Proudly We Served

by Kelly, Mary Pat

  Lately, I’ve been working with my sister and brother-in-law on the Mason history. I got out my old diary, but I kept notes in here [taps head]. I would draw everything. Anything I would find, I’d draw it and see for myself. I wrote down places I was, things we did. We found all of it confirmed in the navy records down in the Washington, D.C., archives.

  I have a couple of poems in my diary that I like too. There’s one poem by Powell, who dedicated it to “A helluva fella and friend.” I won’t let this book out of my hands. I don’t let it out of my hands.

  DuFau: It was a wonderful relationship aboard ship. We really developed a family, and that feeling still exists. When I’m among these guys now, the memories come out. We relive those moments. Every time we talk, we come up with new stories, new incidents that happened way back when. And we have to be so cautious now, because when we’re talking and our wives are around, we may say something and be in trouble about it later on trying to explain. If the women get to mumblin’ at you, you’re in bad trouble.

  There were problems, but we just couldn’t fight hate with hate. That wasn’t our role there, to fight hate. We were there to prove ourselves. Nowadays, you see so many black officers. To think that we were part of that beginning . . . it’s wonderful to know that I played a small role in giving others an opportunity. I have the dream of all Americans together. You’re still American, under one flag, under God, with liberty and justice for all. And I believe that. I may be called stupid or something like that, but I still believe it. That was embedded in me. From my school days on, I never had anyone preach hatred, told me anything about trying to hate. I was always taught to love and respect others. Love and respect yourself first, then respect others. It’s so simple. It would solve so many problems.

  I had the opportunity to show that I was as American as anybody! I don’t take a backseat to anybody being American. You do what you can, wherever you are, to make this nation work. I felt that I owed it to the nation to take part in defending the flag. That flag still means a lot to me. I still like to hear our national anthem. I still like to sing it. I don’t take a backseat to anybody. The president is no more American than me. I don’t appreciate people bringing their hatreds here and wanting to practice them and still calling themselves Americans.

  Be real. Don’t be singing the anthem and then go out and kick somebody around because their skin is a different color.

  Civilian life didn’t offer me an opportunity to practice anything I had learned being a signalman in the navy. But having a wife and a kid, I had to get busy as fast as I could. I just wanted to be working. I had to take all kinds of little menial jobs until, eventually, I went into construction work, and I was in that for about twenty-six years. I got my benefits and everything from construction work. It was a very interesting role to play in New York. I can see buildings where I mixed mortar to go between the bricks to help build them. That’s a contribution, and I was a part of it. I am very happy about being a part of making something constructive, making something beautiful.

  And the same thing in everyday life. If I can say or do something for someone to lift up somebody’s spirits, I will do it. I carry out here in everyday life the closeness that existed among the navy crew. I strive to keep that calm atmosphere around me, do what I can to solve any problem that I’m around.

  Graham: I went to so many trade schools, it wasn’t even funny. And I went to Delahanty Radio and Television, FM and Television, technician this and technician that. I went to RCA Engineering School for about six weeks. But what’s the use? I must have looked for years for a job. I just couldn’t get a job. And I went to one that was advertised in an electronics publication. The name of the place was on 72nd Street and York Avenue. I was sure this guy was going to give me a job as an electronics technician. He put me to work sweeping up—that sort of thing.

  Eventually, I got a job. I couldn’t get a job in what I wanted, so I started repairing television sets. I stayed with that until the time I retired in ’86. It was good money. In those days I was making sixty dollars a week and living high on the hog. I was the only guy on the block with a new car. I was trading the car in every two years. I built my own television set in time for the Joe Louis fight. I had the whole neighborhood lined up on my sun porch.

  But I never forgot my experience on the Mason. I was part of the navy, and I was very proud to be a sailor. The Mason was decommissioned in 1945, and she was sold for scrap in 1947. But there was never anything in any of the newspapers about the Mason. I used to watch the documentaries on World War II all the time, and I’d look from beginning to end, and I never saw a black face in them. Once or twice you’d see the black face of a black soldier or a sailor, but most of the documentaries were strictly white.

  The Mason kind of fell through the cracks and was never heard of after. But there was another ship—not a ship, it was a patrol craft—that also had a black crew, and it seemed that that one . . . they favored that one over ours.

  Back in 1973, I think, there was a writer by the name of Gibson. His grandmother was very famous; she was the Gibson Girl. He wrote a book about one particular convoy that we took over. There were waves ninety feet high, winds at ninety miles per hour. He wrote a book about that particular convoy, NY-119, and he had a book party down at the South Street Seaport Museum.

  The author had a whole piece in his book about the Mason, and I met a lot of the guys at the book party who had served in the navy at that time. Through one man I enlisted in the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association (DESA). We had a little bimonthly paper I used to look at religiously to see if I could find some of my shipmates listed or something about the Mason. There was never anything. Then Dr. Martin Davis decided that he would organize a branch of DESA here on Long Island, and we named it SOL DESA—Statue of Liberty DESA. The night that we were supposed to meet was a very bad, snowy night, and we didn’t meet. Dr. Martin called me the next day on the telephone, and we started talking. I mentioned the Mason and the black sailors. He had never heard of the ship. He said, “Are you sure?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “That’s a shame, because it should be in the history books. Well, I’ll do everything in my power to get it in the history books.” And from then on, he and I worked together.

  I started writing the archives for pictures and documents and a muster of the fellows from the ship. I sent a lot of letters down to St. Louis, to the archives down there, for the history of the ship and so forth. DuFau always lived here in New York, so we contacted him. And from then on, we’ve been sailing pretty good.

  I was determined that it would come to pass. I said I would devote the rest of my life to making sure that it did.

  When we first started out, Buchanan was into photography. He taught my wife and me. We’d go over once a week to redo the old pictures, reproduce the old pictures. We made about ten or twelve albums with about 130 pictures each. And we sent albums to Divers, Bland, Garrison, DuFau, among others.

  I just decided that I would devote the rest of my life to bringing the Mason to the forefront, so that everyone would know about our ship. Because it would be a crime for us to pass through history without our children or grandchildren ever knowing about the Mason.

  Divers: Until this day, nobody—very few people—knew about the accomplishments of the Mason. The story was buried in the archives, in my opinion. It was buried in the archives, and the people that did that are probably all dead. And it’s still dead in the bureaucracy. But we’ve been fortunate lately to be able to dig out a lot of that stuff and fight our case.

  The people should know what we did, what we were a success at. Even though they had programmed us to fail, we were very, very successful. Our success made progress possible in all branches of the armed forces. We were capable of doing everything that the rest of the general public was able to do. I feel proud that we were one of the teams in the forefront. We have to fight, fight, fight to bring that out. Us guys are getting up to . . . we’re in ou
r seventies now, and even our eighties. We’ve got to hurry up and get the story out! Otherwise, it will be buried. If we don’t do this ourselves, it will never come out.

  DuFau: You know, we wanted to be something. We always wanted to have our history recorded. And now we are covering it. We’ve closed the gap from 1943. Here it is, 1993, and we can stand and talk with officers. Back then it was such a big thing just to be a seaman striker for a rate other than steward’s mate and cook. And recently we went to Annapolis and met all these black officers and midshipmen and women.

  It tells us that we were on the right road. Even though we were young, we had this idea of overcoming all these barriers that were in our way to prove that there was nobody more American than us. We had to go through so much hell to prove it.

  We’re fading out. Time is catching up with us. We’ve handed the torch over to the new generation.

  Garrison: I was glad when I was discharged that I didn’t go back to the South. I don’t think that I could have adjusted to it. Although I had lived in it all my life, I don’t think I could have readjusted. In three years, you go from being a boy to a man. The service really matures you quickly.

  All of us learned in the service that we can live together in close proximity and not fight. I learned that.

  I carried other lessons into my later life: the emphasis on punctuality, on doing your best in anything you try to do. If you didn’t do a good job, the navy didn’t fool around with you too long. They’d get somebody else. So I continued to try to excel in whatever I did.

  I was discharged from the service at the Naval Air Station in Charleston, South Carolina, and my family had moved to Brooklyn, New York. I attended Brooklyn College. I found that hard because the other students seemed so immature. I went to New York University School of Religious Education. I had felt the call to the ministry. I studied there, and I also went to the New York City Department of Corrections as a correction officer. I worked in that capacity for sixteen years. I became disabled with a heart attack, and I was out sick two years. At age fifty-four, I went back to Brooklyn College and got a degree in European history and Afro-American history. I pastored a church in Brooklyn for thirty-three years, and I retired in October 1992.

  At the time we were involved on the Mason, we weren’t aware of the fact that we were making history. We knew we were an experiment, but we were so involved in doing what we were doing that that took precedence over any part about making history. But I loved it. I’m glad I did take a part in it. Sometimes it seems almost unbelievable, but it’s true.

  Gordon: I got married in August of ’45, after the war ended. Much of what happened until December the twenty-third, when I got discharged, was a blur because of my being a newlywed. I was out of the navy for four years, then the Korean War started building up. I knew that we were going to get drafted back into the military. I decided, instead of waiting until I got drafted, I would go back in voluntarily for a career and see how many stripes I could get on my arm before the war started.

  On the first of December, 1949, I rejoined the navy. I went to aviation and electronics school and became an aviation electronics technician. In the ensuing ten years, I served on various carriers. I taught airborne and radar controlling. I was one of the few enlisted men in the navy to be an airborne controller. I taught navy and air force officers airborne controlling so that they could qualify for their air observer wings.

  During the Korean War the navy was not segregated. I was accepted as just another sailor. I still had the mistreatment because of who I was, but I was not lumped into a segregated group any more.

  I went up in rank very fast and became a chief petty officer. I tried to get a commission; I applied for a commission. I tried every program they had. I was tops in my field, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t get a commission. I could not have made my recommendations any higher if I’d have written them myself, but I never could break into the commission ranks. It seemed to get stopped in the bureau somewhere. I always imagined that it was stopped because of the red lettering on the front cover of my service jacket that spelled out NEGRO.

  Peters: The navy has a good way of covering things up that they don’t want the general public to know. Look at the events aboard the USS Iowa. Remember when that turret exploded? They said a gay sailor committed suicide! The navy tried to cover that up, but then they finally had to come forward and say that they were completely wrong, and the person that they accused has been exonerated. I think the importance of the Mason in terms of the history of this country is something that the navy decided they just didn’t want out.

  I think possibly because it would be giving too much credit to people who were considered at the time not to have 100 percent citizenship. Possibly they did not want to give credit where credit was due.

  It’s like other omissions of history that eventually come out after years and years and years. But we’re talking about fifty years of information that should have come out, or should have been a part of our ongoing history. It’s just coming out now, in the twilight of the lives of the people who participated in it. Some of these people will never know that this information ever came out. In some respects, it’s devastating. When you think about the amount of sacrifice that you put out on behalf of your country, and that country disregards it, discounts it. That certainly doesn’t make you feel good.

  Plus, if the story had been known, things might have been different. The integration of the armed forces probably would have occurred much earlier than it did. The USS Mason was an experiment. At the time that we were doing this, we were all kids. I never gave any real thought to the fact that this was history. This was something that the country needed, and we were there to give the country what it needed.

  I think the officer corps in all of the services would have been more representative of the population of the country. And I think it may have been a catalyst for what took place in the 1960s in terms of the civil rights of black Americans.

  I have been a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary for fifteen, over fifteen years. Both my wife and I do a lot of work for the Coast Guard. And I have a real soft spot in my heart for the Coast Guard. We do a lot of search and rescue work, a lot of public education work—and it’s appreciated.

  Watkins: There’s a Black Sailors Association here in Chicago. I went to a ceremony at the Daley Center once, and one of the members asked, “You’re from the Mason?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, what’s your name?” I told him. He said, “Sit on the stage with me,” and I did. Then he said, “Oh, you’re on next.”

  “I am?” I don’t even remember what I said, but I spoke and they clapped. It’s nice to be honored. It’s nice.

  Graham: One really strange thing—I was watching a documentary about a U.S. pilot who shot down a lot of Japanese planes. He had all these Zeros painted on the side of his plane. I was thinking about how much I’d wanted to paint a U-boat kill on our stack. Suddenly, I realized I was glad we never sank a sub. Glad. I would have been an old man at fifty if I had. I would have kept picturing those guys as they went down. Their faces—knowing they were going to die. In war you think “sub,” not people, not other men. So I’m glad I didn’t kill anybody.

  Epilogue

  Their story has begun to be told. The Cable News Network sent a producer and cameraman on a ferry to Governor’s Island to cover the 1993 reunion of the USS Mason crew. Irish Night was the theme of the banquet on Saturday, June 18. Mayor David Dinkins sent a note of congratulations and mentioned that he too had experienced the kindness of Irish people. The Mason story reached a national audience, and the reaction to it came first from the crew’s relatives. James Graham received calls from nephews in North Carolina, in Virginia, in Florida. Lorenzo DuFau heard from New Orleans. Benjamin Garrison took calls from grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  When a small portion of the Mason story was told on the Chicago PBS station as part of Home Away from Home: The Yanks in Ireland,
I too had heard from relatives. They had enjoyed the entire documentary about the U.S. involvement in the north of Ireland during World War II, but the interviews with the men of the Mason had struck a particular cord. The day after Yanks in Ireland aired, my cousin called me with the story of his experience in a bar on 103rd Street on the far south side of Chicago. Most of the patrons of this tavern were veterans of Viet Nam whose fathers had fought in World War II. Because many of them were Irish American, they expressed a certain pride in the lack of prejudice the Irish had shown during the ship’s trip to Belfast. “An odd kind of self-congratulations, considering the attitudes I’d heard expressed there about black people,” my cousin remarked. “But there was something else too. A sympathy for what it’s like to serve and have your service ignored. They were rooting for the crew of the USS Mason in that bar.”

  What happened that night in the bar my cousin visited is really the epilogue to the story of the USS Mason. The Viet Nam veterans’ sympathy for the crew is a good sign of changing attitudes. The crew of the Mason went on to live rich lives and made a difference to many people. But when I asked James Graham, Lorenzo DuFau, Benjamin Garrison, and Gordon Buchanan if they felt they had been able to really make the contribution to society that their time on the Mason had equipped them for, all of them answered, “No.” To think of James Graham being turned away from job after job as other men with less training were hired is to confront white America’s problem. He refused to let anger turn his life sour, but he never compromised his dignity. Graham recalls meeting a white sailor years later that he had known in the war. Someone made a racist remark that Graham objected to—verbally. “You’re lucky,” the white former shipmate told the man. “When I knew him he would have knocked your block off.”

  “Patience,” Graham says. “I learned patience. Just to keep coming back, whether I was wanted or not, until I accomplished my goal.”

  He had wanted to belong to the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association as a way of bringing the Mason’s history to the fore. “The first dinner Barb and I went to, no one spoke to us. We sat alone,” Graham recalls. This year he served as vice chairman of the Statue of Liberty chapter, and the men of the Mason plan their reunions so they can participate in the ceremonies on the Intrepid commemorating Destroyer Escort Day. Part of the CNN coverage included members of the Mason crew placing red carnations in a vase in remembrance of destroyer escort sailors who had been lost at sea.