Though many doubted its validity, the Navy and Marine Corps used the Naval General Classification Test to discourage black enlistment. The exam was made up of of 150 multiple-choice questions, consisting of math, vocabulary, and basic logic, which emphasized spatial thinking. According to the Navy, the exam measured “usable intelligence” or “trainability.” Scores were divided into five classes, with Class I scoring 130 or more and Class V scoring below 70. Once in the Navy, those who had scored poorly on the test had little prospect for technical training.
In his book Hidden Heroism, Robert Edgerton argues that the AGCT (the Army’s version of the test) was used to prove that blacks were “innately stupid.” What the Army wanted was black laborers to free whites for combat duty, and the AGCT, according to Edgerton, “provided the inferiority the Army was looking for.”
Blacks scored on average lower than whites—sometimes significantly lower—which the War Department used as “proof” that blacks were less intelligent than whites and less able to perform military duties except labor. The Navy used the results of the tests to justify its policy of keeping blacks at shore installations, arguing that as a group they were less able to perform military duties other than labor.
The Committee on Selection and Classification of Military Personnel was created by the National Research Council at the request of the Adjutant General of the U.S. Army with responsibility for “development, construction, validation, and standardization of all personnel screening test and interview techniques for the Army.”
Boykin and Cunningham were traveling north, but black servicemen traveling south of Washington, D.C., were moved from sleeping cars to segregated cars once they crossed what was known as the “black line.”
The exact day of the Great Lakes announcement was June 6, 1942.
Details of the lieutenant’s welcome speech are from Sammie Boykin.
Camp Robert Smalls was previously called Camp Morrow because it lay along Morrow Road. Robert Smalls was a pilot on a Confederate transport ship. In May 1862, Smalls ran the Planter out of Charleston Harbor and delivered it into the hands of a Union squadron. Smalls was honored for his heroism and was subsequently made a pilot in the Union Navy.
In September 1942, Armstrong established the “Remedial School,” which was set up to teach the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic to black recruits. One of the officers wrote, “The amount of time and effort required to train these recruits is admittedly much greater than is necessary for normal men. In view of the following considerations, it is exceedingly doubtful whether this expenditure is justified.” According to reports, Negro regiments also had a very high percentage of non-swimmers—80 to 90 percent as compared with only 30 percent in white regiments and a “high rate of venereal disease found among men returning from leave.”
Armstrong’s officers complained that motivation was exactly what was missing among the black men. The recruits’ priorities, the officers said, were the “improvement of the Negro race and complete equality,” and not the war.
Some of the white training commanders at Great Lakes also questioned Armstrong’s tactics, suggesting that he placed too much faith in recruits of limited ability, hurriedly promoted blacks of dubious achievement, made too many promises, and was soft on problem recruits, treating them with kid gloves for offenses that would have elicited courts-martial in white camps. Quietly they established their own, harsher system of justice, administering penalties “in a manner understandable to the Negro.”
In July 1942, Armstrong set up what was called the “slacker squad” (also known as the Correction Squad) for recalcitrant recruits. Ignoring Armstrong’s guidelines for disciplining problem recruits, training commanders took the punishment of slackers into their own hands. According to Lieutenant T. A. Larson, who wrote History of the U.S. Naval Training Center Great Lakes, Illinois, in World War II (Washington, DC: Office of Naval History, 1945), “Negro Training” meant “taking a recalcitrant recruit into a room where there were no witnesses and beating him.” “The Negro in the United States Navy in World War II,” from the Bureau of Naval Personnel, however, says of the “slacker squad” that “putting them in the brig would not cure ignorance, so instead they were put in a specially hard-worked and hard-drilled detail.”
According to a Great Lakes Intelligence Report, only 5,549 blacks entered the Service Schools at Great Lakes between September 12, 1942, when the school was established, and July 18, 1944.
In September 1942, the presidents of the seventeen Negro Land Grant Colleges met in Chicago and went on record with the Negro press criticizing the Navy’s failure to commission Negro officers.
In 1910 a host of cities throughout the South, following the example set by Baltimore’s city council, ratified ordinances that allowed them to establish separate white and black neighborhoods. The trend spread north and west to St. Louis and Oklahoma City. When the Louisville city council tried to enact similar legislation, the NAACP filed a suit in federal court. One year later the Supreme Court struck down the segregation law, calling it unconstitutional. Proponents of the movement, however, fought back. Southern cities implemented methods that had proved successful in the North, achieving segregation through a mixture of intimidation, racially restrictive covenants (whereby a landowner would sign an agreement saying he would not permit a black to own or lease his property), discriminatory real estate practices, and zoning restrictions. In fact, the Federal Housing Authority’s 1939 Underwriting Manual encouraged the practice, stating that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.”
By the time Boykin walked through the gates of the U.S. Naval Training Center at Great Lakes, in Waukegan, Illinois, the perimeters of the modern black ghetto were firmly defined in Birmingham and other Southern cities as well as Northern cities like Chicago.
In March 1926 the front page of the New York Herald featured an exposé on Southern slavery. The stories reported that in fifty-one of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties, nearly one thousand prisoners had been sold into slave mines and forced labor camps the previous year, generating $250,000 for local officials. In 1925 the state government earned $595,000 from the same practice. In excess of eight thousand men—nearly all black—worked on chain gangs in 116 Southern counties. By 1930 Georgia had more forced labor slaves than ever before.
Even in a large city like Mobile, blacks were forced to observe a 10:00 p.m. curfew. A crime of indecency was the most serious charge. A black man could be accused of indecency for merely looking the wrong way at a white woman. A sheriff might turn a “criminal” or a fugitive over to an angry mob that would pour kerosene over him and set him afire. Those who survived lived in pain, their lips the color of charcoal, their hair, ears, and nose burned and shriveled to nothing. The jails were bad, but the camps to which sheriffs sent young black men raised misery to new heights. There, overseers routinely beat them. Those who avoided the whip and the club endured squalid living conditions and the threat of disease. Outbreaks of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and dysentery were common.
Blacks sought different things in the North. Inspired by flashy advertisements in newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American, they came by the thousands searching for economic opportunity and Henry Ford’s five-dollar day. Some were lured by the promise of electric lights and indoor plumbing, while others left to escape oppression or to ensure that their children got a decent education. In the South, black schools got only ten cents of every dollar spent on public education, and were often nothing more than airy shacks with leaky roofs. They were plagued by a shortage of books, and taught by inferior, underpaid teachers. Even the brightest students went to school a quarter less than their white counterparts. Many Southern blacks received a poor reception in the Northern cities, where whites regarded them as uncouth, unclean, uneducated, and uninspired. Working-class immigrants especially resented their arrival.
They competed for jobs with immigrants, and industries often viewed blacks as a cheap source of labor. It did not take long for Northern cities to grow combustible. Angry whites, feeling their livelihoods (blacks competed for jobs, especially in the stockyards and meatpacking plants) and neighborhoods imperiled, beat, shot, and lynched blacks, and ransacked and burned their houses. In New York City; East Saint Louis, Illinois; Springfield, Illinois; and Chicago, rampaging bands of whites pulled blacks off trolley cars and dragged them off city sidewalks. In Chicago fifty-eight black homes were bombed between 1917 and 1921. In addition to using Southern blacks to man the factories of wartime industries, northern employers hired Southern blacks because of their utility as strikebreakers in labor disputes. In the 1920s, 877,000 blacks left their homes for the North. Many whites considered them a pestilence. One paper exclaimed, HALF A MILLION DARKIES BRING PERIL TO HEALTH.
The city of Chicago was the site of a violent riot during the summer of 1919. In July a heat wave settled over the city. Whites and blacks alike flooded the beaches of Lake Michigan, seeking relief. On July 27, at the 29th Street Beach, a black boy crossed into a “white” swimming area. Angry beachgoers battered him with stones, and the boy drowned. When a policeman investigating the incident refused to arrest any of the whites, and instead booked a black beachgoer for a minor offense, a group of blacks attacked him, hurling rocks at the whites who tried to rescue him.
Reports of the incident spread throughout Chicago. Blacks required little incitement.
The drowning of the boy and its aftermath released long-simmering racial resentments. For seven days, riots raged. White gangs talked of burning down the black ghetto and running its residents out of town. A mob of white men even threatened to ransack Provident Hospital. The first black-owned and -operated hospital in America, Provident was established in 1893 by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a black American surgeon, to provide blacks with medical services they were often denied. Police held off the mob, but violence broke out elsewhere, including the prosperous confines of Chicago’s Loop district.
Much of the rioting, however, occurred in Chicago’s Black Belt. Although six thousand National Guard troops and nearly three thousand police officers tried to protect the neighborhoods from white looters, arsonists, and thugs, many pushed their way in. Blacks were attacked in parks and on streetcars, too. But they were not just innocent victims. They fought back, attacking and stoning and stabbing white civilians.
By the night of July 30, the bloodiest of the battles had ended, though smaller skirmishes persisted for another four days. When, on August 3, police and national guardsmen gained control over the city, and Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson officially declared the riot over; the casualty count was grim. Twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites had died, more than five hundred people were injured, and more than one thousand families, mostly black, were left homeless.
Many Southern blacks came from the five-state region comprising Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Langston Hughes described the spirituals and the blues as “pain swallowed in a smile.”
The Jim Crow system of race relations was at its most powerful during the early years of the twentieth century. Some unscrupulous landowners did whatever it took to cheat their sharecroppers; somehow the ledger always indicated that they were in the red. Those who resisted would be reported to the local sheriff, who administered justice any way he saw fit. Some sheriffs threw sharecroppers into crude jails on specious charges. Sharecroppers formed unions in the 1930s, beginning in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, in 1931, and Arkansas in 1934. Membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union included both blacks and poor whites. As leadership strengthened, meetings became more successful and protest became more vigorous; landlords responded with a wave of terror.
The situation of landless farmers who challenged the system in the rural South as late as 1941 has been described by Arthur Draper and Ira Reid in Sharecroppers All. They write, “He is at once a target subject of ridicule and vitriolic denunciation; he may even be waylaid by hooded or unhooded leaders of the community, some of whom may be public officials. If a white man persists in ‘causing trouble,’ the night riders may pay him a visit, or the officials may haul him into court; if he is a Negro, a mob may hunt him down.”
The Mexican boll weevil devastated Louisiana’s cotton crop in 1906, Mississippi’s in 1913, and Alabama’s in 1916.
The big fun for many black families was the annual revival, which often amounted to a week-long event of eating and socializing. Black families brought heaping bowls of turnip greens and black-eyed peas with ham hocks, sugar-cured ham and boiled ribs, fried chicken, squirrel, possum, raccoon and rabbit, biscuits and cornbread, and sweet potato pie.
CHAPTER 9: PORT CHICAGO
Although the episode at the Fred Harvey Restaurant disturbed Boykin, nothing could diminish his faith or damage his morale more than an incident he experienced at Great Lakes in the fall of 1942. In mid-September, President Roosevelt and his wife left Washington, D.C., by train for a two-week, coast-to-coast inspection of Army camps, Navy yards, and factories. North of Chicago, the Roosevelts visited Great Lakes, the largest training center of its kind, home to Boykin’s regiment of black naval recruits and nearly seventy thousand white trainees.
The Roosevelts spent nearly the entire day touring the base facilities in the company of the commandant. Then Eleanor insisted that they stop and see the separate Camp Robert Smalls, where the president’s former black valet, George Fields, was in training. Boykin was on guard duty and was walking the perimeter of the base as the president’s limousine passed. He could see the president and the first lady inside. Boykin had been an admirer of the president and was filled with pride when the car passed by his post. Later, when he learned that the Roosevelts had spent the day on the base and had paused at Robert Smalls long enough only—a few minutes perhaps—to watch a unit complete the obstacle course, he felt disappointed and let down by the president. Had he shown up earlier and visited with the trainees, he could have inspired not only the men at Camp Robert Smalls, but black servicemen across the country. He could have given them instant legitimacy. Instead, Boykin was forced to swallow his frustration as he often had before. One thing he had learned growing up in the Deep South was that a man, especially a black man, had a limited ability to affect a situation. That which he could not change, he simply had to accept. It was not resignation, but rather a strategy for making one’s way in the world.
CHAPTER 10: BOMBS FOR THE BLACK BOYS
Many details regarding the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot and the town are drawn from Dean McLeod’s Port Chicago, Ken Rand’s Port Chicago Isn’t There Anymore, and a document titled “War Time History of the U.S. Naval Magazine, Port Chicago, California (December 5, 1945)” from the Naval Weapons Station, Concord, CA, Communications Officer.
Some of the quotes are taken from my interviews and Tracey Panek’s oral-history interviews with the Port Chicago survivors (Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial in Concord, California).
Hawthorne, Nevada, was 120 miles southeast of Reno.
During World War I, Port Chicago was used as a shipyard, and the Shipping Board built steamers there.
Ironically, great Japanese oil tankers pulled up to the Associated Oil docks throughout the 1930s. There is evidence that the Japanese fleet that took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor got oil from ships that loaded at Association Oil in mid-1941, despite a national embargo.
Liberty buses at Port Chicago were not available until the fall of 1943.
The profile of Captain Goss is derived from his testimony during the mutiny trial.
In a letter dated 4/29/43, Captain Goss wrote the Bureau of Personnel via the Bureau of Ordnance concerning the “Manpower Shortage” at Port Chicago. “The principal trouble with these men, aside from the normal shiftless habits of Negroes, continues to be the attitude of fancied discrimination. This, as previously referred to on several occasion
s, is undoubtedly both originally inspired and continually fostered by sources outside the Navy. It appears to be the result of an organized drive by political pressure groups to secure and obtain greater advantages for colored people as a matter of privilege and without regard to prior demonstration of ability. As one example: it has been found that enlisted men from naval vessels loading at Port Chicago have been glad to use the bus transportation which the colored enlisted men scorn to use.”
(Captain Goss suggests that the term “nigger” was no more derogatory than “limey,” “wop,” or “kike.”)
Details on the arrival and departure of ammunition ships, and the size and nature of their loads (projectiles, bombs, ammunition, etc.), are from Port Chicago’s War Diaries.
Even FDR thought the Liberty ships were “dreadful looking objects.” He called them “ugly ducklings.” However, the Allies could not have won the war without them. Liberty ships would become the workhorses of the Pacific. They were durable, relatively cheap, and easy to build—on average, Kaiser Ship Yards was banging out a new 10,000-ton Liberty ship every six weeks—and capable of carrying 10,800 deadweight tons of cargo.
Details on propellants, fuzes, etc., are from a restricted Navy Personnel Manual (16194) on “Ammunition Handling”; a book on “Bombs and Fuzes” issued by the U.S. Navy Bomb Disposal School to graduates of a course in Bomb Disposal and/or Advanced Fuze and Explosive Ordnance; and a July 30, 1945, manual issued by the Naval Training School (Ammunition Handling) at the USNAD, Hingham, MA, on “Underwater Ordnance and Impulse Ammunition.” The USNAD at Hingham also issued a number of other manuals: one on August 15, 1945, on “Navy Explosives”; one on August 1, 1945, on “Rocket Ammunition”; and one on “Gun Ammunition” issued on April 15, 1945. I also consulted an April 6, 1945, War Department manual on “Nonpersistent Gas Bombs: Handling, Shipping, and Storage.”
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