October 2003 outside a Wendy’s in Prince George’s County, Maryland: I am sitting in my decade-old Volkswagen Jetta, sobbing. I’ve just left a fifth-grade classroom with no intention of going back. I’ve failed miserably at becoming a teacher, my attempt at a new career after several years in the nonprofit world. A three-week “transition to teaching” crash course, it turns out, isn’t nearly enough to take on the immense challenge of teaching middle schoolers in an underserved community. My life is unraveling, and I have nowhere to turn.
Although born into Atlanta’s Black middle class, I had experienced difficulties growing up, especially as a teenager. My parents divorced, and my mother married a financially unstable Vietnam War veteran. Living in reduced circumstances, we became transient, moving on average once a year. By age sixteen, I was convinced that the way to improve my life was through education. I set my sights on attending Howard University.
With an up-by-the-bootstraps spirit, I worked very hard during my final two years of high school. The effort paid off as various philanthropic organizations—including the Vietnam Veterans of America—awarded me scholarships that would enable me to make ends meet as a student. When Howard University offered me admission, it seemed my dream had come true.
I arrived at Howard intent on making a difference and quickly committed myself to student activism. By the fall of my sophomore year, I was coordinating a campus-wide voter registration project. This catapulted me into leadership positions, first as an elected advisory neighborhood commissioner in the District of Columbia, then as president of the Howard University Student Association and undergraduate representative to the university’s board of trustees. But by 2003, those days of collegiate enthusiasm and success seemed oh so distant.
Now things were about to change again. When I left my Jetta to buy a cup of coffee, a US Navy recruiter spotted me. A young, sharp-looking Black man with spit-shined shoes, he walked right up to me and launched into his pitch, promising me “a new lease on life.” When he got to the part about the Navy repaying student loans, I began to listen and to ask a few questions of my own.
It was October 2003, half a year after the George W. Bush administration had launched the US invasion of Iraq. I had no desire to kill anyone or to risk my life fighting on foreign soil, especially on behalf of what I viewed as US imperialism. So I never even considered enlisting in the Army or the Marine Corps. But like Randle McMurphy from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I thought I could leverage the system to my personal advantage. The Navy could provide me with a steady paycheck for a while, I figured, and then I could proceed to the next stage of my life.
Indeed, my eagerness to begin collecting a paycheck almost cost my recruiter his catch. Training in most of the then-available Navy specialties, known as “rates,” wasn’t starting for another six months, and I did not want to wait that long. He was undeterred, however, and called me a few days later with news of a rate available sooner: photographer’s mate. I knew little about photography, but was willing to learn. I took the plunge and enlisted.
My unwillingness to serve as cannon fodder connected directly to the tradition of Black resistance to the Vietnam War. Embodying this dissent was Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, who had chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Ture visited Howard University, his alma mater, during my time there, and compared himself with General Colin Powell, a university trustee. “We both faced the draft for Vietnam,” he said. “Powell told them ‘Yes,’ and I told them ‘Hell, no, I ain’t going.’”
By the time I joined the US Navy, I occupied a middle ground between Powell and Ture. In no way did I intend to make the military a career and become a tool of America’s ruling class. At the same time, I was hardly an ideological purist. I genuinely believed that a term of military service would benefit me. On this point, I was in for a rude awakening.
The human rights champion Paul Robeson once stated, “The battlefield is everywhere.” I found that despite the military’s supposed inclusivity today, it offers no escape from racism and white nationalism. And this racism is directly connected to the acts of aggression and even war crimes committed by the US military overseas.
THE NINE-WEEK NAVY basic training was tough, mostly from a physical perspective, but I hung in there and graduated. Next came an assignment to the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Maryland, to learn the basics of still photography. Here things began to go south. On the first day of class, students were asked to state their reasons for enlisting. I responded by saying that the military was the best affirmative action employer in the country. My use of the phrase affirmative action provoked the military instructors, and from then on, they were intent on getting me. If I was even one second late for class, or if they could find any minor infraction, I’d be written up. Still, I managed to graduate, in no small part thanks to the support of other Black recruits.
In July 2004, my training complete, I reported for duty aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. At the time, the carrier was undergoing shipyard repairs in Portsmouth, Virginia, in preparation for a six-month deployment the following year. Given my experience at Fort Meade, I joined the ship with limited trust in the chain of command and the Navy in general. My first day at the ship’s photo lab foreshadowed the struggles that lay ahead.
The problem began with a white sailor from upstate New York. After observing me for roughly ten minutes without my having said a word, he bluntly stated, “You’re one of those Real Black People, huh.” Though initially shocked, I eventually came to understand what he meant. He was an overt racist who praised Adolf Hitler, performed Nazi salutes, and openly referred to Dr. Martin Luther King as “a coon.” What was most disheartening to me wasn’t his attitude but the internalized oppression displayed by Black sailors around us, who would either ignore him or uncomfortably laugh.
The situation was made worse by the tyrannical petty officer who ran the ship’s media division. He talked down to everyone, barked and shouted orders, mistreated workers, and ran the shop with an iron fist. On only my third day in the photo lab, he remarked that my photography was the worst he had ever seen in his life. By December it became clear that he was intent on driving me out of the Navy.
The following month, I traveled to Washington, DC, to attend my son’s birthday party. While I was there, a snowstorm hit, preventing me from returning to the ship as required by seven o’clock Monday morning. Such minor offenses are usually overlooked as long as the sailor involved alerts the chain of command and describes the mitigating circumstances. This courtesy was not extended to me, however. I was written up and brought before the draconian disciplinary review board, composed of high-ranking chief petty officers. The master chief presiding over the board was the senior enlisted sailor on the ship, outranking all but the carrier’s executive officer (XO) and its commanding officer.
It was here I came face-to-face with the real Navy, live and uncensored. The board was diverse in terms of race and gender, but that made little difference in the way I was treated. I was forced to do multiple parade-ground-style “facing movements” while being screamed at repeatedly. One grisly-looking master chief, a white man, banged on the table and threatened to “kick my ass.” Another chief, a Black woman, mockingly asked me if I’d ever heard of Hallmark: next time, she said, I had better send a card and forget about my son’s party. Ultimately, the presiding master chief decided that I had not demonstrated sufficient contrition, and therefore should submit to an executive officer inquiry—the final step before a “captain’s mast,” a disciplinary hearing convened by the ship’s commander.
At this point, I’d had enough of the Navy. The bullying that followed solidified that decision. After the disciplinary review board’s hearing, I was ordered to stand rigidly at attention in the photo lab while awaiting a sea bag inspection—petty harassment disguised as a way of ensuring that I had all required uniforms and clothing. I had never been so humiliated in my life. After standing at attention for more than thirty minutes, I made a break for it. I grabbed a few personal articles, made my way to the quarterdeck, left the ship, and caught a cab to the nearest rental car facility. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I knew I would not be returning to the United States Navy. I was going AWOL.
Of the several calls I made as I drove toward Washington, DC, one was to Rodney Green, an economics professor at Howard University. He’d been foundational to my development in college; as a student, I had participated in my first demonstration alongside Rod and the International Committee Against Racism. He also had personal experience with the military, having been drafted into the Army in 1969. Now Rod invited me to come over to his home the next morning for a chat and chew.
I was unprepared for the advice he gave me. Rod believed my going AWOL was both ill advised and harmful to my future. He spoke about his experience organizing against the Vietnam War from inside the Army and said that my actions went against the principle of building working-class solidarity and cohesion among the enlisted “grunts.” Rod’s most striking assertion was that a number of my fellow sailors probably felt much as I did but expressed their unhappiness differently. He challenged me to report back aboard ship, accept whatever punishment I had coming, and then gradually work on building the deeper relationships and support needed to more effectively challenge the chain of command.
I returned to the ship after forty-two hours of unauthorized absence. Two weeks later, I stood at the executive officer’s inquiry, inwardly fuming while the XO personally admonished me for behavior unbecoming a sailor. Believing I was “trainable,” the executive officer decided against escalating my case to a captain’s mast and instead assigned me extra military instruction, to be overseen by the despotic petty officer running the lab. Extra military instruction was a euphemism for dirty work. For the next month, I stayed after work for hours each evening—shining brass, stripping and waxing the photo lab deck, scrubbing ladder wells, cleaning deck drains, and so on. It was very humbling, yet the entire time I heeded Rod’s advice and kept my eye on the ball.
Soon thereafter we were at sea, and I kept busy as a photojournalist in the ship’s public affairs office. Then, on January 10, 2006, came the events that will always be burned into my memory. That night, I went to the photo lab to inquire about the military’s joint photojournalism program with Syracuse University and saw three white petty officers in conversation there. Reaching into a vent duct, one of them pulled out a hangman’s noose and grabbed his crotch. It was beyond shocking, as was the fact that the other two just stood there smirking. When I spoke up in protest, the man holding the noose replied that another Black sailor of our acquaintance could use a lynching as well.
I stormed out of the photo lab in utter disgust. Two hours later, I sent an email to the three petty officers demanding an apology and acknowledgment of their wrongdoing. I included some background on the legacy of lynching in America, explaining why their actions were the very opposite of funny. The next morning, when I went to the photo lab, the noose was still there, tied to the top of the vent duct. I wasn’t prepared for the emotions I felt as I untied the noose. I wept uncontrollably as I recalled images of Black men tortured and killed, savage crimes for which there have been no real accounting and no reparations to this day.
It was evident the next day, upon seeing the smirk still on the face of the man who’d pulled out the noose, that no apology would be forthcoming. At this point, I decided enough was enough. Months earlier, I had already alerted my immediate chain of command to the oppressive culture within our workspace. I described an environment where racist remarks, including favorable references to the Ku Klux Klan, were constantly being made. But instead of investigating my complaints, the supervisors had accused me of being a racist.
With no hope of finding justice within my shop, I decided to send a letter of complaint to our ship’s equal opportunity advisor. The Navy’s ethos emphasizes handling situations at the lowest level, but I saw that as just sweeping problems under the rug. I was determined not to let that happen.
When asked to fill out paperwork, the target of my complaint designated a Black senior petty officer to serve as his advocate. A Black man serving as an advocate for an overt racist might seem absurd, but in reality it is far from surprising. Internalizing oppression is all but a requirement for African Americans who want to ascend the Navy’s ranks.
To his credit, the officer conducting the investigation surveyed the sailors in my shop to assess my allegations. Remarkably, nearly a third of them affirmed that an oppressive culture existed there. Those who spoke up represented a cross section of the shop: three Black men, two white men, a Latino man, and a white woman. The lone woman had been victimized by having misogynistic pictures of her plastered on the wall of the photo lab, which the shop’s chain of command clearly ignored.
The investigating officer ruled in my favor, charging the petty officer who’d brought out the noose with violating two articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Eventually, he was restricted to the ship, reduced in rank, and fined. One of the other petty officers, the most senior sailor who’d witnessed the incident and done nothing about it, was reduced in rank and fined as well. Rod’s advice to be patient, build collective solidarity, and “dig deeper” had paid off. This time my immediate superiors were the ones feeling the heat.
To my frustration, though, much of their punishment was suspended, to be wiped away if they committed no further misconduct in the next six months. Given the severity of the offense, it felt like they were getting away with just a slap on the wrist. I decided to appeal the outcome to higher authority. I felt strongly that the light punishments were inconsistent with the Navy’s purported “zero tolerance” of racism and sexism. In my view, both of them should have been court-martialed, making them subject to much graver consequences.
WHILE DOING SOME research to strengthen my appeal, I came across the Center on Conscience and War. From them I learned that every member of the military is allowed to contact their member of Congress without going through the chain of command or getting prior command approval. In the spirit of causing some of the “good trouble” he famously urged, I contacted the office of civil rights icon John Lewis, who represented the Georgia congressional district where my parents resided.
Congressman Lewis subsequently wrote a letter to the Navy regarding my concerns. The Navy wrote back to him that it did not intend to take any further action. However, just by responding to Lewis about my concerns, the Navy made my case part of the public record, an example for present and future generations of enlisted personnel who encounter racism and sexism within the ranks and who may be looking for guidance on how to organize and resist.
While all this was going on, I had occasion to see the documentary Sir! No Sir!, which chronicles the history of dissent by active-duty troops who mobilized to end the Vietnam War. It added historical context to my own struggles. Here I encountered the testimony of Greg Payton, an Army veteran who took part in the 1968 uprising of Black soldiers being held at Long Binh stockade in Vietnam. I came to appreciate how the US military’s domestic racism is part of a pattern of dehumanization that, at the extreme, leads to events like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the killing of civilians in Fallujah during the Iraq War.
Payton compared being called nigger in the United States to GIs referring to the Vietnamese as gooks—later echoed by US troops disparaging Iraqis as hajjis. (Contrast this with the famous phrase often attributed to Muhammad Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger.”) Payton’s story also helped me gain a deeper understanding of the noose incident. It was clear that as a Black sailor, I had been insufficiently submissive in the eyes of the white petty officers, so they felt a need to put me in my proper place.
Around the same time, Rod sent me a copy of Soldiers in Revolt, which also documents the Vietnam GI resistance movement. First published in 1975 by David Cortright, a veteran of the movement who later became a professor of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, the book had just been reissued for its thirtieth anniversary. One chapter in particular captured my attention. Titled “Black on White,” it describes the struggle against the racism afflicting the Navy during the early 1970s, culminating in the shipboard rebellion on the USS Kitty Hawk in October 1972.
Shortly before we returned from deployment, I emailed Cortright and invited him to give a talk in Norfolk, Theodore Roosevelt’s home port. To my delight, he enthusiastically accepted. The event drew about seventy-five attendees, including several active-duty sailors and a few marines who drove down from Quantico.
The highlight of the evening came afterward, when ten active-duty service members met with Cortright at the home of another local professor. There we engaged in a two-hour discussion centered on the question, “What could we do in this present moment?” All members of the group were united in their opposition to the ongoing post-9/11 wars and occupations. Cortright pledged his support, yet was cautious as he recalled his activist comrades from the prior generation being jailed and harassed for speaking out. We departed that night with a commitment to continue the fight.
Throughout that summer, Cortright and I had many conversations as we sought to envision a framework for active-duty opposition to war. The foundation of our vision was the Military Whistleblower Protection Act of 1988 coupled with Defense Department Regulation 1325.6, “Handling Dissident and Protest Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces.” The Whistleblower Act gives an active-duty member the right of appeal to a member of Congress on any issue, without prior command approval. Regulation 1325.6, meanwhile, gives active-duty members the right to participate in political demonstrations while off base and out of uniform, so long as these occur within the United States and avoid slandering the president and other high officials.
I soon began to discuss this proposed framework with a handful of like-minded service members. Cortright began mobilizing the broader peace-and-justice community, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the Center on Conscience and War. Our immediate aim was to mobilize GI opposition to the Iraq War. We drafted an Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, which we hoped other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines would sign. The text was respectful and to the point: “As a Patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.”
We launched the appeal in October 2006. Tony Snow, President George W. Bush’s White House press secretary at the time, stated during a press briefing that we had the right to appeal for redress but that our movement was not representative of the military as a whole. Within a few weeks, however, we had roughly six hundred signers from around the globe. CBS interviewed more than a dozen of them for the news show 60 Minutes. The Nation magazine spoke to another twenty-four for a cover story called “About Face.” On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we announced that the number of signers had surpassed a thousand. Immediately following the announcement, Representatives John Lewis and Dennis Kucinich became the first members of Congress to endorse the appeal. Clearly, we were onto something.
In October 2007, our burgeoning movement was both honored and humbled to receive the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The award ceremony was attended by an intergenerational crowd of peace activists and organizers, including IPS cofounder Marc Raskin, who had been David Cortright’s dissertation committee chair. By the end of the year, we had upward of two thousand signers serving in ten countries around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Eighty-five percent of them came from the enlisted ranks, with 60 percent having served at least one tour of duty in the Iraq War.
The struggle against racism aboard Theodore Roosevelt, coupled with my work on the Appeal for Redress, left an indelible imprint on my activist soul. I saw that military dissent is of inestimable value as a resource to end America’s ongoing imperial wars. The spark for the Appeal for Redress came directly from the Vietnam-era GI resistance movement, which demonstrated how members of the armed forces can fight for their interests even in the face of opposition from military and political leaders. In a myriad of ways, GIs had dissented, resisted, and, by the early 1970s, rendered the US armed forces virtually ungovernable and all but useless as a fighting force. In a different time and in different circumstances, our Appeal for Redress was building on their example.
My experiences within the US Navy taught me that enlisted personnel have an untapped power that, if organized, can potentially help change the course of history. By and large, enlisted members hail from the margins of American society, rural towns and blighted urban centers all but abandoned by the elites. Whether they come from Appalachia, West Virginia, or Washington, DC, young enlistees share a wide range of common interests. My fervent hope is that the Appeal for Redress can inspire a new generation of peacemakers within the ranks of the armed forces.