The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  It’s impossible to know whether Richmond’s intent was as pure as he later said, and it is irrelevant because the men did not know and could not have known his motives. All they knew was that Richmond, who was younger than every one of them, seemed far more interested in explaining why they’d fail than in helping them succeed.

  Whether Richmond’s attitude was for their benefit or his, it had the effect of making the group more determined. They took everything he threw at them and came back for more.61

  They were going to show him and every other Richmond-like figure they’d ever met.

  And so they did.

  As their training drew to a close in March, the group was posting grades like no other officer class in history. Their marks were so good, in fact, that some in Washington did not believe they could be real. The men were forced to take some exams a second time. They scored even higher, a collective 3.89 out of 4.0, the highest average of any class in Navy history.62

  The Navy had been working on the assumption that one-fourth of the class would fail, in line with the attrition rate for white officer candidates.63 No one expected all the men to pass, certainly not with top marks. Toward the end of their ten-week course, when it became obvious that all of them would not only pass but pass with flying colors, the Navy decided it would commission only twelve of the sixteen men and a thirteenth would be made a warrant officer.

  No explanation was given for this decision.

  Perhaps some felt uncomfortable having black men succeed at a better clip than white men, or perhaps they took Stevenson’s memo literally and decided to commission no more than twelve officers. Whatever the reason, the decision meant that the first black class, a group that posted the highest marks ever, would have the same pass rate as a class of average of white officer candidates.

  The sixteen men were told that three would be dropped, but not which three. Instead, men were excused from Barracks 202 to be processed into officer ranks one by one, while the others sat, nervous and dejected, waiting to see who would be cast off. Nelson recalled that “morale was at an all-time low” during this “sweating out” period.64

  When Arbor walked into Armstrong’s office, the commander looked him over and asked, “Now that you’re an officer, how do you feel?”

  “Sir, having never been an officer before . . . I will first have to be an officer a day or two before I know how I feel.”

  “I understand all of you made good grades over there, and that’s commendable,” Armstrong said. “Now you know you will have to make choices as an officer instead of an enlisted man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, in the event that you would be in a position where there was a colored sailor and a white sailor in a fight, whose side would you take?” Armstrong asked.

  “Sir, I have to wait until that occasion arises.”

  Armstrong stared at Arbor. It was not the answer he wanted and he waited a beat to give Arbor a second chance.

  “The first thing I would think of to do is as an officer, as has been taught to me,” Arbor said. “It’s the only thing I could rely on. My personal judgment would not enter into the case.”

  “Well, that sounds pretty good,” Armstrong said. “Now you know there are no quarters for you.”

  Arbor did not know that.

  It was the first of many times these newly commissioned black officers would learn that they may wear the same stripes as white men, but they would not be given the same privileges. In fact, their commissions came with far more warnings and admonishments than respect and plaudits.

  And one more thing, Armstrong added, as Arbor was about to leave. “I don’t want any of you fellows going to the officers’ club.”65

  For Reagan, this was a particularly dispiriting order and darkened what he otherwise considered the “outstanding event” of his life. Becoming an officer was like a dream, a minor miracle. He had been denied the chance to fly for his country because of the color of his skin. Now, he was an ensign.66

  Sam Barnes entered Armstrong’s office uncertain what to expect.

  The conversation was brief, perfunctory almost to the point of absurdity. The man he played badminton with, the man he had worked under at the selection office, could conjure no kind thoughts.

  “Now you are an officer and a gentleman,” Armstrong said.

  Barnes could not let that suffice.

  “Well, I wish, sir, to say one thing,” he replied. “I was a gentleman before I came. You can make me an officer, but my parents made me a gentleman. So I respect what the Navy’s saying, but I just wanted you to realize that these values were taught to me prior to coming into the service. I want to give my parents credit for that.”67

  When it was Cooper’s turn, it was Armstrong who seemed uncertain what to expect.

  “I don’t know what kind of an officer you’d make for the Navy,” he told a stunned Cooper. “In the first place, you’re what we call a hell-raiser.”

  “Sir, I don’t recall having raised any hell since I’ve been here, and certainly not at Hampton when I was down there as a chief petty officer,” Cooper responded.

  “This goes back to when you were eight-years old and the fight you had with a white boy in Washington, North Carolina.”68

  It had been decades since that day when Cooper was delivering milk for his father and a little boy, standing on Market Street, called him a nigger. A fight broke out. The white boy went home and told his father, who spoke to Cooper’s father, but nothing came of it, a fortunate circumstance at a time and place where that was enough of a transgression for a black family to be run out of town. The incident was literally childish, and Cooper couldn’t believe Armstrong was bringing it up now—or that he even knew about it at all.

  It had turned up during the FBI background check, and Armstrong’s message to Cooper was clear: stay in line, know your place.

  It was another example of Armstrong functioning like a Rorschach test. White saw a commanding officer simply trying to protect this new crew, telling them to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble.69

  Cooper saw something else.

  “Prejudice is exerted in so many subtle and unobvious ways that a black person senses it and smells it and feels it,” he later said. “There are so many subtle ways of demonstrating prejudice, but as a black person, you just have antennas out, and you sense it and you feel it instinctively.”

  It can be a glance or in the tone of voice, or a demeanor.

  “And it’s so frequently done by people who, if you’re on the bitter end of it, are so much your inferior in so many ways until it takes a hell of a lot of guts to even stomach it,” Cooper said. “And you know this. And you sense this. And you feel this. And it takes me back to what Mama used to say: ‘Son, it ain’t no sin being colored, but it’s darned inconvenient.’“70

  Lear, the candidate with no college experience, was made a warrant officer. The Navy also announced that Willie Powell, a pay clerk who first enlisted as a messman in 1918, would be appointed a warrant officer when he returned from the South Pacific.71

  Armstrong offered no explanation as to why Augustus Alves, Lewis “Mummy” Williams, and J. B. Pinkney were not commissioned. They simply disappeared from the group and returned to enlisted duty.

  Alves, the rumor was, had once passed for Portuguese. He was light skinned with straight hair, so he could have passed for European and that might have been enough for the Navy to deny him his commission.72 Or maybe, Hair guessed, Alves was rejected because he had once told men to boycott the Red Cross on account of its policy of segregating blood donations.

  “He was quite militant at the time,” Hair said.73

  Whatever the reason, Alves was let go, though he would later make history as the first African American chief specialist in the Naval Reserve, and as adjutant of the Twenty-Ninth Battalion at Camp Robert Smalls.74

  Williams always felt that it was his participation in the labor movement that rubbed some in the Navy the wrong w
ay.75

  Pinkney, too, was considered radical, an agitator, because he had worked for the labor movement in Atlanta.76

  The Navy kept the commissioning a quiet affair. There were no graduation exercises, no ceremonies, no celebrations.77

  But just as Stevenson had predicted, “the news got out soon enough.”

  The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender ran the new officers’ names and photos on their front pages, cheering the twelve new ensigns. The Defender reported that the “United States Navy is moving closer to the principles of Democracy by gradually erasing its color line.”78

  There was only one problem: the story wasn’t entirely accurate. There were not twelve ensigns. White had not yet received his commission. Just days before the end of officer training he started complaining of headaches, chills, and chest pain. He likely had a respiratory infection, which was diagnosed as “catarrhal fever,” a catchall term used at the time for lung diseases. He was placed on bed rest for three days and was absent when the Navy took the first official photograph of its black officers.

  The fever wasn’t White’s only problem. He hadn’t passed his physical. He’d had teeth pulled in November, shortly after enlisting, and the replacements were still missing, which was enough to deny him a commission. The week after their training began, White requested a medical waiver. By March 20, it still had not arrived and the Navy refused to grant his commission until the paperwork cleared, which left White in limbo for about a week. The waiver was finally granted on March 29, and White, a man the FBI said it had no use for because of his color, became an ensign in the United States Naval Reserve.79

  White’s respiratory infection cleared up that week, too, so he was ready to be photographed for Life magazine’s April 24 issue under the caption “First Negro Ensigns.” The photo was “historic,” the magazine said, but the editors did not bother to print the officers’ names.80

  Three weeks later, J. L. Jones, a Life reader from Great Neck, New York, wrote in a letter to the editor that he was “shocked” by the photo. “Every real American will bitterly resent the breaking down of our great naval traditions. There is no place for the black man in our white Navy, and there is moral and political dynamite in trying to mix the white with the black.”

  No doubt Jones spoke for many, but his is the only objection that Life printed. Ronald Spiers, a naval reservist in New Hampshire, wrote that he “would be proud to salute any of them.”

  “Shame on Mr. Jones for this thoughtlessness,” wrote W. W. Ritter Jr., a reservist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in a subsequent issue. “His ideas are of the kind which start race riots and prevent closer collaboration between the races. I am a Southerner, but more than that, I am an American—and white.”

  Eight reservists from Princeton, New Jersey, expressed “great distaste” for Jones’s letter. “Our nation is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to insure equal opportunity for all men,” they wrote. “If any man, regardless of his race, color or creed, can hasten our victory by his efforts he should be given that opportunity.”81

  Cooper, by virtue of his size, was the only one who could buy a uniform off the rack from the ship’s stores. He needed no alterations and walked out with it that day, becoming the very first black man to wear a naval officer’s uniform: a dress blue, double-breasted coat with a half-inch gold stripe and gold star on each sleeve above the wrist.

  They had gone through hell, Cooper thought as he put on that uniform for the first time. But having been through that hell, they had laid the groundwork for others to follow.82

  Arbor took Baugh, Hair, and Reagan to Finchley’s, a clothing store in Chicago where there was an expert tailor who would have their new uniforms fitting perfectly. The tailor gave them a deal on the suits, so proud was he to be sewing on gold braids for the first African American officers.83 James Hair, the son of a slave, a man born to a man owned, fastened the gilt brass buttons on his coat and walked out into the Chicago streets wearing the uniform of a United States naval officer.

  The men received a ten-day pass after they were commissioned. Cooper took advantage of his first free weekend in a couple of months to visit his wife and daughter in Hamilton, Ohio. When he walked into Union Station in Chicago, wearing his uniform, everyone stared. Same on the train. No one quite knew how to react to what they were seeing.84

  White also went home to visit his wife, George Vivian Bridgeforth, whom he had not seen in three months. Twin girls, Carolyn and Marilyn, were born nine months later.

  “The Navy chow really does something for you,” he used to joke.85

  Sublett, the day after he received his commission, married Henrietta Beck, a young woman who grew up in Evanston not far from his own home.

  Baugh suggested that he and Arbor visit their alma mater, Arkansas AM&N, and the two were greeted like conquering heroes. Everyone wanted to know the story of how two of the first black officers came from a small, little-known school.86

  Arbor also used his free time to visit Duck Collins, the sailor responsible for acclimating him to the Navy two years earlier. Collins hadn’t heard anything about black officers, and when he saw Arbor standing before him in his perfectly tailored uniform, wearing a cap with an officer’s insignia, he broke down and wept.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. “You wouldn’t have been a damn thing if it hadn’t been for me.”

  And Arbor thought then, and for the rest of his life, “No, I probably would not have.”87

  CHAPTER 11

  “His INTELLIGENCE AND JUDGMENT ARE EXCEPTIONAL.”

  James Forrestal, the undersecretary of the Navy, flicked a switch in his boss’s office. The microphone came alive and carried his taut voice through the cavernous halls of the Navy’s sprawling headquarters and the corridors of the annex across the Potomac.

  His voice choked and cracked as he told thirty thousand Washington-based Navy employees, “The Navy has suffered a great loss.”1

  Frank Knox was dead.

  The secretary suffered a massive heart attack on April 25, 1944, and died three days later, surrounded in his final moments by his wife and closest friends, including Assistant Secretary Ralph Bard.2

  Funeral services were held at Mount Pleasant Congregational Church. His flag-draped casket was taken to Arlington National Cemetery, where a Navy chaplain read the committal service, a bluejacket detachment fired three volleys, a Navy bugler sounded taps, and Frank Knox was lowered into the ground.3

  He had been appointed secretary of the Navy nearly four years before. He was an efficiency expert to whom the president entrusted the task of transforming a meager fleet into an armada that could defend the world from fascism. When Knox took over, in July 1940, the Navy had just 385 combat ships. At the time of his death, it had nearly 1,000. The Navy had 2,112 aircraft when Knox took office. When he died, it had 42,600 aircraft, of which more than 2,000 were tactical combat aircraft.4

  President Roosevelt, a man who so treasured matching the right words to the right moment, could find few to express his grief to Frank’s widow, Annie Reid Knox.

  “It seems so futile for me to say anything at this moment except that I am sure you know that I am thinking of you and that you realize that in these four years I have come to have not only a deep respect for Frank’s ability but also a great affection for him personally with a high appreciation of his outspoken honesty and underlying devotion to duty,” wrote the president. “He has very literally given his life in the cause of his country.”5

  The flags of the ships of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada flew at half-mast. The Allies mourned.

  Inside Camp Robert Smalls, the newly commissioned officers wondered whether the reality of black men wearing gold stripes had been just too much for Knox to bear. The news, they joked, must have literally killed him or at the very least hastened his demise.

  “We had a little laugh about that,” Sam Barnes admitted.6

  Secretary Knox may
have been gone, but the Navy’s fear of black officers commanding white men in battle remained.

  Sea duty was out of the question for the men of Barracks 202. For the time being, they had to remain in the United States, performing clerical duties and other menial jobs. If they were assigned to shore installations, they were to be sent in pairs, because the Navy reasoned that no white officer would speak to, or be seen with, them. Keeping the men in pairs would ensure they had a modicum of companionship; the policy lasted through the fall of 1944.7

  But no one it seems had given serious thought to what assignments these black ensigns should be given.

  Commander Armstrong offered one idea. He suggested that one of the new black officers be assigned public relations duties. It was a nod to John Sengstacke, who had visited Camp Robert Smalls just before the men received their commission. Sengstacke owned the largest chain of black newspapers in the country and had founded the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which had been asking for some time for a black officer to be assigned to the Navy’s bureau of public relations.8

  Captain Leland Lovette embraced the proposal and told Knox, weeks before the secretary’s death, that it would satisfy the demands of “the Negro press” for a “Negro public relations officer.”9

  Knox gave the green light, and Syl White was assigned the position on April 6, 1944, one week after he was commissioned. He worked at Great Lakes, where he functioned as a liaison to the black press, feeding reporters and editors story tips and ideas that put the Navy in the best possible light.