The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  “We are not trying to solve the race problem here at our school,” Downes told reporters. “We are simply trying to make a constructive contribution to its ultimate solution. . . . We are making men competent so that they can be in demand wherever they are in the post-war world.”24 He hammered home that he was training “good men,” Hampton men. That had to mean as much to them as it did to him.25

  Inside his office hung a sign that reminded him and anyone who visited of the mission that he carried out every day: “Teach the trainees to do better those things they are likely to be required to do afterwards . . . [and] be damned sure no boy’s ghost will ever say, ‘if your training program had only done its job.’“26

  A few weeks after Sublett and Reagan arrived in Virginia, as Hampton started to swell with new recruits arriving from Camp Robert Smalls, Downes interviewed a young African American sheet-metal worker from Ohio who was applying to teach metalsmiths.

  George Cooper had completed his undergraduate education at Hampton and so was familiar with the campus. He desperately wanted to avoid the draft, and teaching at a Class A naval training school seemed a better way to do so than teaching aircraft sheet-metal work at Wilberforce University, where he had been the senior foreman since 1941. Cooper and his wife, Margarett “Peg” Gillespie, who had also graduated Hampton, were expecting their first child, and he told his wife that a teaching position at Hampton “might keep me out of the service for two or three years.”

  Downes immediately recognized Cooper’s talent.

  “Mr. Cooper, we would like to have you take this job, because we need you, and there aren’t many of you around, white or colored,” Downes said. “And if you take this job, I’ll see what I can do to keep you from being drafted.”

  Cooper had followed his family’s advice and left “little Washington” in the mid-1930s. There was too much racism and violence in North Carolina, they had warned, and they feared for his safety. Hampton, where his brothers and sisters had gone, offered him a fresh start and a chance to earn a college degree, so he enrolled in the fall of 1935.

  The school allowed freshmen to take a lighter course load so they could work full-time during their first year and save some money for tuition. Cooper, who had been a bellhop back home, found a job at the Holly Tree Inn, the guest house on campus, as a bellman, valet, and waiter. About half the guests were Hampton faculty, which made the clientele far less racist and hostile than what he had dealt with in North Carolina.

  Cooper added to his income singing spirituals with the Hampton Institute Choir, the Trade School Singers, and the Hampton Student Quartet. The baritone made even more money by chauffeuring the quartet to its gigs.27

  Singing had taken Cooper all around the South, to churches and to hotels, to Richmond and to Charlotte, but it was back on Hampton’s campus that Cooper really found his voice.

  Two decades before Rosa Parks and a generation before passage of the Civil Rights Act, Cooper helped lead a student protest over the dismissal of black faculty.

  Hampton’s president at the time, Arthur Howe Jr., had cut staff to balance the budget, and a majority of those laid off were black.

  Howe was married to Margaret Marshall Armstrong—the daughter of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the school’s founder, and the sister of Daniel Armstrong, the commander of Camp Robert Smalls. Howe had been held in high regard since his tenure began in 1930, having been lauded for broadening the curriculum and expanding the campus, but the student protests marred his final year in office.

  The layoffs were but one of several grievances that students brought to administrators and alumni. A survey found that whites outnumbered blacks two to one in administrative and supervisory positions, leading to an imbalance in salaries. Students also demanded their own free press and better athletic coaching.

  The final straw was the dismissal, on May 13, of James Ivy, a popular African American English teacher, who students felt had been fired without cause, just weeks before commencement. Howe told the students that Ivy’s firing was “an administrative problem beyond their comprehension.”28

  The students went on strike, refusing to attend chapel exercises or the junior-senior banquet at which “thousands of gallons of ice cream and punch were wasted.”29 Administrators warned that if their strike continued the students would not be allowed to graduate. The students persisted: if they were not allowed to graduate, so be it. This was more important.

  Students involved no faculty, worrying that teachers might face professional consequences. The protest was peaceful and effective.

  “Apparently the day of the docile and humble student body which accepted, without criticism or protest, every dictum of a reactionary regime has passed,” the Baltimore Afro-American opined.30

  Indeed, a new day had come.

  At an assembly on the last Saturday in May 1939, Cooper, a senior just days away from graduating, was reciting the class poem, written by another student, when Howe leaped from his seat, ended the assembly, and announced that he was canceling commencement.

  The students were confused. The poem was nothing more than silly couplets poking fun at classes, but Howe, who was partially deaf and may have misheard the words, interpreted it as an attack on his administration and the school.

  The students surrounded Howe on the stage, demanding that he recant. He did once he learned that the poem had been written several weeks before the protests had begun, and commencement went forward, though his administration never recovered from the debacle.31

  Ivy was not reinstated, but he did receive a year’s severance. Black newspapers began taking seriously accusations of pay inequity at the school and Jim Crow hiring practices in the campus infirmary.

  Howe, the founder’s son-in-law, was forced to resign in February 1940, paving the way for the arrival of Malcolm Shaw MacLean and Hampton’s role in training black men for the Navy.

  “That’s something you look back on and say, ‘Well, I was a part of that and helped make something happen that needed to happen,’“ Cooper said fifty years later. “There are experiences like that in my lifetime that, I suppose make me sleep better at night.”

  Nearly eighty years after George Cooper graduated, Peggy Cooper Davis said she would not put it past her father to have chosen a poem that could easily have a double meaning to those embroiled in the conflict with students—something just enough to make a point while leaving room for plausible deniability.32

  Six months after graduation, Cooper married Peg, the homecoming queen. The two had met at Hampton, where she was studying to be a librarian.33 Returning to Hampton in October, 1942, a place they both knew, seemed like a smart move to Cooper, but his wife had doubts. She loved the campus but hated Virginia and did not want to leave Wilberforce, a racially progressive town.

  “Virginia was hell,” Peg Cooper, said in 2012, when she was ninety-eight. Even then she could still taste, in an almost visceral way, the bitter discrimination she had faced seven decades earlier.

  In Virginia, Peg couldn’t try on a pair of shoes or a hat at the store. If merchandise touched her black skin, she had best be prepared to buy.

  “I remember walking my toddler across the bridge and she saw ice cream,” she recounted. Little Peggy Cooper was screaming in that way babies do when they want something, but black people were not allowed to buy ice cream from a white vendor.

  “You just couldn’t,” she said. “It was—I hated that place. It was demeaning.”

  Her husband, she said, was less bothered by that sort of thing. Peg had grown up in Ohio. Her husband had grown up in North Carolina, where Jim Crow was the rule, and he had been called a “nigger” countless times. He had been conditioned to have some anxiety about speaking up and had grown accustomed to the racist milieu.

  The couple headed south and lived in half of a duplex in the faculty housing section at Hampton. Some of the Navy families who were their neighbors could be pleasant, but Peg found most of them condescending, displaying a paternalistic a
ttitude, as if to say, “I’m here to show you how to be intelligent.” Some would be friendly while on Hampton’s campus but would not so much as look at the Coopers if they were off campus.34

  This dichotomy was due in large part to the protective bubble Downes had created at the school. Very little made him angrier than seeing prejudice or racism of any kind, and officers who ran afoul of that precept usually found themselves assigned someplace else.35

  “Yes, here is one spot in the Navy where democracy is not a rumor,” the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported. “It is working fine—and below the Mason Dixon line.”36

  But off campus, there existed no such protections or protectors.

  Hampton was only a short distance from Norfolk Naval Training Station, the Class A training school for white men. Black men were allowed to visit but were prohibited from boarding any ships.37

  Black sailors dubbed Norfolk “shit city” and the “asshole of creation” because of the town’s overt hostility toward blacks.38

  Sublett rarely left the campus. Why, he asked himself, should he sit in a separate section of a movie theater when movies were regularly shown at Hampton and he could sit wherever he pleased?

  Reagan left the campus more frequently. The answer to Sublett’s question, in Reagan’s mind, was obvious: girls. Reagan was dating Lillian Thomas, a nursing student, who would become his first wife, and visiting her meant enduring the humiliation that typified life for a black man in Virginia.39

  State law required that whites enter the front of the bus and sit in front and that African Americans enter through the back and sit behind the color line drawn on the floor. If there were whites standing and seats open behind the color line, then the African Americans on the bus had to move farther back.

  But buses were often so crowded that the rules were impractical.

  Reagan, an Illinois man who hadn’t been conditioned as Cooper might have been to keep his mouth shut, once tried to enter through the front because the bus was too crowded in back.40

  The driver would not let him on and refused to budge until he got off the bus. Reagan stood his ground.

  The police were called and asked him to leave.

  Reagan stood firm.

  “Well, come on, son, you’ve got to get off,” the officer said. “That’s the law.”

  Reagan, not sure what stand he could make, demanded that his dime be returned.

  It was.

  He took his coin and, fuming, walked off the bus and returned to Hampton, where men were trained to free the world from tyranny.41

  Black men from the North, like Reagan and Sublett, were more likely to find the humiliation galling and were less willing to accept it quietly or play the lackey. Many of these men had never before been forced to the back of the bus, or to drink from “colored” water fountains. They had never before walked into the gutter with their heads bowed so as not to make eye contact with a white man walking on the sidewalk.42

  Only now, in Virginia—where they were picking up arms and putting their lives on the line to defend their country—were they treated so inhumanely.

  On bases, black men encountered signs laying out the schedule for religious services that read “Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Negroes.” Off base, black soldiers and sailors were expected to conform to local mores. Those who did not risked being clubbed, jailed, or shot. Many whites let it be known that a black man in his nation’s uniform was just “a nigger who doesn’t know his place.”43

  An armed bus driver murdered a black soldier in Mobile, Alabama. Local police murdered black soldiers in Columbia, South Carolina, and Little Rock, Arkansas.44

  Little more than a month after Pearl Harbor, military police in Alexandria, Louisiana, attempting to arrest a black man, triggered a race riot, during which twenty-eight black men were shot. Nearly three thousand black men and women were detained in the city’s “Little Harlem” section. The city’s entire supply of tear gas was used on black soldiers, almost all of whom were from the North, principally New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. One black soldier later wrote, “I would almost rather desert and be placed before a firing squad and shot down before fighting for America.”45

  It was one of fifty-nine known confrontations between black soldiers and military police and civilian authorities in 1942, as black men quickly learned that a military uniform was no protection from a mob.

  If an African American soldier or sailor didn’t personally experience the bigotry, he could certainly read about it in the black press. A “U.S. Army uniform to a colored man makes him about as free as a man in the Georgia chain gang,” one soldier told the Baltimore Afro-American. “If this is Uncle Sam’s Army then treat us like soldiers not animals or else Uncle Sam might find a new axis to fight.”46

  The bitterness coursing through the black community and the antipathy toward calls for unity were further stoked by the horrific details of lynchings, which belied any notion that the United States was really one nation with a common enemy.

  Just a few weeks after Alexandria, the black press screamed the story of Cleo Wright, a thirty-year-old cotton mill worker in Sikeston, Missouri, who allegedly assaulted a white woman and stabbed the arresting police officer. Wright was shot during the scuffle but survived. On Sunday morning, a mob of more than three hundred grabbed Wright from his jail cell, tied him to the back of a maroon-colored Ford, and dragged his near-naked body through the black section of town. They stopped to force his wife to view his bloodied body. Then they doused him with gasoline and set him on fire in front of two black churches, where the pews were filled with men, women, and children who had come for services.47

  Truman Gibson, William H. Hastie’s aide, commented that so many black men were bludgeoned to death in the South that it would only be a “slight exaggeration to say more black Americans were murdered by White Americans during World War II than were killed by Germans.”48

  James Baldwin, the famed novelist and essayist, said that many black families felt a “peculiar kind of relief” when their boys were shipped overseas from the South because “now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen.”49

  Almost a year into the war, morale in the black community remained an acute concern. “The men in the barbershop, on the assembly line, sweeping the floors or washing windows know their spirit, concerning the war, isn’t right,” Enoc Waters wrote in the Defender. “It’s a thing of which they’re not conscious but as they follow the band down the street . . . The cheers of the patriotic crowd as Old Glory flutters by carry their minds back to the angry jeers of the lynch mob, which lynched and burned a Negro at Sikeston, Mo. And the wavering voices of singers of the national anthem are like an echo of the enslaved thousands on peonage farms in the South.”50

  The hypocrisy, so evident across America, stung almost as much as the racism itself. At about the same time that John Reagan was stewing over the color line on the public bus, Lloyd Brown, an African American soldier stationed in Salina, Kansas, went with several compatriots to a lunch counter.

  “You boys know we don’t serve colored here,” the owner politely said.

  Of course they knew. They weren’t served anywhere in Salina.

  But they hadn’t come to be served.

  The black men just stood there at the door, staring.

  Just feet from where they were frozen in place were German prisoners of war who were having lunch at the counter.

  The people of Salina would serve the enemy but not American GIs.51

  By the end of 1942, Navy Secretary Knox’s policy of refusing to accept black men through the draft and relying on volunteers so as to limit the number of African Americans in the service was becoming untenable. The Selective Service estimated that three hundred thousand black men had been drafted in 1942 and were awaiting induction into the military.52 The nation could no longer afford to have that many men on the sidelines.

  On December 5, 1942, the president
issued Executive Order 9279, which ended volunteer enlistments for men between ages eighteen and thirty-eight. By February 1943, all men entering the Navy would come through the draft. Black enrollment was about to explode because Knox would no longer be able to turn black men away.

  Knox sought to head off what he saw as a coming crisis, reminding Roosevelt that the Navy could accept no more than 1,200 black men for the general service per month and 1,500 for the messman branch, which was renamed the steward branch in March 1943.53 Any more than that and crews aboard ships would have to be integrated, an outcome that the Navy secretary reminded the president they had both agreed to avoid.

  When Knox did not hear any dissent from the White House, he assumed that Roosevelt agreed that segregation aboard ship must be maintained. Knox told Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, in charge of recruitment, that the president understood the need to limit the number of black men coming into the Navy (segregation aboard ships must be maintained) and ordered him to resolve the matter with the director of Selective Service.54

  Two weeks later, Roosevelt, in a snarky note to Knox, made it clear that the secretary had gone too far. Avoiding mixed crews did not mean curtailing the employment of African Americans in the Navy, Roosevelt said. “I guess you were dreaming or maybe I was dreaming if Randall Jacobs is right in regard to what I am supposed to have said about employment of negroes in the Navy,” he wrote. “If I did say that such employment should be stopped, I must have been talking in my sleep. Most decidedly we must continue the employment of negroes in the Navy, and I do not think it the least bit necessary to put mixed crews on the ships. I can find a thousand ways of employing them without doing so.” The president didn’t need to remind Knox that he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy during the First World War.55 Shore duty and yard craft would be good places to start, the president noted, echoing King’s recommendation from the previous spring. Knox, chastened, followed Roosevelt’s order: The number of African Americans in the Navy would triple to 78,000 by the end of 1943. It would nearly double, to 147,374, by August 1944.