The sixty-year-old black woman rose when it was her turn to speak. Mary McLeod Bethune, one of seventeen children whose parents were born into slavery in rural South Carolina, was far from her southern roots on that memorable day in 1935. She was standing in the Oval Office at the White House, about to address the president of the United States.
“Now I speak, Mr. President, not as Mrs. Bethune but as the voice of fourteen million Americans who seek to achieve full citizenship,” she began. “We have been taking the crumbs for a long time. We have been eating the feet and the head of the chicken long enough. The time has come when we want some white meat.”1
Bethune was part of a delegation called to the White House to review the year-old National Youth Administration (NYA) created by President Franklin Roosevelt to assist young Americans, many of them minorities, struggling with economic and social issues. Bethune had devoted her life to improving the social, economic, and educational position of African Americans, receiving a great deal of publicity and scores of accolades for her work. She had been selected as a member of the NYA’s advisory board by Aubrey Williams, its social activist director, and now had a chance to give Roosevelt a firsthand accounting of the state of affairs for minorities in the United States.
Bethune, who met and became friends with both Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president’s mother, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt a year earlier, urged President Roosevelt to continue advocating for the nation’s minority population, encouraging him to open more doors for blacks so they could contribute their talents in government and in business. “Because they already have a reassuring and hopeful belief that there is somebody in the White House who cares!” she told the president. Roosevelt, said to be visibly touched by Bethune’s words, leaned across his desk and grasped her hands in both of his. “Mrs. Bethune,” he said, “thank you for the informal knowledge you have placed at our disposal in these important days of beginnings in a new field. I’m glad that I’m able to contribute something to help make a better life for your people. I want to assure you that I shall continue to do my best for them in every way.”2
A week after her historic White House visit, Bethune received a letter asking her to return to Washington to meet again with Roosevelt. She rushed to the capital, meeting first with Aubrey Williams, who told her that the president, impressed by her earlier presentation, decided to create an office of minority affairs within the NYA and wanted her to become its director. She accepted the position and pledged to do her best under the leadership of Williams, who already had many powerful enemies, particularly among southern conservatives, for his liberal views on civil rights. As she was leaving the Oval Office, Roosevelt, looking at Bethune but speaking to Williams, said, “Aubrey, Mrs. Bethune is a great woman. I believe in her because she has her feet on the ground—not only on the ground but in the deep, plowed soil.”3
Roosevelt developed a fondness for Bethune and met with her regularly on matters relating to minorities, sometimes to the chagrin of some of his less-enlightened White House staff, and would be hearing a lot more from her on integration of the military once it appeared that the United States was headed to war. Although he may have agreed with some of the views of both Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt, the latter also a staunch advocate for minorities, FDR was first and foremost a political pragmatist who understood the strong sentiments against blacks held by many southerners, including some who worked closely with him in the White House, and the ramifications integration could have at the ballot box. While Bethune may have made a deep impression on FDR, it would take more time—and more relentless convincing and even threatening by other prominent minorities—before Roosevelt would initiate decisive action allowing African Americans to fight side by side with white Americans. But their day would come.
Walter White, an African American with skin so light he could pass for a white man, was one who would make additional headway with Roosevelt on the issue of ending segregation in the armed forces as well as in American industry. As a thirteen-year-old boy, White survived the 1906 race riots in Atlanta, Georgia, and twelve years later became assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Soon he would follow Bethune’s path to Roosevelt’s White House door.
Race relations in America were becoming increasingly strained as blacks were not only segregated in the military but also banned from jobs in the industrial plants providing wartime equipment and materials. As the situation started to approach a flashpoint with a major protest march planned for Washington, Franklin Roosevelt was urged in the summer of 1941 to meet with White and Asa Philip Randolph, a Harlem street orator and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black labor union, which helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement. Those requests were rebuffed.
Instead Eleanor Roosevelt was dispatched by the president to New York City to meet with White and Randolph, urging them to call off the rally. She told them of her fear of violence should a demonstration occur, particularly since the Washington police force was made up mostly of southerners. Randolph, who had moved to Harlem from Florida as part of the black migration north, told the first lady that there would be no violence unless the president “ordered the police to crack some black heads.”4
When Eleanor reported to FDR that the rally was still on, the president relented, agreeing to meet with the march organizers. During the White House meeting, White and Randolph urged the president to issue an executive order abolishing discrimination in the armed forces as well as in America’s industries. White, who at the time was being courted by supporters of Wendell Wilkie to throw his support to the Republican presidential candidate, pointed out to the president the irony of the American military being trained to fight against Hitler’s theories of race while the Army and Navy were practicing a similar philosophy. He also said that inefficient and prejudiced southern officers were handicapping the armed services by making it unattractive for bright white northern recruits, let alone African Americans, to stay in the services, where they were forced to tolerate the backward ways of the southern officers.
Roosevelt turned to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who attended the meeting, for an explanation. “We can’t do a thing about it because men live in such intimacy aboard ship that we simply can’t enlist Negroes above the rank of messman,” Knox said. “Hold on Frank,” Roosevelt replied. “We’ve got some good Negro bands in the Navy. Why don’t we make a beginning by putting some of these bands aboard battleships? White and Negro men aboard ship will thereby learn to know and respect each other and then we can move on from there.” Knox said he would look into the president’s idea, a small and some might say condescending step, but no one really expected much from Knox, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt who had all but eliminated blacks from any rank above messman. “Experience of many years in the Navy has shown clearly,” Knox wrote earlier, “that men of the colored race in any branch than the messman branch, and, promoted to the position of petty officer, cannot maintain discipline among men of the white race. . . . As a result, teamwork, harmony and ship efficiency are seriously handicapped.”5
Realizing that the only way to stop the demonstration was to agree to an executive order, President Roosevelt asked White and Randolph to prepare a draft order they felt would help remedy the situation, and suggested they retire to the Cabinet Room and get started right away drafting the order. Over the next week several drafts were developed, some of which White said emasculated the order to the point of it being worthless. A final draft was agreed on, and it, which would become Executive Order 8802, was issued by Roosevelt on 25 June 1941, seven days after the first White House meeting. Roosevelt’s directive specifically banned discrimination on account of race, creed, color, or national origin in industries holding government contracts for war production and in vocational training for jobs in war industries.
In announcing Roosevelt’s order, the New York Times carried a story on page twelve headlined “President Orders an Even Break for Minorities in Defense Jobs.” The president noted that “the democratic way of life within the nation can be defended successfully only with the help and support of all groups.” Executive Order 8802, however, would amount to a sea change in American industry, where people like the president of North American Aviation flatly stated, “We will not employ Negroes. It is against company policy.” Or as Kansas City’s Standard Steel Corporation declared, “We have not had a Negro worker in twenty-five years, and do not plan to start now.”6
Although the order did nothing to eliminate segregation in the armed forces, it was seen as a historic step forward in ending discrimination in America’s industries. Roosevelt understood that no single executive order would end deep-seated racial feelings, but it certainly would set the stage for further advancements for minorities. The order was met with ridicule and criticism in many quarters, particularly from some industries and southern railroads, which refused to follow the president’s directive. But eventually they would comply or risk losing lucrative government contracts.
Six months later, in an address to the nation, Roosevelt touched on racial discrimination, stating, “We must guard against divisions among ourselves and among all the other United Nations. We must be particularly vigilant against racial discrimination in any of its ugly forms,” the president said, cautioning, “Hitler will try again to breed mistrust and suspicion between one individual and another, one group and another, one race and another, one government and another.” Whether or not he recognized the impact of his words, Roosevelt was echoing the same sentiment expressed in that June 1941 meeting in the White House with White and Randolph: How can America rail against Hitler’s discrimination when we permit it to go on here at home?7
Change, however, came at a snail’s pace in the military, given the resistance on the part of Army and Navy brass, military officers, and a large majority of white sailors and soldiers. Some contended that discrimination in the military simply reflected the social segregation of blacks throughout the nation. Once again Eleanor Roosevelt, sometimes acting as a moral conscience for her husband, may have provided the catalyst sparking a small, incremental change in the attitude of the United States’ military brass by opening up the ranks of the Army Air Corps to black pilots, who Army officials had contended would not be capable of learning the technology necessary to fly an airplane.
In early 1941 the first lady traveled to the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, and visited the field where the civilian pilot training program was under way. It was there she met Charles Alfred Anderson, son of an African American chauffeur in Pennsylvania and an accomplished pilot, having taught himself to fly in the 1920s. Later he was tutored by a member of the German air force in World War I and received the first commercial pilot license ever awarded to an African American. In 1934 Anderson and another African American pilot embarked on a thirty-five-day interracial goodwill flight sponsored by the Tuskegee Institute to South America, with scheduled stops in the Bahamas, Cuba, Caribbean, Nicaragua, Brazil, San Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. They had made similar flights across the United States and Canada.8
“I remember her [Eleanor Roosevelt] telling me that everybody told her we [blacks] couldn’t fly,” Anderson said. He said the first lady told him, “I see you flying all right here. Everybody that’s here is flying. You must be able to fly. As a matter of fact, I’m going to find out for sure. I’m going up with you.” The first lady brushed off concerns by Secret Service agents over her safety as she and Anderson headed to the small plane sitting on the runway.
When she climbed into the Piper Cub and the pair made an hour-long flight over Alabama, Eleanor Roosevelt made history. “Well, you can fly all right,” Roosevelt reportedly told Anderson after they landed. The African American flyer credits the first lady with convincing her husband to open up the Army Air Corps to blacks. In January 1941 the New York Times announced that the first African American pursuit squadron would be organized in the Army. Two months later the Army called for thirty-three volunteers on a “first come, first served” basis for an African American unit in the Army Air Corps, which would be known as the 99th Pursuit Squadron and was to be formed in the fall at Tuskegee. Pilots were required to have two years of college or the equivalent and to undergo six months of training.9
Although the color barrier was starting to crumble ever so slowly in the Army, the Navy was another matter. Knox, who had agreed to explore Roosevelt’s suggestion to install African American musical bands on battleships so that whites and blacks could get to know one another, never took any action on it. Later the president asked the Navy’s general board to develop a plan to enroll 5,000 minority recruits. The Navy board told Roosevelt it would not comply with his request, telling the president that the current role played by “these people” in the military is sufficient. The board believed that integration simply would not work because white men would not accept a black in position of authority over them, felt they were the superior race, and refused to allow blacks into intimate family relationships leading to marriage.10
Race relations in the United States continued to boil, with riots and brutal beatings starting to erupt in the nation’s larger cities, and at the same time the Navy’s staunch opposition to integration started to thaw ever so slightly. Faced with a need for manpower to fight a war at sea that they were unprepared to wage and a president who was becoming less tolerant of the military’s recalcitrance with regard to race, the Navy’s brass relented and finally opened up enlistment to blacks for ranks above messman in the spring of 1942. The Navy’s action amounted to an acknowledgment that the days of segregation were numbered.11
Although certainly a product of his times and a political pragmatist at heart, a hint of Franklin Roosevelt’s true feelings about race and intolerance can be gleaned from his own writings years before he ever became president. Back in 1928, when FDR, running for governor of New York State and working as a part-time columnist for the Standard, a newspaper in Beacon, New York, touched on the subject in a column titled “Between Neighbors.” Roosevelt, discussing political parties, bigotry, and the KKK, related a story where he was the guest of honor three years earlier at a chamber of commerce banquet in a small city in Georgia. He said the community was almost pure Scottish and English Protestant ancestry.12
“I sat on the right of the mayor of the town and on the other side of me sat the secretary of the chamber of commerce, a young man born in Italy, and a Roman Catholic. Just beyond sat a Jew who was a member of the executive committee,” Roosevelt recalled. “I turned to the mayor and asked him if the Ku Klux Klan was strong in the city. He said ‘yes, very.’” Then I asked if most of the members of the chamber belonged to the Klan, and again he said ‘yes.’”
“If this is so,” a puzzled Roosevelt asked, “why is it that the secretary is a Catholic and that a Jew is on the executive committee?” Roosevelt said the mayor “turned to me utterly surprised and answered: Why, Mr. Roosevelt, we know those men. They are intimate friends of ours, we respect them and like them. You know this Klan business doesn’t apply to people you know!”
Adding his own personal commentary, Roosevelt wrote: “I often wonder if those unfortunates who are working in open defiance of that article of the Constitution of the United States which guarantees religious liberty are also opposed to the great commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’” He concluded the column with these words: “Think it over.”13
Twelve years after Roosevelt wrote those words, religious and racial discrimination still existed throughout the nation, particularly in many of the southern states, which still held pre–Civil War views about the rights of minorities. There was strong opposition to minorities in the military, frequently by members of Roosevelt’s inner circle. In 1940 the regular Army had only five black officers, three of them serving as chaplains, and no black man ever had attended Annapolis. Following World War I, enlistment of blacks in the Navy had been discontinued, although recruitment of messmen may have been kept open formally. But in actual practice, only Filipinos were recruited into the messman branch from 1919 until 1932.
By 1932 the total enlisted force in the Navy was 81,120 men, of which only 441 were listed as African Americans, the majority of whom were messmen. Most of the remainder were musicians assigned to the station band in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In his private diary, Roosevelt’s interior secretary Harold Ickes questioned whether African Americans could qualify as pilots. “There is some doubt,” Ickes wrote, “whether they [blacks] can qualify as first-class aviators, but the president wants them to be given a chance in this branch of service, and on ground aviation work they are to have their full ten percent proportion.”14
Roosevelt suggested to Secretary of War Harold Stimson that, with regard to African Americans drafted into the military, they be proportioned into the various services based upon their proportion in the general population, which at that time was 10 percent. “Negro leaders are very much concerned,” Ickes wrote, “because they anticipate that conscripted men of their race will all be turned into labor regiments. The president is opposed to this and said so.”15
But the president saying blacks should have a chance to serve, and even his groundbreaking Executive Order 8802 opening up employment to blacks, did little to stop the clashes between blacks and whites in the streets as well as in the Army and Navy training centers. Militancy within the black community increased and thousands of blacks streamed from the Deep South to the promise of industry jobs in the North. Although Jim Crow was still alive and well, the shift toward some semblance of equality had begun, and soon African American sailors would be doing more than loading ships or serving meals to white officers. In fact, for the first time since Reconstruction the federal government was about to revive the principle of racial equality, leading some to proclaim Roosevelt’s New Deal the “Second Reconstruction.”16
Benjamin Garrison grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, with rigidly segregated schools, drinking fountains, bus stations, and train stations. He had to sit separately from whites in the balcony of movie theaters. If blacks wanted a meal in a southern restaurant, they were forced to go to the back door, he said, where they would be given their meal in a brown paper bag. It all seemed normal to Garrison, having spent his entire life in the South. “I didn’t realize until later how this should not be,” Garrison said. “The adults shielded us from this—they never taught us to hate anybody.”
Garrison’s father was a musician and his mother taught adults to read and write under the auspices of FDR’s literacy program. After graduating Booker T. Washington High School in 1942, Garrison enlisted in the Navy prior to being drafted. Boarding a train in Columbia, Garrison arrived the next day at the massive Great Lakes Naval Training Center, where he would join other blacks in Camp Robert Smalls, a segregated facility, the Navy’s first for training African Americans, named for a black Civil War hero and located on the other side of the tracks from the main training facility.17
Tenth-grade student James Graham followed a similar path. He was born in tiny Lake City, South Carolina, and attended a segregated one-room school before joining the Navy in 1942. Graham originally wanted to join the Army Air Corps, but once he learned that they did not accept blacks, he signed up with the Navy after being assured that he would not have to serve as a mess attendant as previous African Americans were required to do. After an overnight ride on a segregated steam train from Columbia, Graham was sent to Camp Smalls.18
For Adolph Newton, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Baltimore, Maryland, who forged his parents’ signature to enlist, the experience at boot camp was a real awakening. Newton skipped school that day and climbed aboard the Liberty Limited bound for Chicago and the promise of a new life. Upon arrival he and the other African American recruits were herded into the back of an open truck on its way to their barracks at Camp Smalls. As the truck passed other camps in the base, Newton remembered white guards at those camps taunting, “You’re gonna be sorry” and “You had a good home but you left.” Until a full complement was present, the black recruits were told they would be issued no clothing or bedding. Instead they would keep their civilian clothes and be forced to sleep on the floor.
“I had always taken a warm bed for granted,” Newton said, “but that weekend I found out just how important a mattress and blankets are. The floor was my mattress, and my overcoat was my blanket.” He shivered himself to sleep each night in the drafty barracks on the windswept shores of Lake Michigan. “I felt every board in the floor; they seemed to cut right into my back. I eventually settled for rolling halfway onto my side.”19
Eventually a full complement of recruits arrived, but Newton and the other boots were in for another surprise. They would not be sleeping in beds but would be in hammocks. It took some skill not only to get in and out of a hammock but also to keep from falling out of one while asleep. “Bodies were hitting the floor for a week,” Newton said.
For sixteen weeks Newton and his fellow sailors-in-training would be examined and tested and would learn to march, shoot a rifle, and tie knots. In short they would get a taste of discipline, Navy style. “Each morning,” Newton recalled, “we had to march down to the drill hall for a personal inspection. Here each trainee was inspected to see if he had shaved, bathed, put on clean underwear, and pressed his uniform.”20
Newton remembered lectures from the camp’s admiral in which the officer warned the African American boots that they had to be “better than good.” The admiral told them that there were no written guidelines for integrating the Navy, that this was brand-new territory, and that they were certain to face problems both from fellow white boots as well as white officers. He said the only way to overcome these obstacles was to study hard and use their heads—being “good” would not be enough, he said. The African Americans had to be better than good in order to survive military life.21
James Graham was all of ninety pounds when he arrived at Camp Smalls. The Lake City, South Carolina, kid was excited that the Navy was finally allowing blacks to do more than clean and cook, and he was ready to learn all that he could with the hopes he would soon be at sea. But training for the Camp Small boots went longer than expected. Usually, the training at Great Lakes would take six or eight weeks, but for the recruits in Camp Small, the time stretched to sixteen weeks because, the way Graham saw it, “they were trying to figure out what to do with us.”22
In the beginning white petty officers were assigned as company commanders. Gradually blacks were brought in as assistant company commanders until, finally, they were put in charge of some of the training. Unfortunately some of those black commanders had little experience on how to train recruits, themselves having served only as mess attendants. This was all new to the Navy, and there was still plenty to be worked out, so Lt. Daniel W. Armstrong, son of the Civil War general and founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, was appointed overall commander for the training of all African Americans at the facility.23
As the number of blacks continued to stream into the Navy, two addi-tional camps were used for the overflow. Armstrong, a southerner and Annapolis graduate, believed that blacks should be segregated and have “special” treatment, a policy many white officers failed to embrace. They contended that all recruits should be trained according to the same standards. But Armstrong was the boss, and according to the official naval station history, many stabbings and barrack fights between blacks ensued and might have been reduced had Armstrong allowed officers to use “impartial firmness” in disciplining the black recruits, just as they did with the white men.24 Armstrong believed that because of differences in background, blacks were not qualified to compete against white recruits in some disciplines, although this certainly proved not to be the case as many Camp Smalls graduates excelled in service schools, and went on to provide exemplary service in all advanced specialized schools with several eventually becoming officers. The first black Navy officer was appointed in 1942, nearly 150 years after the founding of the Navy.
Camp Smalls set up segregated service schools for gunners, radiomen, quartermasters, signalmen, yeomen, storekeepers, cooks, and bakers in September 1942. The following month schools were set up for aviation machinist and aviation metalsmiths, said to be the most successful of the segregated service schools. A new $200,000 building was built the following spring to house these schools, which ironically gave the African American recruits better classrooms, laboratories, and equipment than was available for the white Great Lakes recruits. Some seven thousand blacks entered the Camp Smalls service schools during the three years they were in operation.25
Eventually the government studied the segregated service schools and determined that they were operating inefficiently. Some of the schools had only four or five students, which obviously was a waste of valuable resources. Segregation was found to be a “useless luxury,” in the government’s words, so integration in service schools was introduced on a small scale in 1944. The experiment proved an immediate success and that the black students were “well liked and well treated, did well in their classes and had no complaints to make.” The color barrier crumbled a little more with the gradual integration of the service schools, a precursor to integration of the entire facility, which got under way in the summer of 1945.26
James Graham, that ninety-pound seventeen year old from Lake City, South Carolina, has clear memories of his days in Camp Smalls. He has an especially vivid one involving President Roosevelt, who decided to visit Great Lakes. Roosevelt was revered by the majority of blacks throughout the nation and the idea that he was coming to Camp Smalls was very exciting for the black recruits. “We waxed the floor and cleaned the barracks for two weeks when we heard he was coming,” Graham said. “President Roosevelt was coming to pay us a visit!” The day of FDR’s arrival, all of the troops were standing at attention in the barracks awaiting the arrival of their commander in chief. To the great disappointment of the black recruits, the president did not stop.
“I just happened to be standing near a window and I saw the [presidential] limousine swoosh by,” Graham said. The president, it turns out, was not snubbing Camp Smalls but simply had a tight schedule, traveling more than 8,750 miles by train and automobile inspecting facilities throughout the nation. He didn’t have time to meet any of the recruits in the facility as the top-secret two-week trip was designed to inspect training and industrial locations and was not specifically aimed at garnering publicity for the president.
Daisy Suckley, the president’s cousin and close confidante, accompanied him on the cross-country tour that fall, and she recorded her thoughts on the Great Lakes stop in her daily diary. It was a dreary and rainy day when the presidential train arrived in the wee hours of Saturday morning, 19 September 1942. “Sailors & marines stood silent guard on the tops of buildings & about every hundred feet on the ground in the light of . . . flood lamps. We shifted back and forth on sidings & finally stopped,” Suckley wrote.27
Suckley and the rest of the contingent piled into the presidential car and toured the base. “The station is . . . not quite finished yet, 68,000 men,” FDR’s cousin wrote. “We saw (the men) doing their various daily duties—a company doing setting-up exercises, a couple of blocks further a group of Negroes raking a yard & singing in unison, two or three companies singing as they march, another jumping over obstacles & in & out of trenches, etc., etc. We drove about 35 miles around the station before returning to the train. A group of nurses in white uniforms saluting just as well as the men.”28
For seventeen-year-old Thomas Howard, boot camp would be the first time he was away from home. Howard, son of a hog carrier in East St. Louis, Illinois, quit Lincoln High School to join the Navy in the summer of 1942. After an eight-week stay at Camp Smalls, he was selected to go to gunnery school at Great Lakes and served as a gunnery striker for the next six weeks. With training complete Howard was sent to Cape May, New Jersey, and assigned to a converted minesweeper, which patrolled the Delaware Bay area. He would remain there through 1943 until finally being assigned to the USS Mason, the first Navy warship manned by a mostly black crew.
When he went on board the Mason in March 1944, Howard was excited about the prospect of serving on an American warship and was ready to take his post as a gunner. Unfortunately all the gunnery posts were filled and he was assigned general seaman duties swabbing the deck. “I didn’t like my duties at first,” Howard said. So when a vacancy in the galley occurred, he jumped at the opportunity, turning in his mop for a serving tray. “I was close to the good food,” Howard remarked, noting that he never did get the gunnery job for which he was trained and instead served in the mess his entire time on board the destroyer escort serving chow to enlisted men.29
Benjamin Garrison, the nineteen year old from Columbia, South Carolina, followed a similar path from Great Lakes to minesweeper patrol along the East Coast. After boot camp and specialized training as a signalman, Garrison was sent to Lockwood Basin in East Boston, Massachusetts, and assigned to a wooden boat patrolling Boston Harbor for submarines each night. Later Garrison was assigned to the USS Puffin, a minesweeper patrolling Boston Harbor and the coast of Maine. Then he got the call to report to the Mason, about to be commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard.30
James Graham was selected for radio school after completing Great Lakes. Eventually he would find his way to Cape May, New Jersey, along with classmate Thomas Howard, and be assigned to a minesweeper, the USS Blue Jay, a converted yacht patrolling the East Coast. He would spend his next year looking for mines and doing what he considered longshore labor work along the docks. When he received the call to go on board the Mason, Graham was more than happy to comply.31
A driving blizzard with bitter winds and freezing temperatures greeted the recruits as they arrived at the Boston Navy Yard and boarded their shiny new USS Mason in March 1944. Although gale-force winds were blowing off the water, Graham said the cold really did not bother the new recruits, who were excited about being the first African Americans to serve as full-fledged sailors on board a Navy warship. Graham recalled that the ship, getting the finishing touches before commissioning day, had no heat or electricity.
What would be a groundbreaking event for African Americans, the Navy, and the nation was recorded in the 21 March 1944 edition of the New York Times. The seventy-five-word article headlined “New Navy Crew Mostly Negroes” appeared on page ten of the newspaper. “The destroyer-escort Mason, first United States naval vessel with a predominantly Negro crew, was commissioned today at Boston Navy Yard,” the Times article noted. “The crew of 204 includes forty-four whites. Later the vessel will be manned entirely by Negroes specially trained for destroyer-escort duties.”32
The momentous occasion received a bit more publicity in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, one of the leading black southern newspapers. “First Negro-Manned Naval Vessel Is Commissioned,” headlined a story appearing on page two of the 25 March 1944 edition. During the ceremonies at the Boston Navy Yard amid a driving spring snowstorm and bitter cold temperatures, Republican Massachusetts governor Leverett A. Saltonstall and Boston mayor Maurice J. Tobin, a Democrat who eventually would succeed Saltonstall as governor, spoke as the crew stood at attention. “There was moisture in the eyes of some of its colored workers who, with their white comrades, braved the bitter cold to witness the ceremony,” the newspaper reported. A sense of pride was evident among the blacks present as well as a realization that this would be their opportunity to show the Navy and the American people that they were every bit as capable as white sailors.33
Lt. Cdr. William M. Blackford, from a prominent Virginia family, was selected as skipper of the Mason. From all accounts, Blackford, who was white, as were the ship’s other officers, was admired and respected by his crew, who used terms such as “great man, competent, understanding” to describe him. There is no evidence to suggest that the Navy knew that the skipper’s great-grandmother was a well-known southern abolitionist when he was assigned to the Mason, and although some speculate that her views on slavery were carried through the generations, Blackford was not a “crusader,” according to his son.34
Once at sea Blackford wrote a letter to his parents, which read in part, “I think the crew is better than average and is developing some spirit. There has been a lot of bunk said about Negro crews. We can’t see that they are any different from others if treated the same, but will know more later. They are anxious to make a name for themselves. [They] actually work harder.”35
Although James Graham admired Blackford and contends that the skipper was only interested in running a good ship, the sailor felt that the Mason was “programmed for failure.” Graham said “they didn’t want us to succeed,” and his ship received a high level of attention from base officers as well as from officers on other ships. “There were always inspections” by these officers whenever the ship was docked. While nothing was ever found to be amiss, Graham and his shipmates saw this activity as part of the overall view held by Navy officials that the ship would not succeed.36
But if that was truly the attitude of the Navy brass, the courageous black sailors on board the Mason were about to prove them wrong. Following a routine shakedown cruise off Bermuda, the ship left Charleston in mid-June escorting a convoy bound for Europe, arriving at Horta Harbor, Azores, in July. Although it was against the rules, James Dunn, the ship’s signalman, kept a day-to-day detailed diary of his time on board. “We are getting underway at 0340,” Dunn wrote in his 14 June entry. “Each man is on his special sea detail. . . . None of the boys seems to know what we are going to do. About 0600 we see some merchant ships coming out of port. Then we knew that the real stuff was here at last.”37
On board the Mason for its first convoy across the German submarine hunting grounds was Thomas W. Young, a reporter for the Norfolk Journal and Guide and the first African American war correspondent reporting from a Navy ship. Young described the transatlantic trip as an “odyssey” that was both “the fulfillment of a promise and the answer to a question.” He said the cruise, in which the Mason and the other destroyer escorts safely escorted the convoy with its vital war supplies to Europe, fulfilled the promise the Navy made to send black sailors into combat on board a warship. In addition Young said the cruise helped to answer the question regarding what was happening to the African American sailors who had been trained in the Great Lakes and Hampton Naval Training centers.38
Although there were some U-boat contacts made during the crossing, the submarines left the convoy alone. But high seas, gale-force winds, and subfreezing temperatures frequently caused severe damage and loss of life on board the tiny DEs, which were tossed around like corks in the heavy seas. As water heaved up on deck it quickly turned to ice, coating the steel deck, making walking treacherous, and encasing the lines with thick ice. As the ships rolled and pitched, it was easy for a crewman to slip on the icy deck and wind up overboard.
Elmo Allen, radioman on board the USS Chase, had quit school in his senior year to join the Navy. Allen had tried three times, all unsuccessfully, to join the Navy since he was sixteen years old. Each time the recruiter had told him he was too skinny. But when March 1943 came around and the war raged on, the Navy jumped at the chance to signing up the still-skinny Jackson, Michigan, kid. “By that time, they were glad to see you,” Allen said, because manpower needs were becoming critical in the war. But Allen, who was ready to do battle with the Nazis, never could have imagined that one of the greatest and most destructive enemies he would be facing would be the weather.39
Hurricane season had just arrived in the North Atlantic in the fall of 1944 when Allen and his shipmates were ordered to New York City to prepare for a special assignment: shepherding a ragtag collection of seventy-six U.S. Army vessels from New York City to Falmouth, England, some 3,500 miles away. The invasion of France already was under way and the Allies were pushing toward Germany. Although the U-boat strength in the North Atlantic was reduced by this time, there still were a few Nazi submarines lying off America’s shores waiting for an opportunity to strike Allied vessels. But on this trip the weather would steal the show from the U-boats.
Besides the destroyer escorts Chase and O’Toole, three other DEs would provide escort duty for the convoy, the USS Powers, USS Bermingham, and USS Mason, that new American warship manned by a mostly black crew who were about to call upon all their skills and training to survive the dangerous crossing. They had no way of knowing just how much they would be tested in the weeks ahead. The fleet oiler USS Maumee and seagoing tug USS Abnaki were assigned to the trip as well. The mission was to deliver this strange collection of Army vessels, manned by civilians, to the staging area in England for use in the war zones in northern Europe. The route would be through the unpredictable and stormy North Atlantic, made even more dangerous by an active hurricane season.40
In fact, as preparations were under way for this latest crossing, a category-three hurricane, with winds of up to 150 miles per hour, already was devastating parts of the American coastline, causing more than $100 million in damage and a loss of forty-six lives. Called the “Great Atlantic Hurricane” of 1944, the storm packed a wallop, producing seventy-foot waves and resulting in the sinking of five ships, including two U.S. Coast Guard cutters, a minesweeper, and an American destroyer, the USS Warrington, with the combined loss of 344 American sailors.41
Lt. Cdr. Russ V. Bradley, skipper of the destroyer escort Chase, viewed this storm as an “evil omen” of what might be in store for his convoy, designated Convoy N.Y. 119. A few days after the hurricane had become extratropical and merged harmlessly with another storm near Greenland, Convoy N.Y. 119 got under way. “The sea that day was mirror calm,” Captain Bradley remembered. “It gave us no hint of what was to come.” The Army vessels consisted of fourteen steel railroad car floats, fourteen wood cargo barges, twelve large seagoing tugs, fifteen small harbor tugs, fifteen self-propelled harbor oil barges, one Panamanian tramp with a Greek crew, and two British net tenders.42 The civilians chosen by the Army transport service to operate the vessels were “the last scrapings available from the exhausted wartime manpower pools.” Some consisted of misfits, unable to find other jobs on conventional merchant ships, with many either too old or too young for military service.43
The DEs would have their work cut out for them. The trip across the North Atlantic would not be quick, as the escorts had to keep their speed below five knots in order not to lose the motley collection of Army vessels, most of which were not accustomed to sailing on the high seas. Bradley remembered seeing the Queen Mary steaming at twenty-five knots across the Atlantic, carrying troops to England. The ocean liner made three round-trip crossings before Convoy N.Y. 119 would even arrive in England.44
“The first two weeks were a constant scramble to herd the unruly units back into the convoy,” Bradley wrote. “Even modest bad weather broke up the formation, but mostly it was an endless series of equipment failures, sick crew members or just plain inability to do what was required.” On one night of moderately rough seas, one of the tugs lost its bilge pumps and developed a bad list. Before any help could be given, the vessel turned over, dumping its crew of twelve into the dark ocean waters. Eleven of the twelve were rescued. This was only the first—but would not be the last—casualty of the trip.45
With ninety-mile-per-hour winds and seas building to heights of sixty to eighty feet, the vessels of Convoy N.Y. 119 were in for some real trouble. “The poor little tugs and oilers could do nothing but run with the waves, hang on, and try to survive,” Bradley said. Elmo Allen, radioman on board the Chase, said it was “like riding the Coney Island roller coaster standing up.” He said the crew was “hanging on for dear life,” noting that “the DEs had no internal passageway, making it all but impossible to go fore and aft with the chance of winding up overboard.”46
Bradley said this trip made him realize how sturdy the destroyer escorts were: “The angry crest would tower over our bridge—itself 40 feet above the waterline, and lift the stern sky high.” He added, “We had to hang on with both hands and she whipped and twisted and dropped like a stone each time a crest passed under.” Bradley recalled “the slide down into the trough was unnerving with dark and heaving water all around, and it seemed most likely that the ship would break up or else dive right under the water. After a night and day of this, however, through a sort of numb fatigue, we thought perhaps we would make it.”47
And they did—at least most of them. The casualty list included nineteen men lost at sea, three small tugs, eight steel car floats, and five wooden cargo barges. The remainder of the convoy made it into England on 20 October, more than a month after departing New York City. On the final approach there was an incident, Bradley remembered, involving the destroyer escort Mason, the African American–manned warship. With a seventeen-foot crack in its deck plates, the Mason was starting to take on water—some twenty-one inches reported in the chain lockers—but was dispatched to speed ahead toward Lizard Head, England, escorting a group of twenty smaller craft before they faltered in the heavy seas.
The tiny warship led the tugs, oil barges and other small vessels to port on a fourteen-hour trip through the treacherous channel with its fifty-foot waves and ninety-mile-per-hour winds. Upon arriving safely the crack in the ship’s deck was welded and, within a couple of hours, the Mason was back on the water, plowing through fifty-foot seas to assist the remaining members of the convoy—a courageous move by the captain and his crew of the little DE, especially given that two larger British destroyers assigned to assist the convoy chose not to venture out onto the angry seas.48
Mason signalman Lorenzo A. DuFau remembered the day they headed back out to sea to help the rest of the convoy. “The calm that was among the crew members in the midst of this conflict was remarkable. We would resort to trying to humor each other rather than being in fear. But fear was there,” he said. “There was no way to swim to get out of there because the ships couldn’t come near each other and the nearest line was straight down. So if the end came, we’d hope that we were at peace with our Maker.”49
In his 16 October diary entry, James Dunn, the Mason’s signalman, said the sea was still raging and pitching the ship from side to side as the tiny escort tried to round up ships in the convoy “like a shepherd rounding up his sheep.” The howling winds and raging seas reminded Dunn of the earlier days of the convoy when it plowed through the cyclonic North Atlantic: “You couldn’t stay in your bunk at all. All the ships are having a very hard time, especially the small Army tugs. One of them sank last night . . . also a boy fell over the side of one of the destroyer escorts and hasn’t been found since.” Dunn went on to write, “People shouldn’t condemn a sailor so much for what he does while in port, because you don’t know the hell he goes thru at sea.”50
After safely escorting the vessels to port, Dunn also recalled when the Mason was ordered to return to sea to search for the other ships as well as survivors. “The weather is still very bad and a terrific storm is coming up,” Dunn wrote. “The two British ships started back with us but later turned back because the sea was too rough. But we had to keep going.” Dunn added, “It didn’t look as thought we were going to make it but with the help of the Lord we made it safely. We have never been in a storm as rough as that one.”51
Nineteen-year-old Mason radioman Ben Garrison, who was “elated” to have a chance to serve as a full-fledged sailor, will never forget Convoy N.Y. 119, which he described as a “hair-raising” experience. Garrison said the quartermaster told him the ship took a 70-degree roll during the crossing. The young sailor, who was in his foul-weather gear with a wool jacket and long johns, said as the water washed over the deck it would freeze on contact. Lines were caked with thick ice, making them difficult to handle. They had to be especially careful walking on the slippery decks, he said, because if a sailor went overboard no one would be able to rescue him in the raging seas.52
Thomas Howard, the eighteen year old who trained as a gunner’s mate but spent his time in the ship’s mess, remembered gripping onto the ship’s cable guardrails to keep from being tossed overboard. “The waves were astronomical,” Howard recalled. “That was the day of all days,” he noted in recalling Convoy N.Y. 119. Howard said the Mason would sink down and then lurch back up as the ship pitched from side to side.53
For their heroic efforts, the crew of the USS Mason was recommended by Captain Blackford as well as the convoy commander, Cdr. Alfred L. Lind, to receive a Navy commendation, a commendation that, despite their courageous steadfast devotion to duty, was not awarded to the black sailors who served on board the Mason, owing almost certainly to the racial prejudice of the time. After all, if the Mason was “programmed to fail,” as some of its crew believed— and it instead excelled—the Navy brass would have found it easier to bury the commendation recommendation than to admit they were wrong. It would take more than half a century before the U.S. government bestowed upon the Mason crew members who were still alive the honor they had earned—and been recommended for—way back in 1944.54
Even though the men of the USS Mason wore the uniform of the U.S. Navy, racial prejudice was felt every day. In fact, Ben Garrison recalled an instance when he and his white shipmates were on board a ferry in Virginia. They sat down at the lunch counter and placed their order. The white waitress eyed Garrison warily but did bring him his hot dog and Coke. Within minutes, however, a white man came from the kitchen and, using a racial epithet, told Garrison to leave. “I had to persuade my shipmates not to defend me,” Garrison said, adding that he quietly picked up his lunch and left the counter.
Martin Davis, pharmacist’s mate on board the USS Pettit, labels as “horrible” the treatment of blacks on board DEs. “When I first got aboard the ship I saw these black fellows and they were all segregated,” he recalled. “They were all living in one location of the ship and they were serving as cooking personnel, officers’ stewards, and they were treated by the officers like servants.” Davis said the treatment carried over off the ship as well. “If you ended up in a southern port, if you ended up in Norfolk, Virginia, or anyplace in the South, these fellows had to get in the back of the bus.”
Davis recalled one instance while his ship was docked in New York. In South Beach, he said, Italian prisoners were being held, and when Italy surrendered, the POWs were given American military uniforms with a green patch that identified them as “Italy.” Davis said he would never forget what happened while in port. “The saloon keepers were serving Italian POWs but were refusing to serve American black servicemen.”55
Cassin Craig was a white supply officer assigned to the Mason. The Philadelphia native had graduated from high school and college before the Navy sent him to Harvard Business School for additional training. Craig said he was assigned to the ship and was not aware until he boarded that the ship was manned by a predominantly black crew. Craig came on board in November, following the Convoy N.Y. 119 crossing, and made three convoy crossings to North Africa later that month. “They were good sailors,” Craig said in describing the black crew, noting that the white officers were unexpectedly impressed by the African American sailors, although he did detect racial tension on board ship, particularly on the part of some of the white officers.56
War correspondent Thomas Young, who rode along on one of the Mason’s first missions, said the ship served as a “floating laboratory” that showed how easily workable the principles of democracy are when given a fair trial. “Here is being tested the ability of its men in uniform to live and work peacefully and harmoniously and effectively,” Young wrote, “irrespective of previously applied patterns of separation.” Young noted that the Mason was just like all other American warships. Bunks were assigned according to the sections in which the men work rather than their racial identity. The chow hall had no separate tables for whites and blacks. “The men line up for their meals, first come first served, and sit where there is a vacant seat to eat them,” he wrote. “Any other arrangement obviously would carry over into the way these men work and fight together. Such an effective and high spirited team could not exist otherwise.”57
The Mason’s sailors would not soon forget their visit to Northern Ireland, where they received a warm and hospitable welcome. In Thomas Young’s article on the trip, headlined “Irish First to Treat USS Mason Crew Like Real Americans,” he said if the ship ever went AWOL, it was a fairly safe bet that search planes would locate it in the Irish Sea. “We were overcome by their friendliness,” Thomas Howard remarked.58
“Funny,” one sailor mused, “how I had to come all the way across the ocean to a foreign country before I get to enjoy the feeling of being an American.” Compared to wartime Boston, Philadelphia, Norfolk, or San Diego, Young remarked, this Irish port was poor, dull, and half starved. But the black sailors on board the Mason found it kind and pleasant. After almost six weeks at sea, the sailors walked the streets and frequented the pubs and dance halls, where a large, friendly group of local women helped bring back memories of home. “It was the first time in my life that I’ve been treated like a real American,” one Mason sailor remarked.59
For Seaman William Bland of the Mason, Ireland was an experience like no other. “All the boys on the Mason were raised right here in this country, in the United States, and we couldn’t go to a movie show or sit down at a counter in Woolworth’s even,” he recalled. “We had to go around to the back. And the next thing you know, we were on the ship, and we were scared. Then we went to Ireland and the Irish people didn’t look on us as our skin color. They looked on us as Americans—as American fighting men.”60