by Dan Goldberg
But acts of heroism and bravery by African Americans were forever anomalies in the eyes of the military’s leaders, mere exceptions to the self-evident truth that black men were inferior.
The same year that Ely released his report, 1925, Major General Robert Lee Bullard, commander of the Second Army during World War I, published his memoir, in which he wrote, “If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don’t put your time in Negroes.”5
Ely and Bullard, American heroes in contemporary eyes, were writing on paper what most military men felt in their hearts.
Of course, those feelings were simply a reflection of American society. Ely’s and Bullard’s works coincided with the second flowering of the Ku Klux Klan, which boasted more than four million members at the time and included governors, congressmen, and a future Supreme Court justice.
It also coincided with the founding of the American Eugenics Society, which popularized anthropometry, which equated physical measurements with mental capabilities and purported to demonstrate the superiority of certain races and ethnicities. By 1928, there were 376 separate university courses on eugenics in many of the United States’ leading colleges and universities.6
Civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois had hoped and argued that a courageous performance during the fight in Europe would win black men respect when they returned to the United States. But after the war, black soldiers and sailors were accorded little respect. Patriotism was a currency of no value to black men, particularly in the South.7
During World War I, black men in the Navy mostly served as coal-passers and firemen on coal-burning ships. Anything more than menial work was a rarity. Only a handful of black men were promoted into petty officer ratings. Those who were served as water tenders, assigned to manage the fire in a boiler, or, occasionally, as gunners’ mates, who were nearly always in charge of the armory, working alone, away from white men.8 But even that much responsibility was considered distasteful, an encroachment acceptable only because of the necessities of a world war.
When the war ended, the US Navy, no longer needing as many men, suspended new enlistments of black men entirely. The chores they had performed would be handled by Filipinos, considered better suited than African Americans for a servant’s role.9 By 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, the Navy had 81,000 men, only 441 of whom were black, the lowest percentage in American history—considerably fewer than at the end of the nineteenth century, when African Americans made up between 20 and 30 percent of men serving in the Navy.10
It might have remained that way had Japan not invaded Manchuria in 1931, which prompted Captain Abram Claude, the Navy’s director of enlisted personnel, to suggest phasing out Filipinos, who had come to dominate the servants’ ranks. Claude thought it unwise to have so many East Asians employed on US ships when Japan might advance on American interests in the Pacific. He proposed opening the messman branch to African Americans again, telling his superiors that it “would enable us to answer the criticism that Negro citizens are not allowed to enlist in our Navy.”
Claude’s memorandum garnered quick condemnation—had it been written by a less well-credentialed officer, the suggestion might have been dismissed altogether. But Claude was an American hero. He had earned the Navy Cross for saving his ship, the USS Cassin, during a widely publicized clash with the German submarine U-61 in 1917. He was a scion of a prominent and influential Maryland family that had once owned slaves.
Claude was no radical, but his heroism, prestige, and lineage were not enough to push forward as revolutionary an idea as reshaping the messman branch of the United States Navy with men born in the United States.
The day after Claude sent his suggestion, Commander Robert R. M. Emmet, then the head of enlisted personnel training, railed against the idea. “As an officer of considerable experience with Officer’s Messes, using both Colored and Filipino servants, I feel we ought to hang on to the Filipinos till the last,” he wrote. “They are cleaner, more efficient and eat much less than Negros [sic]. Negros are capable of being better cooks though even the best require very close supervision or you will find yourself drenched with grease in the cooking. . . . Going back to colored men would be a distinct step backward.”11
Claude persisted, arguing that black men had never received adequate training for those tasks. He promised he “could get a high type of Negro and train him in his duties before sending him out to the service and the result would eventually be improvement in officers’ servants.”
A compromise was reached. The Navy would “maintain a nucleus of Negro messmen without dispensing with the services of Filipinos until necessary.”
Claude was warned not to accept the “wrong” kind of black man. Northern blacks were undesirable because they were “apt to be independent, insolent, and over-educated,” and therefore unsuitable to play the “lackey.”12
The Navy wanted African Americans from the South because “by training and environment the Southern colored man has inherited a servant’s point of view and is usually contented and happy in that position,” Commander D. A. Weaver wrote to Claude.
In the South, the Navy believed, it would find the “unspoiled young Negro.”13
While the Navy debated changing its policy on black messmen, a meeting was taking place in Pittsburgh that would forever alter black politics and have a far more profound impact on integration in the military than anyone at the time could have possibly imagined.
Michael Benedum, the head of the Pittsburgh-based Benedum-Trees Oil Company, who was known as the man who “uncork[ed] more oil than anyone else in the world,” sought out Robert Lee Vann, the esteemed publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most influential black newspapers in the country, to make an outlandish request.
He wanted Vann, the son of slaves, to abandon the party of Abraham Lincoln, endorse the Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, and use his paper to encourage the 181,000 black registered Republicans in western Pennsylvania to vote for FDR in the 1932 election.
Look how African Americans were faring under President Herbert Hoover, Benedum pondered aloud. More than 40 percent of Pittsburgh’s blacks were unemployed and living in squalor as the Great Depression cast a pall over American life.
“What had the Negro ever gotten by voting the Republican ticket?” Benedum asked when the two met.
“Nothing,” Vann conceded.
Benedum told Vann that he admired African Americans’ loyalty to the GOP but felt that they owed no further debt to the party simply because of what Lincoln had done seventy years earlier. By 1932, Benedum said, blacks “had already paid this debt many times over and with plenty of interest.”14
Vann agreed.
The Pittsburgh Courier became relentless in its criticisms of Republicans and prolific in its praise for the Democratic nominee, reminding its readers—in articles and editorials—of the Republican government’s unequal treatment of black Americans in the midst of the Depression. The Republicans were not paying attention, Vann told his audience. A wakeup call was needed and the voting booth was the alarm clock.
Vann sympathized with those who hesitated to leave the party that had freed the slaves and join one so beholden to Southern racists. But, in a speech titled “The Patriot and the Partisan,” he argued that if black people desired change from their politicians, they needed to be willing to change their politics.
The marriage between African Americans and the Republican Party had gone stale. The thrill was gone. Vann intended to convince his fellow African Americans that the time had come to sue for divorce.
“So long as the Republican party could use the photograph of Abraham Lincoln to entice Negroes to vote a Republican ticket they condescended to accord Negroes some degree of political recognition,” Vann said in his speech. “The Republican party under Harding absolutely deserted us. The Republican Party under Mr. Coolidge was a lifeless, voiceless thing. The Republican Party under Mr. Hoover has been the saddest fail
ure known to political history. . . . I see millions of Negroes turning the pictures of Abraham Lincoln to the wall.”15
Vann’s speech was reprinted in the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers, and also was circulated nationally as a pamphlet. Vann could not swing Pennsylvania, which gave Hoover 36 of his paltry 59 electoral votes in the election that swept FDR to power, but the margin was exceedingly close. Allegheny County, where Vann’s influence was strongest, went for Roosevelt by 37,000 votes.16
Roosevelt named Vann special assistant to the attorney general. But before Vann accepted the appointment, he sounded a warning. The black vote, to have any meaning, would have to remain in play, and never again be wedded to one party.
“I came to the Democratic Party because the Republican Party no longer serves the interest of the people,” Vann said shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration. “When this party gets to where they no longer offer my people any service I’ll either go back to the Republican Party or to some other party.”17 Vann called it “loose leaf politics.”
The man who could shape black opinion throughout the country with a single story became one of the most powerful and most feared black men in America.18 When his newspaper reported that black men in the Tenth Cavalry at West Point were assigned to groom officers’ mounts and shovel manure or when it informed readers that blacks at Fort Benning were working as orderlies or on routine garrison duty, other black newspapers chased the story and amplified the outrage.
Roughly one-third of all African American families in cities regularly subscribed to a black newspaper and then shared them with families who could not afford a subscription. Porters on Pullman railroad carriages would haul copies of the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender to the rural South.19 They were read aloud to those who could not read themselves. They were available in barbershops, churches, lodges, and pool halls.20
By 1936, the Courier’s circulation had reached 174,000, and Vann’s reach was as undeniable as his influence.21
After helping Roosevelt win reelection and become the first Democrat to win Pennsylvania since James Buchanan, Vann felt that the president and the Democratic Party owed African Americans something tangible, something audacious, something commensurate with the size of the electoral victory.
Vann chose equality in the military. “Although colored citizens have participated with honor and distinction in every war the United States has fought and died in the thousands that this grand Republic might live, they are today barred from virtually all service in our Army and Navy which they help support,” Vann wrote in a letter he published in the Courier and sent to college presidents and US senators. “In the Navy they are rigidly restricted to service as mess attendants. . . . We do not believe that the thinking white people of this country are acquainted with this situation or would approve of it if they were. We are trying to have all branches of the Army and Navy opened to colored youth that our nation may be certain of a trained reservoir of loyal, intelligent and dependable men.”22
Vann wrote an open letter to President Roosevelt outlining ten reasons why black men deserved equality in the Army and Navy, one of several articles that appeared month after month demanding fairer treatment in the armed services.23 “I feel, and my people feel, that this is the psychological moment to strike for our rightful place in our National Defense,” Vann wrote Roosevelt in 1939. “I need not tell you we are expecting a more dignified place in our armed forces during the next war than we occupied during the World War.”24
James Hair became acquainted with politics and civil rights struggles in a shoe shop in Fort Pierce, Florida. He was a high school student who wanted the owner, Ronald Warrick, to teach him the secrets of fishing, but while hanging out there Hair was just another kid listening to older black men discuss the day’s news: Roosevelt’s New Deal, Adolf Hitler’s rise abroad, and the push for greater equality at home. The shoe shop was filled with books, and although Warrick himself had never made it past the eighth grade, he operated an unofficial library and open forum for black men to discuss current events, social politics, and world affairs. They discussed the station of African Americans, how it had improved, how it had not, and how education could be the great equalizer.25
At the time Hair was so much more interested in fishing, but what he heard stuck and remained with him throughout his life. Education, dignity, respect—they were the qualities that would a decade later help make this son of a slave one of the first black naval officers.
Hair was not from Fort Pierce. He had been born in Blackville, a part of South Carolina known as the Backcountry.
Blackville, like so many little hamlets across the United States, owed its existence to the railroad. In the early nineteenth century, businessmen seeking a way to keep Charleston competitive with the growing port of Savannah, Georgia, founded the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company in the hopes of connecting Charleston with Hamburg, near Augusta.
John Alexander Black, one of the company’s founders, chose where the train would stop for the night, and that location became the village of Blackville, which was incorporated in 1833. Hotels and shops sprouted up in town to cater to the passengers making their way across the 126 miles of track. Demand for crops in Blackville soared. Cucumbers, asparagus, and watermelon became staples of the surrounding farms.
It was on one of these farms that James Edward Hair was brought into the world in 1915 when Blackville had about a thousand residents. He was the twentieth of twenty-one children born to the Reverend Alfred Hair and Rosa Nix, each of whom had children from previous marriages. Reverend Hair, a Baptist minister whose sermons were more fire and brimstone than “love thy neighbor,” was nearly sixty years old when his son James was born, and many of his other children were already married with families of their own. Reverend Hair had been born a slave in South Carolina, likely the product of his mother and her master. When he was still a boy, his mother and her husband had been sold and he was raised by his white owner, reuniting with his mother only after the Civil War.26
Reverend Hair’s children were expected to work the farm before and after school. James was barely out of diapers when he was in the field picking cotton. The family also grew corn, peas, rice, sugarcane, and other vegetables, enough to provide for the large brood.
Blackville was a bit peculiar for a Southern town in that wealth was more divisive than race. Poor sharecroppers helped one another, regardless of skin color. Children of both races played together in the cotton fields alongside their laboring parents.
James, a good student, loved Blackville. He was content even with the rigorous schedule and strict religious upbringing. He was enamored with his old man. His father seemed to know everything, to have an answer to every question. It was a short relationship. James was only eight years old when his father died. His mother, unable to manage the large farm by herself, moved the younger children to Fort Pierce, Florida, where some of her older children were already living.
Rosa tried to shield her son from the day-to-day racism, but it was harder to do so in Fort Pierce than it had been in Blackville.
In Fort Pierce there was a black section of town, a segregated ghetto in the northwest part of the city bordered by Seventh Street to the east and a canal to the south. African Americans were not supposed to be outside those boundaries after dark. There were “colored” signs above water fountains and tacked to restroom doors. African Americans walked through the back door at a restaurant. They sat in the balcony when they went to a movie. If they worked in the white section of town, they made sure they were back in the black section by sundown.
Follow the rules and there was no trouble.
As a kid, Hair didn’t think too much about segregation. It was just the way things were, and he had plenty to keep him busy in the black section of town. Avenue D, the center of what was known as “colored town,” “black town,” or “nigger town,” was lined with juke joints. There was a pharmacy, an ice house, and the Lincoln Theater. The bar was
on the corner; so was Warrick’s shoe shop.
Hair attended Lincoln Park Academy, which Jean Ellen Wilson, a historian and librarian, said was arguably the best black high school in Florida, attracting families from all parts of the South. After his father died, Hair’s male role model became Estes Wright, who had married his older sister Margaret. Wright became even more important to Hair in 1933 when his mother, Rosa, died.
Wright, a fruit picker by trade, was dynamic and charismatic and Hair became his shadow, learning and emulating.27 Wright was one of the few men Hair knew who did not stand for any kind of racism or segregation. When local authorities set up two lines for the government surplus food that was handed out during the Great Depression—one for whites and one for blacks—Wright ignored the signs. The policy was that all the white families had to be served first, and if there was any food left over, the black people could take.
Wright never waited. He and Hair would walk right in, fill their burlap bags with the food on the shelves, throw the sacks over their shoulders, and walk away.
No one said anything. Perhaps it was because Wright was known to carry a .38 revolver wherever he went and had on more than one occasion pointed it in the face of a man he felt had done him wrong.
One night, Wright and Hair were fishing off a bridge, violating local mores that held black men were not allowed to fish after dark.
Three white men approached and asked why “two niggers” thought they could be on that bridge.
Wright whipped out his revolver.
“Because we want to,” he said. “I’ll give you ten seconds to get off this bridge. If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”
Hair never saw the men again.
And so while the black press talked of ending segregation in the military and breathlessly reported the works of a new generation of civil rights heroes—A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, William H. Hastie, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Mary McLeod Bethune—Estes Wright, who by age thirty had fathered five children and had a sixth on the way, was doing his own, unheralded part to live a life free of racism.
