The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  The black press, though finished with its Double V campaign, still regularly printed stories about the military’s mistreatment of black men, and the Navy provided plenty of material.

  Graduates from Hampton Institute’s service school, who were sent to a Navy facility in East Boston, Massachusetts, complained they were “assigned to waxing floors in barracks, washing paint, cleaning toilets,” and other mindless tasks, while white apprentice seamen were given preference in choosing assignments over the higher-rated black petty officers.10 The papers explained that the chores assigned black men deprived them of the chance to advance because they weren’t doing any work in their ratings.11

  Dennis Nelson, still recruiting in Tennessee, later said that “many well-educated and experienced Negroes who entered the Navy as enlisted men well knew that their abilities were wasted.”12

  Downes, at Hampton, tried to excuse the assignment of such chores to men who had qualified in general-service ratings, telling reporters that he had done the very same dirty jobs when he came up through the ranks. “Men often are shipped to stations before everything is ready for their eventual jobs,” he said. “Hundreds of men loafing would go stale if they had nothing to do, so they clean decks and heads.”13

  But the sheer number of examples of this practical demotion demonstrated that Downes was, at best, willfully ignorant.

  At Pearl Harbor, black men who had trained at Class A training schools were working as stevedores, forced to do menial chores and hard labor by the mostly Southern officers in charge of the Hawaii base. At first, the native Hawaiians were welcoming to black sailors, but white officers told locals that they’d boycott any shop that treated white and black as equal. Suddenly a color line appeared in Hawaii.

  When the men complained about working as stevedores, they were told that if they didn’t like it they were welcome to become messmen, a particularly degrading offer, given how hard black men had fought to leave the messman branch and enter the general service.

  Speaking to the Chicago Defender, a whistleblowing sailor predicted a racial crisis if something wasn’t done.14

  He was right.

  “Longtime warnings to federal authorities that racial tension would bring bloody violence were realistically brought home” in the spring and summer of 1943, the Chicago Defender told its readers.15

  For two years, the drafting and subsequent movement of thousands of black men from segregated towns in the South or racially tolerant cities in the North to boot camps in Southern metropolises or overcrowded cities added fuel to embers that had been smoldering for decades.

  Riots erupted in the nation’s major urban centers as well as cities critical to defense efforts, including Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles. The Social Science Institute at Fisk University counted 242 such outbreaks during 1943, producing what a later observer labeled “an epidemic of interracial violence.”16

  In May 1943, a riot began at a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard when black welders were assigned to work beside white welders. The chaos came on so suddenly that Alice Gamble, a line worker, did not know what was happening even as her black peers began running past, fearing for their lives. Gamble was frozen in place gawking at the strange scene until someone whacked her in the back and yelled, “Get going, nigger. This is our shipyard.”17

  William H. Hastie, who had resigned his position as Secretary of War Stimson’s civilian aide in January 1943 because no one was taking his complaints about the mistreatment of black soldiers seriously, told the National Lawyers Guild at the end of May that “civilian violence against the Negro in uniform is a recurrent phenomenon. It may well be the greatest single factor now operating to make 13 million Negroes bitter and resentful.”18

  The very next day, Private William Walker, a soldier from the 364th Infantry Regiment, stationed at Camp Van Dorn in the southwest corner of Mississippi near the Louisiana border, was shot in the head because a button was missing on his uniform.19

  Walker had been walking near his post when the military police rolled up in a jeep.

  “Say, nigger, what are you doing with your sleeves rolled up?!” a sergeant shouted.

  Walker explained that the button had fallen off his shirt sleeve so he’d rolled it up until he could get back to camp and sew on a new one.

  “Hit that nigger over the head,” the sergeant told the military policeman.

  When Walker raised his hands to defend himself, the sergeant yelled to kill “that damn nigger.”20

  Walker was the third African American member of the 364th Infantry Regiment killed at Camp Van Dorn in just that week.

  After loading the body into the jeep and transferring it back to camp, the MP bragged, “I just got me another nigger and now I reckon I get my transfer.”

  “You ought to get a gold medal for that,” another MP replied.21

  The Chicago Defender told its readers that Walker’s story “leaves one to wonder if the Southern white man isn’t hindering the war effort more than helping because of his prejudice.”22

  In mid-June 1943 a riot took place in Beaumont, Texas, a city eighty miles east of Houston, where shipbuilding and petroleum production were booming. Beaumont was typical of Southern towns during the war. In 1940, it had 59,000 citizens, about one-third of whom were black; by 1943, the population stood at over 80,000, with blacks remaining about a third of the city. Surrounding Texas towns underwent similar growth: Orange went from 7,500 to 38,000; Port Arthur from 56,000 to 70,500; and Port Neches and Nederland from 5,500 to 9,100.23 The situation was as untenable as the violence was predictable.

  Trouble began on June 4 when a nineteen-year-old white telephone operator left work and began walking home along Laurel Street. As she approached the intersection of Laurel and Magnolia, Curtis Thomas, a twenty-four-year-old African American ex-convict, allegedly attacked her. He had supposedly been planning an attack for some time: he dragged her to a loading platform at a nearby storage plant where, the victim stated, he had laid out a quilt.

  Thomas allegedly stabbed and raped the young woman and told her, “The army is going to get me, and if I do this, I’ll get killed for this and I won’t be going to the army.”

  Thomas fell asleep after the alleged attack, and the woman ran home and called the police. Two squad cars raced to the scene, and as they approached, the lights and sirens woke Thomas. He fled into a dead-end alley where policemen shot him four times. Critically wounded, he was taken to the “negro ward” of Hotel Dieu Hospital. Thomas died a few days after, but the seeds for violence were sown. Rumors of crazed black men on the hunt for white women spread in town during the following week and white women were told to stay home because of “nigger mobs on the street.”24

  The following week another woman accused a black man of raping her in her home while her children napped upstairs. Police could not find the suspect. At Beaumont’s Pennsylvania Shipyards shift workers decided to take matters into their own hands. More than two thousand dropped their tools and walked off the line. Foremen pleaded with them, appealing to their common patriotic duty, but one worker summed up the feeling of his peers when he said “our duty is for the protection of our homes.”

  Production at the shipyard halted as the mob began the short walk downtown to the police station. As the men marched, more joined so that by the time they reached the station they numbered three thousand.

  The alleged assailant was not at the station, and the mob grew frustrated, uncertain what to do next, until someone shouted, “Let’s go to nigger town.” They split up, with some heading toward the northern section of the city on Gladys Street while others went downtown, toward Forsythe Street, both areas populated by black families.

  For six hours, roving gangs set fires, overturned cars and looted homes, and destroyed cafés, drugstores, and a radio shop. The windows of black families’ homes were smashed with rocks. Three funeral homes were torched. Even the pharmacy owned by Sol White, a black man of local repute because he had bought $11,000 of war bonds, w
as set on fire.

  Colonel Sidney C. Mason, in charge of state troops and the enforcement of martial law, told reporters that the black section of town was “literally stomped to the ground.”

  Just after midnight, about three hundred white men came upon fifty-two black draftees waiting for a Greyhound to take them home to Port Arthur.

  “Here they are, a whole bunch of them. Let’s get them,” someone cried.25

  Days later the public learned that the second white woman had not been raped. A medical exam by Dr. Barker D. Chunn showed that she had neither been assaulted nor engaged in any sexual activity, but local authorities withheld that information, and by the time it was revealed, the damage was done. The rioting shut down the town and kept five thousand shipyard workers from their posts.26

  The Beaumont riot was the largest race riot that had yet occurred in the country during the war, and it might have received more national attention than it did if an even larger riot had not broken out only a few days later in Detroit.

  The Motor City, like Beaumont, was a powder keg. In early June, more than 25,000 white workers went on strike after the Packard Motor plant promoted three black men to work on the assembly line beside white men. One striker shouted, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win the war than work beside a nigger on the assembly line.”27

  Detroit’s population had ballooned, while its police force had actually shrunk. The police department did everything it could to recruit more officers, offering the highest pay in the United States and recruiting from all over Michigan, but the Army and Navy were taking all the eligible men, and those who weren’t drafted were lured into the factories, which paid even higher salaries.

  On June 20, a 90-plus degree day, nearly 100,000 men, women, and children went to Belle Isle, a municipal park on an island in the Detroit River, seeking relief from the sweltering heat.

  The first interracial fights began around 10 p.m. Soon groups of white men and black men were fighting on the lawn adjacent to the naval armory. White sailors joined the fracas, fueling the hostilities.

  Shortly after midnight, at a bustling nightclub in the heart of the black community, a well-dressed black man carrying a briefcase stopped the music, took the microphone, and said he had an important announcement to make. There was fighting between the races on Belle Isle; three black people had already been killed, and a black woman and her baby had been thrown over the Belle Isle Bridge and into the river. He urged everyone in the club—nearly a thousand people—to go home and get their guns. Now was the time to fight. In the white community, someone said a black man had slit a white sailor’s throat and raped his girlfriend.28

  Neither story was true, but both were believed.

  Mobs of black men and women smashed windows, stopped streetcars to attack the white occupants, and looted stores, especially liquor stores and pawn shops owned by Jews, who were thought to fleece their black customers.

  The mob beat to death a white milkman and a white doctor making a call. By 2 a.m., hospitals were reporting that they were receiving one new patient every minute. A counter-mob formed at around 4 a.m. This time, both sides had rifles. Twenty-five blacks and nine whites were killed, and more than 750 were injured before the riot, the worst of the era, ended.29

  Japan and Germany, using short-wave radio, beamed exaggerated reports of the riots to countries around the world, especially those with people of color, making the case that the United States didn’t really stand for democracy, or if it did, it was democracy for white men only. Anyone who had read Willkie’s One World would have noted how similar the message sounded.

  Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented East Harlem, told the White House that it was now inarguable that racial tensions were part of an enemy strategy to weaken resolve at home just as the United States seemed poised for a great victory abroad.

  He believed the riots had been spurred, in part, by a fifth column—citizens who sympathize with the enemy—telling the president there “is a peculiar Hitler-like pattern running through all these occurrences, which in my opinion is more than accidental.

  “It is significant that anti-negro outbreaks have been stimulated precisely in those areas which are key to successful war production and in and about military training areas,” Marcantonio went on. “It is significant that immediate use of these outbreaks is made by enemy short-wave radio broadcasting agencies to spread distrust of American democracy among people of darker races in India, China, Africa, and Latin America who are our allies.”30

  Letters poured into the White House demanding federal action.

  “Race rioting on the home front is a dangerous Axis weapon, Jim Crowism in our armed forces is the cause,” wrote Sylvia Velkoff, secretary for the United Victory Committee of Park Chester in the Bronx. “You, Mr. President, as Commander in Chief of the Army, must stop it.”31

  Liberal editors in the North wondered how the nation could wipe the Axis from the earth when internal racial strife divided the home front and comforted the enemy. “We cannot fight fascism abroad while turning a blind eye to fascism at home,” editors at the Nation argued. “We cannot inscribe on our banners: ‘For democracy and a caste system.’ We cannot liberate oppressed peoples while maintaining the right to oppress our own minorities.”32

  The riots sweeping the nation demanded a national response, and Walter White, head of the NAACP, begged the president to intervene, to marshal the nation as he had done so many times before when a national crisis threatened to overwhelm the republic.

  “No lesser voice than yours can arouse public opinion sufficiently against these deliberately provoked attacks, which are designed to hamper war production, destroy or weaken morale, and to deny minorities, negroes in particular, the opportunity to participate in the war effort on the same basis as other Americans,” White wrote. “We are certain that unless you act these outbreaks will increase in number and violence.”33

  But the White House made no move, paralyzed by fear of making the situation worse. For every concerned voice that demanded the President intervene to stop Jim Crowism and call for racial equality, there was an equally concerned voice saying it was the very push for racial equality that was causing all these riots, and that Eleanor Roosevelt, in her never-ending quest to promote black men in the factories and the fields, in the Army and the Navy, was responsible for the national discord.

  “It is my belief Mrs. Roosevelt and Mayor [Edward] Jeffries of Detroit are somewhat guilty of the race riots here due to their coddling of negro[e]s,” John Lang, who owned a bookstore in Detroit, wrote in a letter to FDR. “It is about time you began thinking about the men who built this country. I voted for you three times but next year I am voting for Norman Thomas.”34

  In the South—where rumors of “Eleanor Clubs,” which supposedly consisted of black women conspiring to obtain social equality, were so prevalent that the FBI opened an investigation—it was easy to blame the woman who had become the face of a despised movement, an “I told you so” moment for bigots who thought mixing races could only lead to trouble.

  The Jackson Mississippi Daily News declared the Detroit riots were “blood upon your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt” and said she had “been . . . proclaiming and practicing social equality. In Detroit, a city noted for the growing impudence and insolence of its Negro population, an attempt was made to put your preachments into practice.”35

  Eleanor was despondent. The riots left her doubtful that the nation was ready to live up to the ideals she espoused.

  “The domestic scene, as you listen to the radio and read the papers today, is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy,” she wrote in her widely read column, My Day. “We might even fall into the same excesses that some other people whom we look down upon have fallen into, for we do not seem to have learned self-control and obedience to law as yet.”36

  The smoke had barely cleared
in Detroit when another riot occurred at a Navy ammunition depot in St. Juliens Creek, Virginia, precipitated by segregated seating for a radio broadcast. On June 29, 1943, more than half of the 640 African American men of the battalion who had gathered outside a recreation hall before the dress rehearsal, jeered arriving white people, slashed tires, and cut into car seats.

  The disturbance lasted only thirty minutes and no one was seriously hurt. More than 250 black sailors were transferred within twenty-four hours, but that did nothing to solve the larger problem, which was highlighted in a subsequent report from the Navy’s Bureau of Investigation. The report concluded that among the causes of the riot was “a prevalent belief that opportunity for advancement was restricted, together with a desire that all battalion petty officers be colored.” The report also attributed the riot to the fact that “the leave status of white and colored enlisted men differed [and because of] Virginia segregation laws and local customs.”

  The following month, more trouble engulfed the Navy. The Eightieth Construction battalion, a unit made up of 744 black men and 258 white officers, went to Trinidad to build an airfield. Tensions had already been simmering when the battalion was in Gulfport, Mississippi, and they boiled over in Trinidad. Black men complained that two separate windows had been set up to sell beer at the ship’s store, one for whites and one for everyone else. They complained of discrimination in promotions and of discriminatory limitations on liberty, which the commanding officer justified because of the high venereal disease rate among black men.37

  Eleanor again took to her My Day column to lament the state of race relations.

  I was sick at heart . . . over race riots which put us on a par with Nazism which we fight, and make one tremble for what human beings may do when they no longer think but let themselves be dominated by their worst emotions. . . . we cannot prepare for a peaceful world unless we give proof of self-restraint, of open mindedness, of courage to do right at home, even if it means changing our traditional thinking and, for some of us, a sacrifice of our material interests.38