The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  Though Snyder’s plan was almost identical to what the president had proposed fifteen months earlier, during his meeting with Randolph and White, the General Board paid it no mind.40

  And Knox was just fine with that. The same day that the General Board met, Knox explained how and why he had already reached a similar conclusion as the board’s members.

  Leonard Farber, a New York realtor, had asked Knox to allow black men to serve alongside white men and “erase this blot on the American concept of Democracy.” Knox told Farber that he had given a lot of thought to this problem, but it just wasn’t possible. He harbored no prejudice, he explained, but he couldn’t figure out how to integrate the Navy without impairing efficiency.

  “Of course, you will understand that during the progress of a great war, we must not interject into the personnel situation of the Navy any new factors that might militate against the smooth functioning of the crews of our war ships,” Knox said. “It is not through any lack of appreciation of the rights of colored citizens that the Navy hesitates to recruit Negroes generally to serve the Navy, but because we have not yet found a satisfactory way in which to handle the problem of race prejudice so that it will not impair efficiency.”41

  African Americans, Knox said, must remain messmen.

  CHAPTER 5

  “WOULD IT BE DEMANDING TOO MUCH TO DEMAND FULL CITIZENSHIP?”

  The General Board’s machinations and Frank Knox’s stubborn insistence that black men remain limited to the messman branch did not mean a whole lot to Reginald Ernest Goodwin, who, in the winter of 1942 was preoccupied with his own home front.

  Goodwin was about to turn thirty-five, and his relationship with the beautiful Emmita Cardoza was failing. The war tearing apart the world was an apt metaphor for the final embers of a tumultuous marriage that had once shined as bright as any light in the New York City skyline.

  Cardoza was one of the famous Ziegfeld Girls, “a lace and chiffon vision of glamour” whose performances in the Follies, the revue staged by Florenz Ziegfeld in a lavish Broadway theater, helped define New York City during the Jazz Age. Ziegfeld had produced the musical Show Boat, but he was better known for his glorification of the American woman. The Ziegfeld Girls’ enormous glittering, feathered headdresses and sultry strides were a magnet for men, from regular Joes to Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, and President Woodrow Wilson.1

  And of all these beauties, few had the magnetic power of Cardoza, whose stage name was Emmita Casanova. Walter Winchell called her the most exotic of all the girls, with dark eyes that had the “sensuousness of the lotus flower.”2

  Goodwin appeared, at least physically, a suitable match for Cardoza. He was nearly six feet tall, 160 pounds of lean muscle, with expressive brown eyes, fair skin, and a neatly trimmed Clark Gable-style mustache.

  He was charming, the kind of man who commanded attention the moment he walked into a room. And he was well educated, having attended Howard University and New York University before taking leadership courses at Columbia University.

  Their 1936 wedding, held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, was the talk of the town, and Goodwin and Cardoza were regularly referred to as “one of the most popular and attractive couples in Harlem social circles.”3

  But troubles were quickly apparent. By 1939 they were living apart, and although they denied a marital rift—”Reggie and I are as much in love with each other as ever”—the rumors were persistent.

  In March 1940, Goodwin, who had been the physical director of the Harlem Children’s Center, accepted a job as the director of the first unit of the Ninth Street Boys’ Club of Cincinnati, and left for Ohio.

  Emmita followed, and the pair moved to a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on Beecher Street, but the marriage did not last. After two years she was on her way back to New York, alone, and Goodwin was left at the Ninth Street Boys’ Club, contemplating bachelorhood and a possible future in the military.4

  One of his friends, Sam Barnes, who worked a block away at the Ninth Street YMCA, was having more luck with love. He was engaged to Olga Lash, one of the most desirable bachelorettes in her home state of North Carolina, but, like Goodwin, he was apprehensive about a future in the military and the dangers of war. Barnes was born and raised in Oberlin, Ohio. Home was only two hundred miles from Cincinnati, but it might as well have been on another planet. Oberlin was a bastion of racial tolerance, whereas Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, was a city where African Americans were required to enter through the back door of any restaurant that even bothered to serve them.5

  Barnes had handled segregated environments before. After graduating from Oberlin College with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, he accepted a job at Livingstone College, a small historically black school, in Salisbury, North Carolina, with 250 students and 16 faculty members. When Barnes boarded the train in Oberlin, he could sit where he pleased. At Columbus, he would need to switch to the segregated coach, which was behind the fetid coal car.

  At Livingstone he had held several positions, including the director of health, physical education, and athletics; head basketball coach; director of intramural sports; supervisor of the men’s dormitory; and assistant to the dean. He also taught biology and mathematics, although he always preferred coaching.

  Barnes had no assistant coaches—no help, really, of any kind. Before home games, he would wake early to mark the lines on the field. Then he’d come back and tape the players, issue the game equipment, and haul water to the sidelines.6 For road games, he made sure the boys packed lunches so they wouldn’t waste time looking for a restaurant to serve them. He found them school dormitories to stay in so they wouldn’t waste time looking for hotels to house them.

  It was at Livingstone, during a faculty banquet, that he first saw Olga Lash.

  Decades later, Barnes would still tell the story of that moment. The chatter around him ceased, he would say with a smile, as his mind was transfixed by this beautiful creature before him. Olga was dressed all in black with a small black hat and veil that came to her nose. Her hair was parted down the middle and held with a Spanish comb. A foxtail stole was draped over her shoulder. She had a simple and well-tailored suit that accentuated her small waist.

  Breathtaking.

  “Who is that?” he asked a friend.

  As Olga Lash walked by, Barnes stood up.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Lash,” he tried.

  She turned her head but did not respond. She just kept on walking, with the air of a woman used to stealing men’s hearts. She already had a list of suitors.

  Barnes was smitten, but Miss Lash was no easy prize. She hailed from one of the most prominent African American families in the state. Her father, the Reverend Wiley Hezekiah Lash, was among the first African Americans to graduate from Concordia College. A distinguished orator and preacher, he had founded three Lutheran churches in North Carolina.

  Her mother, Mayzonetta “Mary” Grundy Lash, ran a neighborhood grocery on West Innes Street and was fluent in several languages. Her brother would become the town’s first black mayor, and a plaque was unveiled in his honor in 2008.

  With Olga’s means, legacy, and beauty, she could have had almost any man in town, but Barnes won her over with his charm, intellect, and wicked sense of humor. He was fun to be around, and he made her laugh. She could take him anywhere, be it a high-brow function or something much less formal.

  Barnes loved poetry, and one of his favorite lines, a verse he tried to live by, was from Rudyard Kipling’s “If”: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch.”

  “My husband was a very outgoing person with lots of personality,” Olga later said.7 “A people person, very popular with men and ladies, very friendly, just a very warm person. Very intelligent, interesting, animated always, very gifted in sports, a very well-rounded person. He seemed to draw people to him. He was the kind of person who would do whatever he could for whomever.”
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  During his time at Livingstone, Barnes avoided white people as much as he could.

  Samuel Edward Barnes would introduce himself in the South as S. E. Barnes. If white people asked what the S stood for, he would say, “It stands for nothing.” When they asked what the E stood for, he’d just say, “My parents named me S. E. Barnes.”8

  The ruse was designed to avoid the indignity of having a white person call him by his first name, a common way to denigrate black men that Barnes would not abide. It was a small gesture, but his parents had taught him never to compromise his dignity, and he never would.

  Barnes was the grandson of Kentucky slaves and the fifth and final child for James and Margaret Barnes, born January 25, 1915.

  They had left the South in the hopes of finding a more tolerant environment in which to raise their own children. They settled on Oberlin, a small city about thirty-five miles southwest of Cleveland that had been founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers who had grown upset with the decidedly un-Christian values that characterized the nation’s new frontier. They built the college and named the town after a French pastor, John Frederick Oberlin, who established schools and taught trades to poor Frenchmen. Two years after it opened, Oberlin College admitted its first black students and two years after that its first black women; it became a stop along the Underground Railroad and a hotbed of abolitionist thinking.

  It was Oberlin residents who helped John Price, a fugitive slave, find refuge in Canada. This violated the Fugitive Slave Act and caused a national uproar on the eve of the 1860 election, the contest that brought Abraham Lincoln into office.

  By the time the budding Barnes brood made their way north, Oberlin had a long history of racial tolerance, and Margaret soon became a prominent member of the community. She was a trustee at Mount Zion Baptist Church, a member of the Order of the Eastern Star in the local Masonic lodge, a member of the board of trustees at Wilberforce University, where George Cooper would land a job, and a prominent Ohio Republican who served as an alternate delegate to the 1936 Republican convention in Chicago, where Alf Landon and Frank Knox were nominated.

  At the church, Margaret worked with the Reverend Homer J. Tucker and the Phillis Wheatley Association to push Oberlin to hire the city’s first African American public-school teacher.

  The town that Barnes grew up in had a Norman Rockwell vibe. Everyone knew everyone else. When it snowed, kids pulled each other on sleighs and went ice skating. When it was warm, they hiked and fished. When it was hot, they could play kick-the-can for hours.9 A ticket to the movies cost a dime. Popcorn was a nickel.

  On Saturday nights, houses would empty and folks would gather in the center of town to listen to concerts. Children of every color played in the grass as ice cream drizzled down their chins while the grownups smoked cigarettes and drank Coke.10

  James Barnes, who had not finished high school, was a chef at the Oberlin College dormitories. Margaret Barnes, a college graduate, operated a laundry out of her home, which allowed her to spend time with the children, who helped wash, fold, and deliver. The family was never rich, but thanks to the businesses of food and clothing, Barnes’s parents were always able to provide food and clothing.

  Like the Coopers, the Barnes family supplemented their diet with what they grew on their own. Sam Barnes and his older brother James Jr. weeded and harvested the garden in which the family grew apples and berries. Beans were picked, canned, and stored in the basement for winter.

  Barnes’s three sisters did most of the household chores, but Margaret made sure her boys learned how to do all the housework. After all, she told them, “You don’t know who you may marry. I don’t know whether they can cook or not, whether they can sew and iron, so you learn to do for yourself.”11

  The church also played an important role in the children’s lives, acting almost like a third parent and a second school. Mr. Barnes had to work most Sundays, so the children went with their mother. They sat according to their age, which meant Barnes was farthest from his mother, but not out of reach. As a child, he assumed his mother had the longest arms in the whole world, because if he ever misbehaved, she could reach across four other children and smack him upside the head, without ever taking her eyes off the minister. And she wasn’t afraid to take her kids outside church for a formal whipping and then sit them right back in the pew for the end of the sermon.12

  Barnes, a mischievous child who occasionally got caught stealing apples, grapes, and other fruits and vegetables from carts or vendors, was often disciplined. That meant a whipping from parents or neighbors, and neighbors were worse, because that meant a second whipping at home for besmirching the family name.

  As Barnes grew older, he learned that Oberlin’s values and tolerance were rare, even for Ohio. On the football field, where he showed early promise as an end, opponents regularly goaded him with racial epithets. Playing in Fremont, Lorain, Norwalk, or even Elyria, only nine miles from Oberlin, meant enduring a barrage of slurs. Places such as Marietta, just across the Ohio River from West Virginia, were particularly hard because Barnes might be one of the few black people in the whole stadium and the insults would rain down.13

  Barnes also excelled at track. He could run the hundred-yard dash in less than ten seconds and once raced against, and lost to, Jesse Owens, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship.14

  Barnes was on the football field and competed in track meets because of his older brother James Jr., a world-class athlete and track star, who tried out for the 1928 Olympics. James was captain of both the football and basketball teams at Oberlin, where he earned the moniker “Sunny Jim.”

  Barnes worshiped his older brother and took his word as gospel. Sunny Jim always encouraged his younger brother to do more than he thought he was capable of, and thanks to his confidence, he often succeeded beyond his own expectations.

  James Jr. took a job coaching at Virginia State College and said he’d hire Sam, whom he always referred to as “kid.”

  “When you get your degree, you’re coming down here with me,” he said.15

  Barnes couldn’t wait.

  He was one year short of taking his brother up on that offer when James contracted meningitis. His parents and brother made it to his bedside just in time to say their goodbyes and bring the body home to Oberlin.

  James left behind a young bride, a six-month-old son, and a devastated younger brother, who, determined to honor his brother’s memory, went into coaching and teaching, just like his hero.16

  Barnes worked at Livingstone for five years, until 1941, at which point he was engaged to Olga Lash and saving for a wedding. The Reverend Homer Tucker, the man who had worked with Barnes’s mother to see that Oberlin hired a black teacher, had taken a job at the Ninth Street YMCA in Cincinnati and offered a job there to Barnes.

  Goodwin’s Ninth Street Boys’ Club often ran programs with the YMCA, and he and Barnes began running in the same social circles.17

  By 1942, Barnes was accustomed to the racism that permeated Cincinnati, and he dealt with it by doing his best to ignore the white social structure that would keep him down. He was no more interested in socializing with whites than they were with him.

  He could never fully accept the indignities he faced, but he dared not protest “because there’s only one end to that problem,” he later said, and “there was nothing to be said or done about it because doing so would have brought a very, very unhappy circumstance. . . . You had no opportunities for redress, so you just didn’t get involved.”18

  That helplessness was what a lot of young black men felt, which is why so many were conflicted about the war. Black men in Detroit were tearing up their draft cards, saying that if they must fight, they’d prefer to die in their home town fighting the Ku Klux Klan. “The Negro has been psychologically demobilized,” Roy Wilkins of the NAACP told men from the Office of Facts and Figures (later the Office of War Information) as he tried to help federal officials wrap their minds around why black men might feel
disinclined to serve.19

  When the meeting ended, a despondent Wilkins told his boss, Walter White, “It is a plain fact that no Negro leader with a constituency can face his members today and ask full support for the war in the light of the atmosphere the government has created.”20

  The frustration was personified in the winter of 1942 when James G. Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old black cafeteria worker at the Cessna Aircraft Corporation in Wichita, Kansas, wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier asking whether he should sacrifice his life to live half American and wondering whether life would be better for his children in the peace that followed victory, and, if not, was the present America worth defending.

  “Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?” he asked.

  Thompson referred to the “V for Victory” sign on display in countries fighting tyranny. “If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict, then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory,” he said. “The first ‘V’ for victory over our enemies from without, the second ‘V’ for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”21

  Three days after that letter appeared, on February 3, 1942, the Navy General Board issued a report saying it could not comply with Knox’s request to open the general-service ratings to five thousand black men. They must stay in the messman branch as a means of promoting efficiency. Men aboard ship live in such close proximity that segregation was the only reasonable course, they said. “How many white men would choose, of their own accord, that their closest associates in sleeping quarters, at mess, and in a gun’s crew should be of another race? . . . General Board believes that the answer is few if any and further believes that if the issue were forced, there would be a lowering of contentment, teamwork and discipline in the service.”