The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  Penny integrated recruits first by companies in July 1945, placing two black companies with four white companies in a battalion. Finally on the same playing field, the black men showed they were every bit as talented as their white peers and earned six consecutive battalion “Rooster” flags for military proficiency.39 In August, just before the war ended, Penny moved for full integration, placing eight or ten black men in each company. Once again, the black men proved more than up to the task, and a black man was voted honor man of his company.

  Even Armstrong appeared to have a change of heart, acknowledging in December 1945 that integration should have occurred from the outset of the war.40 White remembered running into Armstrong, then a captain, in Washington, DC, and congratulating him on earning his fourth stripe.

  “Too bad I couldn’t have gotten it earlier, during the war,” Armstrong told White, “because there’s so much more I could have done if I’d had the power of the fourth stripe.”41

  After the war, Martin’s wife, Alma, encouraged him to make a career in the Navy, but Martin thought that the accident on the oiler would hold him back.

  Sublett wanted to stay in the service, but he had a wife and young son, and his mother-in-law strongly encouraged him to come home. “The marriage failed anyway,” Sublett later said. “I wish things had wound up differently but you can’t turn back the clock.”42

  Arbor harbored similar regrets. He left the Navy after his service in Guam, figuring he could make more money as a civilian. “Had I known the potentials at the time, I would have stayed because I think I could have done more in the Navy than I did out,” he said. “But knowledge only comes with age and experience.”

  Cooper had hurt his back when he slipped off a diving board during officer training and was given a medical discharge.43

  Sam Barnes had had enough stevedore work in Okinawa to last a lifetime. He returned to Oberlin to care for his ailing mother.

  John Reagan left the Navy in 1946 and returned to Montana State to play football and finish his degree. The “Montana Grizzly” was still a stud on the field and played professionally for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Canadian Football League. His wife, Lillian, the nurse he had chased back at Hampton, didn’t care much for Canada or the cold, so the couple moved back to California.44

  Nelson was the only one of the thirteen who decided to make a career out of the Navy, and he spent much of his tenure at the Bureau of Naval Personnel pushing to make the Navy a more hospitable place for black men.

  He befriended John L. Sullivan, who became secretary of the Navy in 1947 when President Harry Truman appointed Forrestal secretary of defense. That friendship provided Lieutenant Nelson uncommon access to the halls of power.

  Nelson took advantage, firing off letters and memos to senior staff, seeking subtle reforms such as changing the stewards’ uniform so they looked like those of regular seamen, and not-so-subtle reforms such as demanding that stewards, most of whom were black, stop being called “boy.”

  “This has been a constant practice in the Service and is most objectionable, is in bad taste, shows undue familiarity and pins a badge of inferiority, adding little to the dignity and pride of adults,” Nelson wrote Captain E. B. Dexter, deputy director of Navy public relations.45

  Nelson wrote that letter in August 1948, shortly after President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights noted that 80 percent of black sailors were serving as cooks, stewards, and stewards’ mates, while less than 2 percent of whites served in those roles. “It is clear,” the committee wrote, “that discrimination is one of the major elements which keeps the service from attaining the objectives which it has set for itself.”46

  But Nelson kept pushing.

  In October 1949, he asked if Reagan might come back to active duty and help recruit other black men into the Navy. At the time, only fourteen black men were enrolled among more than 5,600 students in the Navy ROTC program, and African Americans made up just 4.3 percent of those serving in the Navy.47

  Reagan’s task was to show black men that the Navy did have a lot to offer, though he was never certain he had much success. He would travel to various cities and make the very best pitch for the Navy he could. Invariably, during the question-and-answer session, someone would raise his hand and ask the black lieutenant (junior grade), “Can [black men] be anything other than a mess cook in the Navy?”48

  The following June, war broke out on the Korean Peninsula, and Reagan finally got to see the action he had always craved. He was ordered to serve in an amphibious boat unit that made its way from San Diego to Japan. The skipper chose Reagan—not the white lieutenant—as his executive officer, a move Reagan could not have imagined happening during World War II.

  During the Korean War, Nelson, in an effort to promote the Navy, courted the black press to promote black sailors’ achievements. In 1950, the Chicago Defender happily reported that aboard the USS Missouri black men “mingled in every department of the ship’s crew, and taking active part in the maneuvers are many colored lads who are ‘learning by doing’ in the radar section, gun turrets, mechanical and engineering divisions.”49

  But Nelson understood his was an uphill climb. Black men, he told historian Lee Nichols, knew promotions came more quickly in other branches of the military, where there was “less caste and class to buck.”50

  Nelson laid it all out in his master’s thesis, “The Integration of the Negro into the U.S. Navy,” which the Navy published. It was, according to a reviewer, a “factual presentation of the progress to date of the Navy in its new racial policies” and included a scathing takedown of Armstrong, who died from a heart attack he suffered while playing tennis in 1947.51

  Nelson was quite brave to publish a critique of the Navy while still in uniform. Equally impressive was the Navy’s decision to publish the manuscript instead of ignoring it or even suppressing it.

  Captain Fred R. Stickney decided to publish it because, he said, it was such excellent scholarship and deserved wider public attention than it would have received if it remained merely an academic work.52

  Nelson made no attempt to sugarcoat the Navy’s past prejudice or gloss over how much work still needed to be done.53 He said current treatment of black personnel “makes fertile grounds” for Communism, writing, “The attitudes of our country toward minority groups, and those manifested and practiced by its armed forces, provide ready-made propaganda for the Communist state.”

  Sam Barnes later mused that Nelson’s bullishness, and the pressure he put on the Navy to reform and face its failings, hampered his career. After twenty-one years in the service, Nelson retired as a lieutenant commander, even as other black officers commissioned after he was earned promotions to higher ranks.

  Nelson was older than other officers who were being promoted, and he’d had no sea duty, an important consideration in Navy promotions. No doubt these factors hampered his prospects as well, but it is also true that Nelson simply wouldn’t play by the Navy’s rules, or act the part of the “unspoiled young Negro,” the quiet, obsequious black man that the Navy had desired since it opened its messman’s branch to African Americans in 1933. Nelson, sometimes at his own peril, opened doors that other men walked through.

  “You have to have some tree-shakers, and then some others come along and pick up the fruit from the man who shakes it down,” Arbor said. “Nelson was a tree-shaker.”54

  Among the men whom Nelson tapped for recruiting duty was Lieutenant Samuel L. Gravely. While Nelson pushed in Washington for black men to have more, Gravely proved they could handle the responsibility. He served as a communications officer aboard the USS Iowa during the Korean War, and took command of the Falgout in 1962, the first black man to command a warship. Then, on April 28, 1971, the Pentagon announced that Captain Gravely, a former railway postal clerk who had joined a segregated Navy and was then sailing home from Vietnam, would be promoted.55

  The United States would have its first black admiral.

  CHAPTER 13 />
  “THERE IS THAT SALUTE YOU NEVER GOT.”

  James Hair was home alone in his modest three-story house in Hollis, a section of Queens in New York City, when the phone rang. He got up to answer, moving a bit more gingerly than he once did. Age had stolen his agility and time had taken the spring from his step. Slowed by a triple bypass, Hair, just shy of his sixty-seventh birthday, was no longer the athlete of his youth or the powerful man of his prime. He was a retired social worker, at the dusk of life, not quite certain what to do with himself now that he was no longer working.

  Hair picked up the phone. His son was on the other end of the line, calling from work and speaking with some urgency.

  Take a look at the newspaper, James Hair Jr. said.

  Hair grabbed a copy of the New York Times and, as instructed, turned to page A18. “8 of First Black Navy Officers Hold Reunion At Sea,” the headline read. Hair looked from the headline to the photo. He recognized the face. It belonged to Syl White, a man he hadn’t seen in nearly forty years.

  “The United States Navy brought them back to sea today,” the first sentence read, describing the reunion on the USS Kidd off the coast of Virginia, “the eight surviving members of the Golden 13.”1

  “I’ll be damned,” Hair said, his eyes darting over the words again and again to be sure he hadn’t made a mistake. “I know I’m still alive.”

  Hair pinched himself just to be sure.

  “I know damn well I’m alive,” he said again, having passed this all-important tactile test. “Why aren’t I there?”

  Hair called the New York Times and asked for Ben A. Franklin, the reporter who wrote the story. Franklin works in the Washington, DC, bureau, Hair was told.

  Hair thought about calling, but, fearing the run-around, instead decided to call the United States Navy. He dialed Navy Intelligence and told them about the Times article.

  “I’m not with them,” he said, “but I’m a member of the Golden Thirteen.”

  “Huh?” came a befuddled reply.

  “Yeah, I’m a member of the Golden Thirteen.”

  “You sure?”

  Yeah, Hair was sure.

  The Navy took Hair’s name and address and told him to wait by the phone.

  Hair did as he was told, waiting in the home that had provided a foundation for him and his wife to raise three children. The kids had grown, moved out, and started lives of their own. Hair and his wife had divorced.

  Now, it was just Hair and Taja, a German shepherd for whom he had great affection. In another time and place, Taja might have served as a hunting dog, more companion than pet.

  Hair had recently become involved with his church, attending services more frequently and reading the Bible. He was becoming more spiritual in his later years, though he still had not decided exactly how he would spend his retirement. So on this particular Wednesday morning in 1982, waiting for the Navy to get back to him was no problem, and he had plenty of time to talk when they did—which was good, because over the next several hours Hair received more than twenty phone calls from Navy headquarters.

  Finally, a captain got on the line. “You are James Hair, aren’t you?”

  “I certainly am,” Hair replied.

  “Can you travel?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, I’m able to travel.”

  “Could you get ready in three hours, because we’ll have somebody there to pick you up?”

  Hair packed a few items, then sat and waited, a torrent of memories flooding his mind. Being one of the Golden Thirteen was a point of pride, but it was not something he thought about often. He rarely spoke about his experience, even with his own children. The war was far behind him. He had a master’s degree from Fordham University. He had worked for Roman Catholic and private agencies in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, helping loving families adopt children. He had been a caseworker and supervisor for thirty-one years.

  Hair waited, wondering how the Navy had forgotten about him. It turned out to be a clerical mix-up. James Hair had entered the Navy as James Hare, on the advice of the Browns, who had told him to spell his last name the “right way,” the white way. Over the years, Hair reverted the spelling but had never informed the Navy. When James Hare could not be found, the Navy assumed he must be dead.

  A car pulled up on schedule. Hair was driven to LaGuardia Airport, named for the beloved mayor who led New York City during the days when Hair patrolled and protected its coast. He flew south to Norfolk, Virginia, a place once referred to as the “asshole of creation,” because it was so hostile toward black men. The Navy rented him a motel room and told him to rest up because tomorrow would be a big day.

  The next morning Hair boarded a helicopter at Norfolk Naval Air Station and flew twenty miles out to sea, landing on the deck of the USS Kidd, a guided missile destroyer.

  Hair leaped off the helicopter, feeling spry and young. He looked around for the captain, wanting to ask permission to come aboard, just as he had been trained to do forty years before. But Hair could not get to the captain before his old Navy buddies started pummeling him with high-fives, back slaps, and hugs.2

  Dalton Baugh, Frank Sublett, John Reagan, Sam Barnes, George Cooper, Graham Martin, Syl White, and Jesse Arbor had not seen Hair since the end of the war. They were older, fatter, and balder than Hair remembered, but here on the ship, in this moment, they were young again—the men of Barracks 202.

  They kidded Hair for missing the first few reunions, which had begun in 1977, and joked that maybe he had been posing as a white man all these years, only to rejoin the race when the ceremonies and special treatment began.3

  Aboard the ship the now nine surviving members were served lunch by white sailors while the USS Kidd’s only African American officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Bruce Martin, stood in awe of these men—the Jackie Robinsons of the Navy.

  “I am so pumped up to have these guys here,” Lieutenant Martin told a reporter. “These guys opened the door for us and if they hadn’t it might have been another 50 years before the Navy got black officers.”4

  For more than three decades these men, who had broken one of the most intractable color barriers in the Navy, were known only as “those Negro officers” or, later, as “those black officers.”

  But Dennis Nelson never stopped pushing for more recognition, and by the late 1970s, a decade after the civil rights movement had forever changed the status of black people in the United States, the Navy was newly proud of their accomplishment and ready to show them off. The surviving officers were feted as a symbol of racial integration, of progress, of pride.

  The first reunion, which took two years to plan, was held in Berkeley, California, in 1977.

  Captain Edward Sechrest, a Vietnam veteran who was assigned to the Navy Recruiting Command, coined the term “Golden Thirteen,” a bit of ingenious PR that gave the group a catchy nickname the Navy could use to tout their achievements.

  Lorraine Baugh, Dalton’s second wife, printed stationery for the men. In the center was “13+1,” a nod to John Dille, who remained close to their hearts all those years later.

  There were nine who gathered that day to mark what they had accomplished thirty-three years earlier and remember their departed comrades.

  Charles Lear had been the first to pass. Navy documents show that he died on October 28, 1946, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest “while in a state of melancholia.”5 Lear’s application for a transfer into the regular Navy had been rejected the previous June, and a few other members of the Golden Thirteen surmised this is what led to his depression. But on September 5, less than two months before he died, the Navy changed its mind and Lear was recommended for appointment to the regular Navy.

  In January 1949 Phil Barnes entered the US Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, because of painful kidney stones. He suffered complications following a nephrolithotomy, and doctors removed his right kidney on February 24, hopeful that would save his life. His condition appeared to be improving and he
was slowly regaining strength, but one week later he vomited violently and gasped for breath. The doctors tried everything they could but to no avail. At 2:05 p.m., on March 2, 1949, Phil Barnes became the second member of the Golden Thirteen to die.6

  Reginald Goodwin had run a lucrative law practice in Chicago. He was a member of the group of traffic court defense lawyers known as “miracle workers” for their unusually high success rate in drunk-driving cases. Goodwin retired to Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1973. The next year he returned to Chicago to address a Saturday dinner gathering of the Frogs Club, an African American leadership organization. After he finished his remarks, Goodwin walked back toward his seat. His legs gave out as he approached it, and he fell, slumped over his chair. He was rushed to Mercy Hospital, where he was pronounced dead from an apparent heart attack.7 Goodwin had turned his law practice over to a man named Bruce Campbell, who later admitted to paying $100 cash bribes to judges to fix drunk-driving cases, and accused Goodwin, long dead, of being in on the scheme.8

  When the men gathered for this first reunion they felt as if it had been just thirty minutes since they’d last seen each other, not thirty years. They posed for pictures, gave interviews, and swapped stories about their lives and families.

  They had so much to catch up on.

  Baugh told them he was now living in Massachusetts and had achieved his lifelong dream when in 1956 he graduated with a master’s degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had stayed in the Naval Reserve until 1964, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. He’d also worked for the Massachusetts public works department and was one of the first two engineers hired by Boston’s traffic department. Now, he ran his own engineering firm.9