Martin reached high school he was a popular student with good grades and president of several clubs, including the boxing club, the student council, and the French club. He was the senior class president. But his life had been the orphanage; what lay beyond, what the world might hold, was something he could only imagine.

  Now, hundreds of miles from school, Martin was getting an education. After some of his teammates, pulling a childish prank, poured salt into the mustard in a restaurant in Terre Haute, Martin saw his coach, a talented African American athlete and member of Phi Beta Kappa, pulled out of the restaurant and humiliated by local police.12

  But he also saw how black men all across the South—across the globe—were achieving every bit as much as, if not more than, white folks, who were supposed to be the superior race. How, he wondered, could Jesse Owens win Olympic Gold in Germany or Joe Louis become a world champion if black men were inferior? Martin even began to suspect that the football teams he played on would beat the white teams if they ever got on the same field.

  Segregation also meant that Crispus Attucks High School attracted inspiring teachers, many of whom had PhDs but could not find work in the white world.

  The principal, Dr. Russell Adrian Lane, had six degrees, including a PhD from Brown University and another from Dayton University, and was one of the first black men admitted to the Maryland Bar. For thirty years he would tell black students like Martin that they, too, could succeed if they worked hard, and that education was “the way you get out of your cycle of poverty.”13

  The teachers at Crispus Attucks taught the boys and girls never to let race be an excuse. They would have to work harder than white people to succeed. “There were two strikes against you to start with, so you’ve got to use that last strike,” is how Martin remembered it. “You go in there and don’t ask for anything and do the job.”14

  Martin enrolled in the University of Indiana, thanks to a merit scholarship for poor but promising youngsters, which offered him $250 per year. He was a walk-on for the football team, where he played tackle for Alvin “Bo” McMillin, the famed college quarterback who went on to coach in the NFL. The teams were not very good, and Martin, at five feet, ten inches and 193 pounds, was one of the smaller tackles in the league. He didn’t play as much as he would have liked, especially during home games. He suspected at the time that it may have been because the hometown fans did not want to see a black man take playing time from a white man, although he later came to realize that walk-ons probably always had a hard time getting on the field.

  He graduated in June 1941, and one month later married Alma Mae Patterson. He had first met her while living in the orphanage—she lived a few doors down from him. In high school, he’d help her with English and math. Absence made the heart grow fonder—they fell in love while away at college, he at the University of Indiana and she at Indiana State and then Kentucky State.

  But they kept their marriage vows a secret. The trouble was, Martin had no job. He still hoped to become a teacher, but he had no means to support his bride and an ailing mother, to whom he was sending what little money he had. Alma moved back home with her parents while Martin enrolled in a master’s program at Howard University, studying under Rayford Logan, and teaching history to the freshman class to help pay his way. He lived on campus in Cook Hall and supplemented his income by selling flowers at Sears and cleaning fish at a local market.

  Howard was a revelation for Martin. Black history wasn’t taught much, if at all, in Indiana, so this was his first chance to study the antebellum South. His thesis was on the Underground Railroad in Indiana, and he spent hours researching abolitionists and slavery, poring over the pages of volumes in the Library of Congress—where, in the nation’s capital, signs saying “colored” designated which restrooms and water fountains he could use.15

  Martin graduated from Howard in May 1942, and eight weeks later he found himself on a train, heading west from Washington, DC, toward a new life in the Navy.

  He arrived at Chicago’s Union Station with about a dozen other recruits, none of whom had any clue what to do next or how to get to Great Lakes. They had been told to take the train, but these men had never seen an elevated train before so they stood around, uncertain where or how to board it until a passerby explained the platform was up a flight of stairs.

  They arrived at Great Lakes Naval Training Station late Friday night, too late for supper. Hungry and tired, Martin looked over his new home.

  The barracks in Camp Morrow, like those in the white camps, were laid out in an H shape. They were two stories tall, 100 by 168 feet, with four dormitories, each one housing sixty to eighty men, with four rooms for petty officers.16 The bare, steam-heated quarters had twelve toilets, six urinals, six shower units, and a laundry room.17

  Like the white camps, Camp Morrow had eighteen barracks capable of housing a total of about 4,500 recruits: sixteen barracks for recruits in training and two for those in ship’s company, the men who worked full-time at Great Lakes. There was one mess hall with cooks’ quarters, one physical training building, and one drill hall, where commanding officers lectured and where black enlistees were told they must be “better than good.”

  There were no guidelines for integrating the general service—nothing like this had ever been attempted in the history of the Navy. These new black recruits could expect to find a hostile, racist environment. They would endure teasing, minstrel shows, racial epithets, and bigoted officers.18 But the Navy would tolerate no complaints from the new recruits. It was the same lesson Principal Lane had delivered to students back in Indianapolis. Black sailors must keep their cool, keep their heads down, and work twice as hard as whites, they were told. They must “be better than good.”19

  When Martin woke up on Saturday morning and headed to mess for breakfast, he couldn’t believe his eyes. They were serving beans and cornbread, a Navy tradition. He was used to eggs, bacon, and cereal. Beans were for dinne
r, maybe lunch, but certainly not breakfast. He pushed his plate aside. But if he wanted to eat, he’d have to eat what the Navy offered, and within a week he was asking for seconds.

  It was one of the many concessions—some large, some small—that men from across the country were making as they adjusted to life at Great Lakes.

  The first few nights could be particularly disorienting.

  The men slept in hammocks slung between posts in an open bay. There were five hammocks per bay and six bays on each side of the room. The hammocks were inches apart and barely the width of a human body.

  Many men feared falling out, so they’d loosen their hammocks, giving them more sway. But that only made things worse, and throughout the night the sound of fresh recruits falling from their hammocks beat in time, almost as if a drum were signaling another failed attempt.

  A number of men also woke up wet, learning the hard way that sleeping in a hammock can activate the bladder.

  Those who managed to sleep through the night could find their new alarm clock—an officer charging into the barracks before sunrise, turning on all the lights and screaming, “All right, every living ass, hit the deck!”—a bit disorienting.20

  Even the military’s most elementary tenets could feel foreign.

  Marching is integral to the military, but some men did not know their right from their left.21 The Navy’s focus on cleanliness, while attractive to men such as Martin, meant little to the thousands who were coming from homes without running water or soap. Some entered the Navy literally filthy, and special inspections for cleanliness and clothing were established.22

  But for many black men, particularly those from the South, the Navy was their salvation. Training is supposed to harden recruits, but the conditions at Great Lakes could seem downright luxurious compared to their lives back home. Men who had never owned a decent set of clothing were given three or four uniforms. Malnourished, scrawny teenagers ate three meals a day—a new experience.23 This was the first time many had ever sat in a dentist’s chair or been vaccinated against communicable diseases. Many hadn’t seen a doctor of any kind in years.