Proudly We Served

by Kelly, Mary Pat

  Among the sixteen thousand DESA members are, no doubt, men who had shouted obscenities at the crew and derided the Mason as that “nigger ship,” but none of that was evident when the veterans stood together to welcome home the USS Slater—the only destroyer escort left afloat in the world. The U.S. Navy had given the Slater to the Greek navy, who had renamed her Aetos (Eagle). Through the efforts of Dr. Martin Davis and the leadership of DESA, the Greek navy had given the Slater to the association, which arranged to tow her to New York. When the ship came into her berth at the USS Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, Gordon Buchanan said, “We’re all eighteen again.”

  Barbara Buchanan Graham remembered the last DE she had watched come into port—the USS Mason. “They’d been talking so proud about ‘My ship, my ship’; I’d expected something the size of the Queen Mary, and here came this little sliver of a thing.” In June 1993 this last DE was bigger than a battleship. The men of the Mason signed on again and joined other DESA members in scraping and painting the decks of the old ship. “The Mason crew are my most loyal volunteers,” says the Intrepid’s curator.

  It took fifty years for the Slater to come home from war. It took the same half century for the U.S. Navy to fulfill the promise it made to seventeen-year-old James Graham in the recruiter’s office in Charleston, South Carolina. “I had been attracted to the traditions of the military, the sense of ceremony. Yet I wasn’t really supposed to be part of that tradition. At that time the service didn’t think a black man could achieve excellence. Then, in May 1993, we spent that week in Annapolis. That was the best experience I ever had in the armed forces.”

  Plans for that special week began when Mark Gatlin of the Naval Institute Press contacted Capt. Gene Kendall, head of the Math and Science Department at the United States Naval Academy. Captain Kendall is a leader among the growing number of African American naval officers. He was, he says, a militant when he attended Duke University in the 1960s and found the predominantly white university setting stifling. He dropped out, enlisted in the navy, and came up through the ranks with great distinction. He inspired not only the midshipmen but also the young officers who, with him, formed the Black Officers Association. He arranged for Mr. and Mrs. James Graham and Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo DuFau to attend the Commissioning Week at the Naval Academy and to be Adm. Thomas Lynch’s honored guests at the parade of midshipmen and at the graduation ceremonies. The week before, Captain Kendall had himself been commissioned as captain of the USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20) the flagship of Second Fleet in the Atlantic.

  On May 25, 1993, the Grahams and the DuFaus took their places in the front row of the reviewing box. Not too far away sat the parents of Brigade Commander Jeff Royal, the graduating midshipman chosen by his teachers and peers to lead the brigade at the final parade. Like James Graham and Lorenzo DuFau, Jeff Royal’s father had been a navy enlisted man, and like them he is black.

  “Did you ever think we’d get so close to this much gold braid?” Lorenzo DuFau asked Mr. Royal. And now the gold braid was in the family. Midshipman Jeff Royal stood at attention, his saber raised. Firmly and loudly he called out the orders that set the companies marching. One by one they saluted as they passed. Adm. Frank Kelso, then-Chief of Naval Operations, and Admiral Lynch, then-Superintendent of the Naval Academy, returned their salutes. So did James Graham and Lorenzo DuFau. In each group many young black men and women marched with their white classmates.

  “Our children,” Terry DuFau said. “All our children.”

  “I shook hands with Admiral Lynch and Admiral Kelso,” Graham said. “You can tell a lot from a handshake. They were sincerely glad we were there. Sincere. The handshake said a lot. Then Admiral Lynch invited us to his house for a reception afterward. ‘You will be there,’ he said. And he gave us directions, told us how to get there, so I knew he meant it.”

  At the reception the Grahams, the DuFaus, and James Graham’s nephews, navy men too, visited with the graduates, their families, and many admirals. Graham discovered that Admiral Kelso’s wife came from Florence, South Carolina, very near Lake City. A band played, champagne and a cold buffet were served under tents. The sun shone. The young men and women dressed in their white uniforms hugged each other and laughed.

  At the honors ceremony that followed, the African American midshipmen made many trips to the stage to accept awards for academic excellence and athletic achievement.

  A group of juniors sat together watching the ceremony. They noticed the Mason group and stopped to say hello. They were members of the Black Students Association and had heard something about the presence of the crew members on campus but did not know much about the history of the ship. Lorenzo DuFau took out his scrapbook and an impromptu lesson began. “We were the first,” he said. As he turned the pages and told his stories the midshipmen moved closer. Then one young man looked up and demanded of no one in particular, “Why weren’t we told? Why didn’t we know about this?!”

  “We’ve come to tell you,” Lorenzo DuFau replied. He and Graham promised they would come back and bring other members of the crew with them.

  The next morning they joined other proud families in the football stadium. Painted along the sides were the names of famous sea battles. The theme of Senator John McCain’s speech was the end of the Cold War and the new opportunities a world at peace could offer the navy. Again, as the graduates went up to receive their diplomas, the new world order at home was evident. No longer was the navy’s officer corps a closed white male club.

  David Robinson moved up to the side of the stage to photograph his brother Charles, who was graduating. Next to him an African American marine colonel stood with his camera ready. The little boy he used to babysit for was about to be commissioned an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.

  When the new officers sailed their hats into the air, James Graham and Lorenzo DuFau were ready. And so, Terry DuFau and Barbara Graham walked out of the stadium on the arms of their sailors wearing navy caps cocked to one side.

  “This is the second greatest day of my life,” James Graham burst out. “It ranks right under my wedding day.”

  Indeed, Proudly We Served exists because of that wedding day. James and Barbara Graham are the heart of the USS Mason Association, and their devotion to each other and the association members created this story. Proudly We Served—a love story.

  Appendix A

  The Negro in the Navy, prepared by the Historical Section of the U.S. Bureau of Naval Personnel in 1947, provides a chronicle of the navy’s efforts to keep African Americans out of the navy completely, to control numbers, to confine their service to a separate stewards’ branch, to restrict even those in the seamen’s branch to menial tasks, and finally, to minimize the achievements of the few black men who actually joined the fleet and manned a warship in the Battle of the Atlantic. It is a document that has never been published. Indeed, when Morris MacGregor refers to it in his collection of pertinent naval documents, he describes coming on the report in a dusty old file cabinet in the far corner of an office where it should not have been. He does not include it in his collection, however.

  I found it in an out-of-the-way place also. After searching for the report through many official avenues, I came across it on a shelf of oversized books in the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library. The copy is marked “First Draft Narrative,” which makes it doubly valuable as a reflection of official unedited navy thinking of the time. The document acknowledges the dissenting voices from within and without that pushed for equal treatment of black citizens willing to sacrifice for their country. The report opens with evidence that “Older Navy men today recall the service of Negroes aboard the larger combatant vessels from the turn of the century through the first World War” (1). It then admits that, following World War I, “enlistment of Negroes seems to have been discontinued by BuNav” and even the messmen’s branch was closed. “[I]n practice, only Filipinos were recruited for this branch from about 1919–1922 until December, 1932.”

  From 1933 on,
African Americans could enlist as messmen, but when World War II opened, there were only six rated black men in the regular navy in the seamen’s branch, twenty-three who had returned from retirement, and fourteen in the Fleet Reserve (1).

  When, in the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, Congress mandated that “any person, regardless of race or color, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, shall be afforded an opportunity to volunteer for induction into the land and naval forces of the United States” and that “there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color,” the secretary of the navy created a committee that said, more or less, that since no black men had cracked the navy’s exclusionary policy, none should be given the opportunity. “Within the limitations of the characteristics of members of certain races, the enlisted personnel of the naval establishment is representative of all the citizens of the United States. Therefore, no corrective measures are necessary” (4).

  When the NAACP wired the navy the day after Pearl Harbor asking that, since the navy was now vigorously recruiting men, black men be included, the answer was simply No. What was the navy’s reason? The report states it baldly. “Mingling Negroes with whites in the relatively large number of non-rated billets on larger ships would inevitably promote race friction and lowered efficiency” (5).

  So, all of the arguments about lack of preparation of black recruits or fear of water, etc., etc., cover the essential reason for holding African American seamen back—white racism. What is the solution to racism, in the opinion of the navy board? Discrimination. “The reasons for discrimination in the United States are rather generally that: (a) the white man will not accept the negro in a position of authority over him; (b) the white man considers that he is of a superior race and will not admit the negro as an equal; and (c) the white man refuses to admit the negro to intimate family relationships leading to marriage. These concepts may not be truly democratic, but it is doubtful if the most ardent lovers of democracy will dispute them, particularly in regard to inter-marriage” (6).

  Anger against the naive do-gooders such as Mrs. Roosevelt or Assistant Secretary of the Navy Adlai Stevenson, who had joined the leaders of the black community in using the navy to conduct the fairness provision of the selective service act, is palpable. Democracy becomes almost a dirty word. Yet, the call to defend democracy formed the essence of the recruiting strategy. It is sadly ludicrous to think that while citizens of African American descent rushed to defend their country, in spite of past injustices, the navy was going to deny them full participation because, “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.” No wonder the reasoned arguments of black intellectuals, the criticism by black newspapers, and the moral outrage of black church leaders did not move the navy.

  What did sway them was the consequence of such exclusion. The report quotes a letter that the chairman of the War Manpower Commission wrote to the secretary of the navy on February 17, 1943, to explain why the services must now take in the hundreds of thousands of black men who had answered the call for recruits and been registered but had been kept from active service in order to fill white calls. After a quick nod to the anti-discrimination ban in the selective service act, he writes that the real reason the army and even the navy must open up is that with so many white males in the services, there is “a higher percentage of Negroes in the civilian population. This situation is made more serious because of the geographical concentration of Negroes and because nearly all of the men involved, Negro and white, have been single” (11). This was coupled with the fear that white registrants might sue, for “The probability of this action increases as the single white registrants disappear and husbands and fathers become the current white inductees, while single negro registrants who are physically fit remain uninducted” (12). So the white fears of black men serving with them had to be balanced against white anger that black men were not.

  When the navy finally did open up to black sailors, it created a Training and Control Division “to overcome the inertia with which any large organization meets a new and strange problem” (18). Representatives from this division would “ride circuit” and see how the policies formulated would be carried out. There were some general guidelines: one, “that northern Negroes be not detailed to the South”; conversely, that command be given to white officers of southern background. The first glimmer of sense in the report comes when it states that this policy was called into question. It was “imagination, firmness and capacity to deal with people, rather than any specialized background of ‘knowing’ Negroes” that made for successful relationships between officers and men and created an atmosphere for achievement (23). One such officer reported to the navy board, “A man may be from the north, south, east or west. If his attitude is to do the best possible job he knows how, regardless of what the color of his personnel is, that is the man we want as an officer for our colored SeaBees. We have learned to steer clear of the ‘I’m from the South—I know how to handle ’em’ variety” (23).

  As the report dutifully moves on, the section on “Negro Competence” begins, “Though whites and Negroes of comparable background made comparable records,” it spends the next pages comparing all white recruits to all black recruits, even though the bureau acknowledges that some black sailors had only attended school for a few years. Black college graduates volunteered to teach remedial classes for these men two hours per night, five nights a week, and two hours on Saturday. They volunteered for the extra duty, giving up precious off-duty time! Seventy-two percent of their students passed the navy’s examination. So, in fact, when gross numbers are used, the percentage of black sailors who qualified for the most advanced training—Class A schools—is 33.14 percent, compared to 40 percent of all white recruits.

  Appendix B

  Following is a copy of what looks like a form letter sent by Captain Blackford. Presumably this is similar to the documents described by Bill Farrell on page 58.

  NAVY DEPARTMENT

  SUBMARINE CHASER TRAINING CENTER

  MIAMI, FLORIDA

  From: Lt. Comdr. William Mann BLACKFORD, DV(G), USNR.

  To: The Chief of Naval Personnel.

  Via: The Commanding Officer.

  Subject: USS MASON (DE 529)–Billeting of.

  1. Lieutenant (jg) B. BLACKFORD, Detail Officer at S.C.T.C., advised me that the majority of the enlisted crew of the subject vessel will comprise colored personnel. I was further advised that my assignment in the vessel was not mandatory.

  2. I consent to and accept this assignment, i.e., to USS MASON (DE-529) after having been advised of the fact that a colored crew will be assigned to the vessel.

  Appendix C

  USS MASON (DE 529)

  Original Statistics

  U.S.S. MASON (DE 529)

  Commissioning Date

  20 March 1944

  Next of Kin of Officers

  BLACKFORD, William M., Lt. Comdr., D-V(G), USNR-Mrs. Jane G. Blackford (wife), Seattle, Washington.

  ROSS, Edward O., Lieutenant, D-V(G), USNR-Mrs. Roxane B. Ross (wife), New York, New York.

  BARTON, Leonard F., Lieutenant, D-V(G), USNR-Mrs. Marilyn Jean Barton (wife), St. Louis, Missouri.

  DEAN, Charles B., Jr., Lieutenant, D-V(S), USNR-Mr. Charles B. Dean, Sr. (father), Norwood, Massachusetts.

  HOLROYD, Roy L., Lieutenant (jg), D-V(S), USNR-Mrs. Gladys I. Holroyd (wife), Princeton, West Virginia.

  FARRELL, William H., Lieutenant (jg), E-V(G), USNR-Mrs. Rosella H. Farrell (wife), Chicago, Illinois.

  PHILLIPS, John C., Lieutenant (jg), C-V(S), USNR-Mrs. Janet G. S. Phillips (wife), Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

  KITTS, William W., Ensign, D-V(G), USNR-Mr. William Z. Kitts (father), Sulphur Springs, Texas.

  HARRINGTON, Merton V., Ensign, D-V(G), USNR-Mrs. JoAnn Harrington (wife), Mayville, North Dakota.

  SCOTT, Frank T., Ensign, USN-Mrs. Alma B. Scott (wife), Norfolk, Virginia.

  W. M. BLACKFORD, Lt. Comdr., USNR, Commanding.

 
ENLISTED MEN (FROM LOG OF THE USS MASON)

  Index

  A-48, 41

  Abnaki, USS (AT-96), 101, 104, 108

  Admiral Hotel, 39

  Aetos (Eagle). See Slater, USS

  Aircraft, unidentified, 85–86

  Allen, Robert L., 40n

  Ambrose, 40

  American Dilemma, An: The Negro in America, 155, 159

  Anderson, Lieutenant, 158–59

  Andres (DE-45), 127

  Annapolis, Maryland. See Naval Academy, U.S.

  Antennae, blown away, 3, 100, 113

  Aptitude tests, 27

  Armstrong Hemenway Foundation, 61

  Army/Navy comparisons, 29

  Astravel, HMS, 2, 108, 110, 114

  ASW (antisubmarine warfare), 52

  Atlanta Daily News, the, 60–61

  Atlantic, Battle of the, 4, 53

  Atlantic, North, storms in, 1–3, 99–118

  Azores, 81–82

  Baker, Newton T., 8

  Balch, USS (DD-363), 127, 129, 130

  Bangor Harbor, Ireland, 90

  Barges, Battle of the, 99–118

  BCF 3203, sunk, 108

  BDE (British destroyer escort), 84–85

  Belfast, Northern Ireland, 90–93

  Bermingham, USS (DE 530), 77–78, 101, 104, 127, 130; and racial prejudice, 118, 151

  Bermuda, 135–36