The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  The year Baugh graduated MIT, Dennis Nelson was in San Diego campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, who was fighting Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee in the Democratic primary. Kefauver was making inroads in the black community because he favored rapid desegregation of American schools. Stevenson thought it would be a mistake to use federal troops to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. California was a pivotal state in that year’s contest, and Stevenson’s position caused many influential African Americans to support Kefauver. Nelson, by then a lieutenant commander, proved an effective surrogate, telling the press that he owed his career to Stevenson.

  “There has never been any question of his sincere interest in these matters,” Nelson told reporters. “He fought for them long before he had any interest in a political career.”10 Stevenson won California and the nomination before losing the general election to President Dwight Eisenhower.

  Nelson retired from active duty in 1963, and the next year teamed up with his son, Dennis Denmark Nelson III, and Reagan to form a public relations firm.11 Nelson and Reagan had remained friends after the war, and both men’s sons had joined the Navy. Nelson’s namesake became an ensign in 1953. His younger brother, Charles A. Nelson, in 1951 became just the fourth African American ever admitted to the US Naval Academy.12

  When John “Skip” Reagan Jr.’s Navy enlistment ended, he signed up for the Marines. His father thought maybe the boy was just trying to show up his old man—prove how tough he was, how much of a man he had become. Reagan was so proud of his son, and he hoped to bring Skip into the business as Nelson had done with his namesake.

  On July 22, 1966, Skip Reagan, only twenty years old, was killed in Vietnam.

  Reagan was devastated and his partnership with Nelson did not last long after that.

  The next year, Nelson was appointed director of Los Angeles’ nascent Human Relations Bureau—he’d been the top scorer on the civil service exam. The bureau was conceived of following the 1965 race riots, and Nelson was tasked with doing for Los Angeles what he had accomplished in the Navy—building bridges between the races.13

  Arbor told his old Navy buddies that he had settled in Chicago, where he’d opened his own tailor shop, which he ran until retiring, in 1969.14

  In 1970, George Cooper became Dayton, Ohio’s first black director of human resources, responsible for nine hundred employees in the departments of corrections, housing, health, consumer protection, and parks and recreation.15

  That same year, Sam Barnes was elected to the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics Hall of Fame, and the year after, he became the first African American officer of the NCAA. Those were just a couple of the many honors he earned during his more than two decades at Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia.

  Before the war, Barnes had hoped to coach alongside his older brother James, a role model whom he would cherish all his life. A terrible illness had robbed Barnes of that chance, but he honored his older brother’s legacy for decades by instilling the principles in young athletes that he knew James stood for. Barnes coached boxing, track, and wrestling. His only experience with boxing was the brief training he received during officer candidate school, so he picked up a book on technique, stood in front of a mirror, and taught himself the maneuvers, same as he had done with badminton back at Camp Robert Smalls.

  After seven years at Howard, Barnes used a sabbatical to work on his PhD thesis. Dr. Sam Barnes graduated with a PhD from Ohio State University in 1956. His thesis focused on the role of intercollegiate athletics in the realm of higher education, including its influence on student life and educational values and its effects on institutional morale and relationships with secondary schools. He returned to Howard as athletic director and head of the Department of Physical Education for Men.16

  For much of Barnes’s early career, the nation’s capital remained a segregated town. One of the Navy’s first black officers, and a distinguished coach and athletic director at an elite university, could not eat in most restaurants, but he could show through his own example that the world would get better.

  William Sylvester White took a cabinet post with Illinois governor Otto Kerner, who had been his boss at the US attorney’s office. Then, in 1968, White became only the second black man to head Cook County’s Juvenile Court system. He would go on to win a seat on the state’s Appellate Court and later become presiding judge for the third division of the first district.17

  Graham Martin told his comrades that he was still working at Crispus Attucks High School, which he had attended as a teenager and where he had taught since 1947. The school that the Klan created to segregate black children employed one of the Navy’s first black officers. He was there for Brown v. Board when the highest court in the land declared separate but equal unconstitutional. He was there for the civil rights marches of the 1960s. And he was there in the 1970s to see white students make up about one-third of the student body.18

  Frank Sublett became the first black service manager for a GM dealership in the Chicago Metro area. Then he took up modeling, appearing in commercials for Bud Light and various other products.19 In one, his hands broke open a hot Pillsbury biscuit. In another, his smile beamed as he modeled preacher’s robes.

  It was during their first reunion that the legacy of the Golden Thirteen came into focus for these men. John Reagan had never seen more than a handful of black officers in the same room, but at the get-together in Berkeley, he saw dozens of black faces—lieutenants, captains, even an admiral.20

  Reagan wasn’t the kind of man to take himself too seriously, but on that day he reflected on all that the Golden Thirteen had accomplished as other black Navy officers walked over to pay their respects and salute these trailblazers.

  “We owe it all to you,” one after the next said. “If it hadn’t been for you guys, we wouldn’t be here.”21

  Reagan just stood there—as awestruck as he’d ever been in his life.

  Nelson used the occasion of the first reunion to encourage his mates to promote the Navy in black communities. He told them that the more black men entered the Navy, the more black men would rise through the ranks.

  They had one more mission, he told them.

  The men of Barracks 202, the Golden Thirteen, answered their country’s call once more.

  All became members of the Navy Recruiting District Advisory Committees in their communities.22 Baugh was active in Boston. Sam Barnes worked around Washington, DC. Cooper was elected president of the Navy League in Dayton, Ohio.

  And they weren’t only interested in advancing African Americans. They celebrated women’s achievements, too. And at a time when many in the United States, especially older men, looked askance at the idea of gay sailors, Cooper and White told audiences that a person’s sexual orientation would have no impact on Navy efficiency, nor would it hamper morale or battle readiness. They swatted away the same arguments that were once used to keep them out of the service. “Ever since we’ve had a Navy, there’ve been gays in the Navy, and it has not ruined that Navy,” Cooper told NPR’s Neal Conan, nearly two decades before LGBT sailors could serve openly. “Gays are in every aspect of this society, and they operate effectively,” he said. “They operate just like anybody else. They operate just as well as women do, they operate just as well as blacks do. This is a part of living in our society today, and we have to accept it, and find out ways to live with it.”23

  The reunions continued every year, always sponsored by Navy Recruiting Command. The second was in New Orleans, then Orlando, then Washington, DC, then Boston, and so on.24

  But as the men began to pass—Nelson in 1979, Baugh in 1985, Hair in 1992, Reagan in 1994, Sam Barnes in 1997, Arbor in 2000, Cooper in 2002, White in 2004, Martin and Sublett in 2006—their story faded from most people’s memories.

  There would be brief mentions in local papers during Black History Month. Sublett was on h
and when the first memorial for black Navy veterans in the nation was commissioned in 2005 in Illinois. That same year, in Ohio, a local diversity award was named for Cooper.25 A park in Indianapolis was named for Martin in 2011.26 And in 2008, a Navy press officer gave President-elect Barack Obama a copy of Paul Stillwell’s The Golden Thirteen, an oral history.27

  The Navy used the memory of these thirteen officers to recruit young African Americans and steadily increased the percentage of black officers. But seventy-five years after the Golden Thirteen were commissioned, although African Americans made up 19 percent of the enlisted force, only 7 percent of the officers were black. As of January 2019, there were 54,151 officers in the US Navy; 42,376 were white and 3,916 were black.28

  And mentions of the Golden Thirteen remained few and far between.

  Three years before he died, White was asked by the History Maker’s Society to provide some recollections from his time in the Navy, because “not many people know of this story.”

  A look of alarm came over White’s eighty-six-year-old face.

  “They don’t?” he said, raising his brows in disbelief. “I thought everybody knew it.”29

  Fifteen years later, White’s daughter Marilyn confessed that she didn’t know much about what her father had done. He didn’t talk much about the war or the barriers he broke.

  Goodwin’s son didn’t know much either.

  Neither did James Hair Jr., who said his father talked very little about his time in the Navy. Hair’s father had never let on to his son that he had been part of a special group. He didn’t have any plaques on the wall or memorabilia displayed. It was just something he had done when he was younger.30

  Even their wives knew little of their achievements. Willimeta Reagan, Lorraine Baugh, and Susan Lopez-Sublett, all of whom married their husbands decades after the war, didn’t know much about those years.

  Lopez-Sublett said her husband just didn’t think the “kids these days” would be interested in what he had done a lifetime ago. She’d tease him and say how many things in this world are there left to be the first of, but he refused to brag about his place in history.

  Sam Barnes’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Olga, was studying in the library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when, bored with her own words, she decided to take a break from working on a paper and peruse the newly created African American studies section. She ran her fingers across the bindings of the books on the shelf. By chance she pulled down a book on blacks in the military and was idly thumbing through its pages when she came across a picture of thirteen men standing in Navy uniforms. The caption said these were the first black officers. The man in the front row looked an awful lot like her father. She was so excited that she could not wait for the elevator and bolted down four flights of steps to a pay phone on the first floor.

  “Dad, I’m holding this book. Were you one of the first blacks commissioned in the United States Navy?”

  “Yes,” he matter-of-factly replied.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Olga asked incredulously.

  “Well, a lot of people fought in the war.”31

  Baugh, similarly, regarded his place in history as accidental.

  “Look, if I hadn’t been selected, an equally qualified black man would have done the same thing as me,” the MIT graduate said at the group’s first reunion. “He would have demonstrated the same skills. The fact that I was one of the first is only a statistic, and statistics bore me.”

  Baugh died New Year’s Day, 1985, two years before the intake center at Great Lakes Naval Training Station was named in honor of the Golden Thirteen. To this day, a large framed photograph of the nation’s first thirteen black officers greets fresh boots when they arrive for basic training.

  The honor came about thanks to John Dille, who never lost touch with the men he helped. Dille ran in high circles in Indiana and was friends with Dick Lugar, the longtime US senator. Dille asked Lugar to speak to John Lehman, President Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary, about naming something for the Golden Thirteen. The first idea was a ship, but that was nixed because ship names were often reserved for the dead. Then, there was talk of naming something at the Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, but Lehman thought the Navy could do better than that. Eventually everyone settled on the intake center at Great Lakes.32

  “It’s ironic we’re dedicating this building in your name,” Vice Admiral Samuel L. Gravely said at the ceremony in 1987. “For you, there was no graduation ceremony, no officers’ privileges.”

  The eight surviving members were surrounded that day by young black officers asking for autographs. Reagan signed graduation programs and a copy of that Life magazine photo from all those years ago.

  Arbor, still cheeky and irreverent, told friends that he was only upset that all this honor and recognition came when he was too old to drink all the free whiskey on offer.

  Lorraine Baugh attended the dedication ceremony at Great Lakes in her husband’s stead. She was so honored to be included among those great men, she said later, as she remembered how inspired she was to hear their stories. Her husband, she said, never talked much about the war. But at those reunions, she had heard of their trials and travails, how they knew that they’d have to be twice as good to receive half as much.

  “That’s true with most black folk,” Baugh said. “We know we have to be better than anyone else because they are going to try their damndest to keep us out.”

  She understood the bond the men shared. It had depth and substance. She could feel it being in their presence. They were from another time, when no one thought much of denying African Americans dignity or livelihood, when black men could disappear or be killed, leaving behind only a community too afraid for their own lives to ask any questions. “They had to provide for each other because of their blackness,” she said. “They knew they’d only survive if they had cohesiveness.”

  She recounted that her husband often said the two high points of his life were being accepted to engineering school at MIT and earning his naval commission. When he announced to folks in Crossett, the tiny Arkansas town of his birth, that his ambition was to attend the famed Massachusetts school, they shook their heads, bemused and slightly sorry for this young dreamer. They asked, “How are you ever going to do that?” When he later returned wearing a Navy officer’s uniform, they stopped asking such questions. They all understood that Dalton Louis Baugh could do whatever he desired.

  The pity was that her husband never saw the same respect and admiration from white men in the Navy. Lorraine Baugh recalled how her husband regretted that there had been no ceremony to mark their commissioning and how bitter he felt about the sailors who crossed the street to avoid saluting a black man.

  “Nobody wanted to be proud of them,” she said. “Nobody acknowledged their achievement. When you think about it, it is so heartbreaking. You just feel so disrespected and unappreciated.”33

  But Baugh and the other members of the Golden Thirteen tolerated it all because that was the world they came from, and to do otherwise would have made it that much harder to change the world for those to come.

  Riding in a staff car, being driven from the ceremony to the luncheon at Great Lakes in June of 1987, Lorraine Baugh thought about all that had changed in the forty-three years since her husband had been commissioned. Through the windshield she could see the sentries dressed in perfectly pressed white uniforms, teenagers who looked barely old enough to shave, let alone fight. For them, World War II was ancient history. The battles they had heard of—Iwo Jima, Midway, Guadalcanal—were far different from the battles for respect her husband and the other black officers had waged. As she passed these fresh faces, they smartly snapped their hands to their hats. A staff car meant an officer was in sight.

  “Oh, my beloved Dalton,” she said softly. “I only hope the good Lord is letting you see all this. There is that salute you never got.”34

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book woul
d not have been possible without Paul Stillwell, a retired naval officer and historian who interviewed the eight surviving members of the Golden Thirteen in the 1980s. Without these oral histories and his probing questions, patience, and foresight, this story would almost certainly have been lost.

  When I first reached out to Paul in 2011, I wasn’t sure how he would feel about a twenty-six-year-old health-care reporter who had never served in the military attempting to tell the story of the Navy’s first black officers. I could not have asked for more. He was supportive, patient, encouraging, and helpful for nearly a decade, asking nothing in return. He corrected numerous mistakes in the draft, for which I am eternally grateful. He shared his time, his thoughts, and his unpublished works, because he, like me, thought this was an important story to tell.

  I owe a special debt to Terry Golway, who immediately understood the potential of this project and was the first person to say, without reservation, that it merited book-length treatment. Terry allowed me to gush about trivia that I found in my research, to say out loud the words I wanted on the page, to test out ideas and themes. His edits of early and late drafts helped make this a much easier read. He also calmed me down when I felt anxious and assured me that crushing self-doubt was all part of the writing process. I am very fortunate to have his mentorship.

  Terry introduced me to my agent, John Wright, who believed in this story from the very start and took a chance representing a never-published author. Wright kept pushing me to refine the book proposal, cut away excess material and focus my story. Many agents would have given up after the first publishers passed on the project, but Wright kept at it, believing that this book would find a home.

  Rakia Clark, a senior editor at Beacon Press, pushed to make this book happen, believing that these men and this story were worthy of being shared. The team at Beacon, Helene Atwan, Susan Lumenello, Carol Chu, Haley Lynch, Beth Collins, Katherine Scott, and many others, were instrumental in helping a news reporter become an author. Their patience and effort to make this a more enjoyable read were invaluable.