by Dan Goldberg
White enjoyed trying almost anything someone said was too tough for him to accomplish or was reserved for older boys. He did well in school and excelled at ROTC.
In the US attorney’s office, White handled civil matters, mostly contracts and torts. His superiors kept most criminal cases off his plate, fearful that a jury might not believe an African American prosecutor.
His position as the “token black” was exploited in early 1943 when the government brought sedition charges against Charles Newby, a forty-six-year-old African American who publicly called on black men to avoid the Navy and the Army. Newby, speaking in Chicago’s Washington Park, said that the war “was a white man’s war” and that the Japanese were the black man’s best friend.
It was a sentiment rippling through black communities across the country because of how blacks were treated in the South, in the military, and in the halls of Congress. It was the same expression of resentment and defiance that had concerned Hastie during the war’s first days so much that he asked for a vote on whether black men truly supported the war effort. Newby’s crime was saying in public what many black men had been saying quietly for years. White was selected to prosecute so that no one could say Newby received unfair treatment on account of his race.
White secured the conviction, which he had mixed feelings about for the remainder of his life, and Newby was sentenced to three years in prison.61
As prominent a position as federal prosecutor was, White was restless and wanted to try something new, so he applied to join the FBI but was told the bureau had no need for black agents. “It used to disgust me that whenever they had some undercover work to do, they would take on a smart black detective and have him work with them, thereby eliminating the necessity of having black agents,” White later said.62
When it became clear that his work for the federal government would not keep him from being drafted, White, in October 1943, went to the same recruiting station as all his white peers from the US attorney’s office and applied to be an officer. An Ensign Drips went through the formality of taking White’s information before, red-faced and tense, he explained that black men were not qualified for commissions.63
But White wouldn’t give up on the Navy. His buddy Mummy Williams was working in the selection office at Great Lakes, not too far from where White lived. White thought Williams could get him into a good service school once he made it through boot camp, so he enlisted later that October.64
Because of his work with the US attorney’s office, White knew plenty of reporters who would print announcements of indictments and convictions, as well as when members of the office went off to war. “Be sure you don’t miss when I’m leaving for the service,” White told them. “Get it into the paper and say I’m going into the Navy.”65
A small item announcing that “W. Sylvester White Jr., Lone Negro Assistant U.S. Attorney,” was reporting to the Navy appeared in several of the nation’s most widely read black newspapers.66
White was only two weeks into boot camp when he needed to have nine teeth pulled, a procedure that kept him on bed rest for three days with little more than a bag of ice on his cheeks to numb his swollen gums. That unpleasantness aside, White performed admirably during boot camp and was selected recruit company commander, thanks, in part, to his ROTC training.
After basic training, White intended to go to quartermaster’s school, intrigued by the intellectual challenge. Mummy Williams was supposed to make it happen, but the opportunity never came.
Instead, White was called to the main side and asked if he thought he could carry out orders—even orders that are unpopular. The black press was attacking how the Navy was—and wasn’t—using black sailors, he was told, and the Navy was considering making him a public relations officer.
“Now,” White was asked, “if the Navy makes decisions regarding the utilization of Negroes and that decision comes under attack by Negro leaders and Negro writers in the press, would you be able still, to carry out the Navy policy?”
White was smart enough to know there was really only one answer to a question like that.
“Well, we are at war and men are dying in following orders,” he said. “And if men can die to follow orders, I guess I can follow orders.”67
The Navy informed White he would not be training as a quartermaster. They had something special in mind for him.
As White was going through boot camp, Graham Martin was growing ever more frustrated with his lack of advancement. Less-educated and, frankly, less-intelligent white enlistees were rising through the petty officer ratings, but Martin, who had already earned a master’s degree from Howard University, was held back because of the color of his skin.68
It was a common refrain throughout 1943. Black men in segregated camps, particularly university graduates, felt that the Navy had little stomach for them, that their talents were wasted, and that the white officers over them “resented their superior education or manliness and that their chances for promotion were far less than those of smiling, knee-bending, ‘cotton-mouth, cotton-tops’ as they termed more subservient trainees.”69 Those suspicions were routinely validated by condescending white officers, many of whom were Annapolis graduates.
“Recruits who felt they had been treated as sub-citizens found it likely they would be classified as sub-sailors as well,” Dennis Nelson remembered. “They were carrying a psychological burden that killed the morale and destroyed the initiative.”70
In the fall of 1943, Martin found an outlet for his frustration when he was finally offered the chance to prove his mettle on the gridiron. When Martin, a football stud, first arrived at Great Lakes in 1942, he’d asked about playing on the station’s team, but he was told that it was for whites only.
Segregation was still the rule at the beginning of the 1943 season, but after an ugly 23–13 loss to Purdue, resulting from some particularly poor tackling, Lieutenant Paul “Tony” Hinkle—a famed coach at Butler University and a future member of the basketball Hall of Fame—came to Camp Robert Smalls and asked whether any of the “boys” wanted to play football.
Hinkle gave the black men tennis shoes and drilled them on asphalt. He had them demonstrate pulling out, blocking left and right, and pass blocking. Martin could do it all and made the team that day. Five days later, he was first string.71
Integrating the football team wasn’t easy. Martin was one of only a handful of black men selected, and he found Hinkle, and his constant warnings to stay out of trouble, condescending.
“Yes, sir,” was really all Martin could say, no matter what he felt. He was addressing a lieutenant.
Hinkle explained to Martin—who had never had any trouble getting along with anyone—how he needed to behave if he was to get along with other players.
“Yes, sir,” Martin said.
Keep your head down and do your job, Principal Lane had instructed him all those years ago.
The one game Martin looked forward to above all others was against Indiana and Bo McMillin, the coach who had underplayed him during his college career. The Great Lakes team stayed at the athletic club, but Martin, who had already played in seven games, was not assigned a room. Instead, they put him in an alcove in the locker room.
“If this is my room, I’ll go home,” he told Hinkle. He’d stay with his mother.
“Okay, Martin, go on home.”
Yes, sir.
Before his biggest game of the year, the one for which he swore he would finally show his old coach what he was capable of, Martin, not welcome at the athletic club with his white teammates, stayed in his mother’s house.72 The next day, Great Lakes beat Indiana 21–7.
Martin helped lead the Great Lakes team to a string of victories and the 1943 award for the nation’s top military team. They played so well that there was an investigation into whether sailor-players were being kept at Great Lakes longer than necessary simply to help the team. Great Lakes was cleared of suspicion. Martin and his teammates were just that good.
&nb
sp; Great Lakes played undefeated Notre Dame the last game of the season on Saturday, November 27, 1943. The Fighting Irish were favored by forty points, but Great Lakes beat them 19–14, and Martin was one of the reasons why, protecting the quarterback with near-flawless play.73
Captain Robert R. M. Emmet, the new commandant of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, “bubbling over with pleasure,” gave the whole team a three-day pass.74 Martin was congratulated for not causing any trouble with whites, no doubt a condescending gesture but one that proved propitious when his superiors decided they needed to find a group of black men who could succeed in a white world and break a color barrier without ruffling feathers.
The following Thursday, December 2, Rear Admiral Jacobs told Navy Secretary Knox that he approved of Adlai Stevenson’s proposal to commission black officers. He explained that the Navy now had 82,000 black sailors and it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a handful who were officer material.75
Even Commander Armstrong got on board, telling Knox that black men should be commissioned, that they’d be capable of commanding white enlisted men. Armstrong insisted that the move could not have been made sooner because black men had only just recently begun training for the general service, and he had done African Americans a great favor by opposing commissioning them as officers until now.
“My own opinion is that there would have been no surer way for this program to have ended in disaster than by the commissioning of officers before either the prospective officers or men whom they were to command were trained to discharge the duties and responsibility incumbent upon them in a satisfactory manner,” Armstrong said.76
Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, consented on December 15, and that was enough for Knox. If his admirals were on board, so was he. Knox approved the plan on December 18, as well as the additional recommendation that the Navy promote to warrant rank no more than four men nominated to the officer candidate group who performed well but did not meet the education requirements.
This was not a blank check, Knox said. He told Admiral Jacobs that the issue of black officers “should again be reviewed” after the first wave completed its training and “before any additional colored officers are commissioned.”77
Martin, just back from a three-day pass and still a hero at Great Lakes, was told something good was about to happen to him, but no one would say exactly what it was.78
In December, Sam Barnes finally had saved up enough to get married.
He and Olga had been engaged since 1940, but nuptials had been postponed because he had been saving for their wedding and she had taken a job teaching in Trenton, New Jersey, where women could not marry until they had been on the faculty for at least three years. Barnes, in order to earn a little extra, took a part-time job at the Johns Manville asbestos plant near Great Lakes. Every weeknight, Barnes ate a quick dinner and then worked at the plant until midnight.
On the weekends, when the plant was closed, he’d work at the Campbell Soup factory in Chicago. He would leave Camp Robert Smalls at noon on Saturday, work through the night, and then catch a few hours of sleep at the USO club. He’d work all through Sunday as well. On Monday morning, he’d wake early and take the 7 a.m. Skokie Valley line back to the base and report at 8 a.m. He kept up this pace for three months so he’d have enough money to travel to North Carolina, where Olga’s family lived, get married, and then enjoy a brief honeymoon in his hometown of Oberlin.
While Barnes was in Ohio introducing his new bride, friends kept asking why strange white men from out of town had been inquiring about him—his past, his associations. These men had interrogated the town’s clergy, Barnes’s high school teachers, people at Oberlin College.
Barnes had no idea what his friends were talking about, and he certainly did not know who these strange white men were or why they were interested in him.
The white men were FBI, and they were running a background check. The Navy was taking no chances.79
In the fall of 1943, Reagan received orders to head east and report to duty on the USS Mason, a coveted assignment. He had spent much of the year stationed at Point Loma, near San Diego, where he worked aboard the USS Firefly, an auxiliary minesweeper.
He sent a note to Downes saying he wasn’t aware of the discrimination that his peers were complaining about, a letter Downes showed off to reporters who asked whether Hampton graduates were really getting a fair shake in the Navy.
“There are close to 60 colored boys here now from Hampton and the Lakes,” Reagan wrote. “The officers seem to be a fine bunch of men—fair and with the Navy’s and the men’s best interest at heart. And they do have the men (every one of them) doing the work they were trained for.”80
But Point Loma had been no easy assignment.
The base commander, a white captain, had named his black dog “Nigger” and walked around yelling, “Here, Nigger, here, Nigger.”81
Off base wasn’t much better. Black men stationed at Point Loma called San Diego “little Georgia,” owing to the signs in windows stating “No sailors, dogs, or colored allowed.”
Reagan’s time aboard the Firefly was uneventful. Occasionally, a generator would break, and Reagan would fix it. The young man who had two years earlier dreamed of being a fighter pilot was spending the war repairing equipment on a small converted fishing boat. It was pleasant enough duty, providing the seas were calm, but it was far from the action he had imagined for himself the day he exited that movie theater in Montana.
At night, he’d enjoy a few beers at the famous Douglas Hotel, the “only quality place of lodging and entertainment for black visitors to San Diego,” and swap sea stories with the other sailors.82 On weekends, he would take three or four guys to Los Angeles, to his mother’s house, for a home-cooked meal.
But the Mason would be a chance to see real action. Reagan, now a petty officer second class, was elated. He arrived in Virginia, feeling spry and ready for his new assignment, when he ran into an old friend, Downes.
The commander would not let him board the Mason. He had something else in mind but would not say what.
“Reagan, you’re to report to Great Lakes on the double,” Downes said, smiling and tossing a sealed brown envelope across his desk. “Your orders are sealed. Don’t open them. But I got a hunch you’ll like what’s inside.”83
Downes also sought out Dalton Baugh and George Cooper.
“You’ve got orders to go to Great Lakes, and I think you will not be sorry,” he said.
He would provide no further explanation.
Just before leaving for Great Lakes, Reagan was waiting for the ferry to take him from Hampton to Norfolk. There was supposed to be a line for whites and a line for blacks, but it was crowded that day and several whites were in the “black” line, looking to board. Reagan, just trying to beat the crowds, got into the “white” line.
Almost immediately, he was given a hard time.
“The hell with it,” Reagan said. “You know, it’s crowded over there and there are whites over there.”
He had given in to this racism the year before, when he was pulled off the bus by police, but this time Reagan would not budge.84
This was a perfect metaphor for what was about to take place: Sixteen black men would meet at Great Lakes to break a color barrier. They, too, would immediately be given a hard time, and they, too, would refuse to back down.
CHAPTER 10
”You CAN MAKE ME AN OFFICER, BUT MY PARENTS MADE ME A GENTLEMAN.”
The very first night when they convened in January 1944, the sixteen officer candidates sat together at the long table inside Barracks 202 with textbooks and syllabi before them. They shared with one another their life experiences, their academic strengths, and their previous assignments, determining who was most proficient at the subjects they’d be expected to master. Those already familiar with a topic volunteered to help the rest.1
“We decided that same day that this was an experiment which could not fail because it
meant too much to too many people,” George Cooper said. “We would either excel as a group or fail as a group.”
Each man around that table represented thousands more. They were certain that if they failed as officers, “the evil of segregation in the Navy, as related to black officers, would be set back for only God knows how long.”2
“We were the hopes and aspirations of the blacks in the Navy,” William Sylvester White recalled. “We were the forerunners. What we did or did not do determined whether the program expanded or failed.”3
“We knew we were putting ourselves—and all blacks—on the line,” Jesse Arbor said. “It was a literal test of our abilities. If we didn’t score high, we would be held accountable. People would point to us as proof that blacks couldn’t be leaders in the Navy.”4
For these sixteen men, the coming trials would be like fighting in the dark, for they could not know what obstacles the Navy would put in their path, only that there were sure to be many. Nor could they know during those first days whether the Navy was making a good-faith effort to train them as officers or whether they were pawns in some larger game, there only to appease some liberal minds in Washington.5
All they were certain of was that many in the Navy hoped and assumed they would fail, simply so that someone high up could say “Well, we gave them a chance and they couldn’t hack it.”
