The navy had entrance requirements. We used to say the army would take a warm body, that’s all they were interested in. But the navy had high physical standards. You had to be a perfect physical specimen. You had to have high academic attainments. They were really an elite group.
Although the men were making progress within the navy, the same discrimination prevailed in society. In fact, seeing a black man in uniform seemed to incense some—especially if the sleeve of that uniform showed this man had achieved some rank.
DuFau: I don’t think I’d ever been a hundred miles away from New Orleans until I went into the service. I’d gone through boot camp, and I got a nine-day leave after the initial training period at Great Lakes. I went home to New Orleans by train, and on my way back to camp, I had to change trains in Atlanta, Georgia. I tried to get a cup of coffee at the lunch counter. I was told there was no coffee, so I told the fellow, “There are two urns going there. That’s what I want, coffee.”
“We don’t have any coffee,” he said. And then it struck me, what he was really saying to me. I was in uniform and couldn’t get a cup of coffee in the train station. It really was like an arrow in me. And I thought, “I’m ready to go into the service to defend this?” But that didn’t discourage me. It didn’t stop me from trying to reach the goal that I was after.
The men found more positive reactions, especially in Chicago, twenty miles from Great Lakes.
Graham: I had sixteen weeks of boot camp, and after that they had examinations to see who would qualify for service school. So I qualified. And I had sixteen weeks of radio school. On the weekends we could go into Chicago. When we got there, the people were so very nice. You’d be walking on the street, and a guy would drive up in his car, with his wife and his daughter, and he would take you to church or take you home and give you dinner. And you know, I can’t remember if they were black or white, but we were down on South State Street, which was black. We would go to the Club De Lys and the Carlisle, so it was probably black families. They would take you home, and they would drive you back to Great Lakes from Chicago, which was fantastic.
Garrison: You could go to the theaters free. Those were the days when they had the big bands, and they had fabulous theaters in Chicago.
Graham: And another thing, you could ride the bus and the El free of charge. Yes, the people there in Chicago really treated the servicemen nice.
DuFau: The outstanding memory I have about Chicago was of this annual affair they had called Bud Billiken Day. They had the companies from Great Lakes, Illinois (at that time I was in the third company there), come down and march in the Bud Billiken Day Parade. I have a picture of us parading down the street. I’ve picked myself out of that long-range shot. I know it’s me because that’s the way I was positioned, walking in the drill formation.
They treated us with such love. It was just a wonderful, wonderful experience to be the center of attention like that. And we were involved in a good thing, a good thing that we were proud of. Pride played a big role in it. A big role.
Dr. Marjorie Joyner: Oh, the people thought they were just wonderful! They admired them because they admired their uniform and what they stood for. And the servicemen were just happy to be there. And they felt too that they were doing something to help erase the prejudice line. But you see, it was deeper than any of us thought.
Garrison: What I remember about Chicago was the USO. I think it was the largest USO I’ve ever seen. They must have had six or more floors. And everything was free: bedding, playing pool, cigarettes, whatever you wanted. That’s what I remember. Marva Louis came and Lena Home came in a few times.
Joyner: Mayor Ed Kelly was very popular at that time. He opened a servicemen’s center, but lo and behold, it was for white servicemen, not for black servicemen. Now, you know we weren’t going to stand still for that. We said, “Well, if you’re asking black boys here in Chicago to go abroad and fight for peace, and yet a black boy can’t get in a center where there’s a white boy and a white girl, we’d better do something to get this thing straightened out.”
So Mayor Kelly opened up a servicemen’s center on the south side for the black boys and girls, right then and there. That was in Joe Louis’s time, and Marva Louis, his wife, was popular with young people. Mayor Kelly had them come as a drawing card. I was a young woman at that time, and he asked me if I would take over Servicemen’s Center Number Three, so that we could have a place for black boys and black girls to come to for entertainment after their wartime activity.
And that we did. We’d even go as far as Great Lakes and bring down the sailors from there. The bands and the music made Servicemen’s Center Number Three very popular. We had the same activities for the black boys and the black girls that the whites had, but they didn’t have to mix. That’s where this whole segregation line came back up again. It was the prejudice line, the Mason-Dixon Line that’s been in America ever since when. We couldn’t move it, but we could be against it. And by being against it, it could be moved one day.
Graham: I remember we were out on Lake Michigan, rowing. We were wearing our peacoats. Some guy was standing on the side watching, and he said, “I smell shit.”
“Smell yo’ mammy,” I said.
Garrison: I know, that was a fight.
Graham: Well, we didn’t fight that time, but I was ready for him. Another time we were on the bus going into Chicago with a bunch of white sailors and black sailors. A black girl walked in front of the bus, and a white sailor said, “Boy, if I could catch her, I could put a bag over her head, and I’d go to town,” or something to that effect. None of the black sailors said anything. At the next stop, a white girl passed by the bus. I said, “Boy, I wouldn’t have to put a bag on her face.” We turned the bus out. Things like that. But they always had something derogatory to say.
Garrison: Well, that was the climate then.
Graham: Yes.
Garrison: The whole national feeling was. I’m not saying that about everybody, but most people felt that way.
DuFau: But it was so built-in. It was like our national policy. A lot of them felt that’s the American way. And you know, we’re involved in a conflict—a world war—and we’re getting ready to fight for them. But that bitterness just stayed there.
I didn’t have much experience of Chicago because by the time I was in service school, my wife had come up from New Orleans with my kid. She was working in Winnetka, Illinois, at a sleep-in job. She and my kid stayed with this family there. So I would leave Great Lakes and go to Winnetka, and then maybe once in awhile we’d ride into Chicago. There were two young boys in the family, maybe about nine or ten, and they tried to teach me how to ice-skate. We went out at five o’clock in the morning to the ice-skating rink because I was ashamed that I couldn’t ice-skate. I still don’t know how to ice-skate, but those kids tried hard to teach me. But I couldn’t get my feet together, and my legs were hurting me so bad because I spread-eagled so much. But my son learned. He’d skate with them, and he did well.
The present commander of Great Lakes Training Center is Adm. Mac Gaston, an African American officer whose first assignment was on a World War II-vintage ship, not that much different from the Mason. He is one of the outstanding naval officers whose careers attest to the wider opportunities for blacks in the present U.S. Navy. Nevertheless, Admiral Gaston has faced his share of racial discrimination. For example, his first commander required much more knowledge from him than he did from the white ensigns and assigned him many hours of extra duty if he could not answer obscure questions of naval regulations and lore. Still, Gaston’s position as head of the facility that fifty years ago confined black sailors to a separate camp across the tracks speaks for itself.
Adm. Mac Gaston: The navy training center at Great Lakes has conducted training for eighty-two years. Sea readiness starts at Great Lakes. It’s a process of transition, taking people from civilian life to military life. This is where the impact of training for the fleet starts, right here at G
reat Lakes.
The technical training that the people who went on the Mason received happened right here at Great Lakes. I would not have the opportunity to do what I am doing today had it not been for them paving the way for black people in the navy in a technical way. They were totally successful. They were trained here, and then they went to sea during war and performed their mission.
Not only do you have to learn the technical aspects of things, but you also have to learn how to lead, how to work in a team. It’s a great education. And when we talk about education, we’re talking about being a good person, being an honest person, having a good heart, and working in team efforts.
Let’s take gunner’s mate training. First, a recruit goes to boot camp for sixteen weeks. The transition from civilian life to military is not easy. After finishing that boot camp, he would go to an apprentice training, or initial training, called A-school. We still have that kind of training here. Gun school could be as long as twenty weeks or twenty-five weeks. And then he would go to an advanced school, called C-school, to learn more specifically how to repair guns and how to operate them. When a person leaves that gunnery school training and goes to the fleet, all the fear of that gun is removed. He has actually gotten to operate and maintain that equipment in school. So you can take that person on board and go to sea, and he is qualified to shoot that gun and also qualified to repair that gun.
That’s true not only in guns but also in electronics, as well as steam, diesel, and gas turbine engineering. And that’s the training the Mason crew received.
For them to have gone to sea on the Mason and completed all the missions and crossings that they did, they had to be qualified, or the ship would have sunk! It would sink right away. That training and that readiness started right here at Great Lakes.
* Those who scored well on aptitude tests and had good records in boot camp were sent to service school. Most attended classes right at Robert Smalls.
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Rated
Classes of trained specialists were graduating from the schools at Camp Robert Smalls week after week—thousands of men. In the navy system, after a man proved his proficiency he was given a rate or rank. First, he was a striker—an apprentice—then third class, second class, first class, and finally chief. Very few—less than 10 percent of every service school class—would leave with a rate, but many of the Mason crew did attain their first rates in school. Promotion depended on service, which was mandatory for any real progress. In addition to practical consequences such as an increase in pay, the men wanted the chance to use what they had learned, to test themselves. Plus, they had joined the navy to go to sea. But the navy was still determined to keep these men out of the fleet. The same old arguments were put forth: white sailors could not be asked to live and work with black sailors aboard ship; black sailors would not respond well under fire; a modern warship with all its sophisticated equipment could not be risked, etc. So the men found themselves at shore stations or on small coastal vessels.
But even when duty was on shore, the navy placed restrictions on the black sailors. For example, as the Bureau of Naval Personnel report (which summarized the navy’s “research” on its African American members) states, “Careful instructions were given to Negro shore patrols that they make no effort to discipline whites and that even in a case of a fight between men of different races, they restrict themselves to handling the colored participants” (36). Again, white “sensibilities” were pandered to, and even a simple change such as creating a rating for steward’s mates “in order to give honor to men who had served long and well” resulted in a flood of protests that saw this “as a willful insult to the men who had already been proudly wearing the eagle” (36).
If white sailors were incensed at just seeing a black man with a rating badge on his uniform, even a member of the steward’s branch, how, the navy wondered, would they react to black men qualified to wear the top petty officer’s ratings—radioman, quartermaster, radar man, chief? “One strong argument made for holding Negroes to a narrow range of billets was that otherwise the races would have to be mingled and the problem of Negro petty officers exercising command over white seamen would present itself” (35).
Reading such statements now brings the images of Gen. Colin Powell, Adm. Mac Gaston, Capt. Gene Kendall, and tens of thousands of outstanding African American officers and servicemen and women to mind. These men and women represent the most powerful arguments against the words of the report and the assumptions that underlie them. Perhaps in the years to come the discriminating attitudes of the present will appear just as benighted and, it is hoped, antiquated. But in 1943, “so firm was the assumption that they would not serve in the fleet that the matter was scarcely discussed” (40).
Buchanan: I came out of service school and was sent down to Cape May, New Jersey. I realized that the black sailors were being used to relieve white sailors so they could go out to the fleet. They needed them so bad. Then I heard that things were going to happen, that we might get more than shore duty.
They put me on a patrol boat. We were going out on a regular basis, out on the coast of New Jersey. Our ship was just an eighty-foot yacht, painted all gray. All that beautiful teak wood on the yacht painted gray. It looked just awful. But the ship was nice, and it was a small crew, about eleven people. We had only a couple of officers. We’d go out off the coast and patrol, sweeping the whole harbor.
One night I was on the fantail, down at the stern of the ship. I said to the officer (I was steering the ship), “What happens if we do see a submarine?”
He says, “We ram. We set the depth charges at thirty feet and we ram.”
“And where are we going to be when we ram with this little piece of wood against a submarine?”
“We’ll be in the water.”
“When those depth charges go off, where are we going to be?”
“We have to figure that out.”
“Oh, man!” I groaned. I didn’t know what this patrolling was all about. That seemed a little odd.
Graham: After finishing boot training and class-A radioman school at Camp Robert Smalls, Great Lakes, five shipmates and I were transferred to Cape May Naval Air Base in Cape May, New Jersey. I was a petty officer third class, but I was doing seaman work on the piers. I learned a lot about seamanship from a shipmate in charge. I do not remember his rank. (He was a white shipmate from Georgia.)
I was discouraged and disappointed that I was not assigned to a ship. I longed to go aboard a ship and sail the “Ocean Blue.” My chance came at last. I was transferred to a minesweeper (the Blue Jay). This minesweeper was no more than a fishing boat, or trawler, converted to a minesweeper.
The first day out I got so seasick that I was unable to do any work. I remember praying to the Lord that if I ever returned to shore, I would never go to sea again. You know what? I was back on this minesweeper and out to sea the next day. I never did get seasick again.
Though the men were moving into positions of responsibility, the old problems of discrimination continued. Even in a northern state like New Jersey, in a town like Cape May, whose economy at this time depended on its naval base, there was prejudice against the black sailors.
Divers: I was shipped out to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. In Philly, I was put in charge of a draft—that’s a group of sailors being sent from one base to another—to Cape May, New Jersey, for assignment at Cape May at the naval section base and air base.
We arrived in Cape May with meal tickets. I had asked the guy who’d given them to me, “Are there any special places that this meal ticket is good for?”
He said, “This meal ticket is a United States Government meal ticket; it’s as good as the money in your pocket.”
“Fine, that’s good,” I said. So we got off the train, and we were all hungry. I was in charge of the draft. We went into this one restaurant. Everybody was seated. The lady came out from behind the counter, and she looked at us, and she ran back to the rear of the restaurant. After
awhile, another lady came up, and she said, “What can I do for you?”
“Well, we’ve got our meal tickets here, and we want to be served.”
She said, “Oh, no. No. No, no, not here, not here.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “Are you running out of food? Are you fixin’ to close up?”
“No. We don’t serve you . . . you people here.”
“What? In New Jersey?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
“Well,” I said, “I can’t figure this out. Here we are in New Jersey. I expect it in certain parts of the South, but not up here.”
In the meantime, people had gathered outside the restaurant and were peeping in the window. It attracted the attention of the shore patrol. The shore patrol comes in and says, “What’s the problem?” So I told them. They said, “Don’t worry about that. We’ll get you something to eat. Come on out, come on out. You guys come on out and line up here. I got transportation coming for you.” Anyway, here comes a big navy van, a big dray, what we call eighteen-wheelers now. And we all climbed aboard and went right to the United States Navy Mess Hall, where we finally got served, in our own facility. They would not honor our meal ticket there in New Jersey. I couldn’t believe it.
I was more surprised than I was angry, because to me, at my age, at that time, it was just a new experience.
Graham: While stationed at Cape May Naval Air Station, I remember several fights with white sailors in the mess hall. One day I went to the first chow call and returned to the barracks. Someone yelled, “There’s a fight going on in the mess hall between white and colored sailors.” Several of us ran back to the mess hall to discover cups and food trays flying in all directions!
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