When the MP ordered Louis to get back to his area, Louis took offense. “I’m wearing a uniform like you,” he objected. “What’s my color got to do with it?”
When the MP placed his billy club against his midsection, Louis might have sent him crashing to the pavement, but the champ caught himself, just barely. “Don’t touch me with that stick,” he threatened.
Now everyone was riveted: the black heavyweight champion of the world facing off against a white MP in the state of Alabama. Not everyone knew who Louis was, but they all understood that he was more than a run-of-the-mill Negro soldier. When the MP raised his club, Robinson came to Louis’s defense and sprang on the MP, wrapping his arms around his neck. More MPs came running. Black soldiers, recognizing Louis, grew angry and defiant. Then the MPs, realizing that the situation had the makings of a brawl or, worse yet, a race riot, stepped back, and instead of swinging their billy clubs and taking on the crowd, they called their lieutenant. By the time he arrived, the men had calmed down. Quietly he put Louis and Sugar Ray in a jeep and took them to the brig. By the time the two fighters reached the jail, however, Army officials at Camp Sibert, realizing that the War Department’s goodwill tour was about to turn ugly, decided not to put the fighters behind bars.
Edgar Huff heard much of the news about his boxing hero, and fellow Alabaman, secondhand. It pained him to think that his people, brimming with a passion for their country and its ideals, were still being treated like outsiders. But he was not surprised. Perhaps Gadsden, the entire South, and the whole country was as narrow-minded and backward as ever. Maybe Eleanor Roosevelt had been right; maybe the United States was not “prepared for democracy.” (The partial text of Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1943 newspaper column read, “The domestic scene is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one the feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.”)
In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR said, “If ever there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now.”
In January 1943, Paul McNutt, the head of the War Manpower Commission, wrote President Roosevelt that the military needed to induct blacks in proportion to their numbers in the general population—a goal of 10 percent. McNutt had already gone on record condemning the “color” barrier in the military and the defense industry as a “line against democracy.” Prejudice, in his words, was “unpatriotic.” But in pressing with President Roosevelt the issue of the underutilization of blacks—mid-1942 figures showed that blacks were available because their unemployment rates were three times higher than those for whites—he chose to appeal to the president’s practical side. Not using blacks because of institutional intolerance was not only unjustifiable, it was a “waste” of manpower. Manpower reserves were being rapidly extinguished. If the military continued to resist accepting large numbers of blacks, it would be forced to take whites out of important jobs to meet draft quotas. He explained further that the percentage of blacks in the military was 5.9 percent, well below the 10-percent goal. McNutt proposed ending racial calls—the custom of taking white registrants rather than blacks who had earlier draft lottery numbers—a suggestion to which both the War Department and the Department of the Navy responded unfavorably, pointing out that bringing in large numbers of blacks required enormous planning. Many accused McNutt of being a publicity hound and a bit of a grandstander (he also had a bad relationship with FDR), but others believed that he was genuinely opposed to discrimination. Whether McNutt was a bona fide proponent of black rights or an enthusiastic self-promoter who loved the stage and used controversial issues to propel himself front and center was a bone of contention for supporters and opponents alike. That said, he even took his case to the black press, praising the accomplishments of black soldiers and workers alike. In World War I, he had commanded two thousand black troops at Camp Jackson, South Carolina. While campaigning for the governorship of Indiana, he passionately denounced the KKK and the discriminatory poll tax. As governor he appointed blacks to influential state boards.
McNutt, however, persisted, taking another tack. On February 17, 1943, he wrote Secretary of War Henry Stimson, explaining that 300,000 blacks had been overlooked while draft boards were taking in white males, in direct violation of the Selective Service Act, which imposed a ban on racial discrimination. “The position,” he wrote, “is not tenable.” The Selective Service was drafting white married men with families and passing over single black men. McNutt, who had attended Harvard Law School, added that the practice possessed “grave implications should the issue be taken into the courts, especially by a white registrant.… The probability of action increases as the single white registrants disappear and husbands and fathers become the current white inductees, while Negro registrants who are physically fit remain uninducted.” McNutt pressed Stimson to start accepting men regardless of color and according to their induction numbers. General Lewis Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, also wrote Stimson. “We feel impelled under the circumstances and under requirements of law that the selection of men … shall be made in an impartial manner … without regard to discrimination against any person on account of race or color.” When Stimson replied to McNutt, he dismissed his concerns, writing that racial calls were not “discriminatory in any way.” Despite his letter, General Lewis Hershey continued to do the military’s bidding, filling racial calls as directed.
Late that same month, McNutt went directly to the president, who, though sympathetic to his argument, refused to overrule either Stimson or Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The president, however, encouraged Knox to review his ranks in an attempt to find places for blacks, including “shore duty of all kinds, together with the handling of many kinds of yard craft.” The president further expressed his concern that if blacks were not used in proportion to their numbers in the population, it could produce both morale issues and serious legal issues for both whites and blacks. Meanwhile McNutt recommended that monthly quotas for blacks be increased from 2,700 per month to 7,350.
Many of the details about McNutt’s efforts to push Secretary of War Stimson to integrate the armed services can be found in George Flynn’s The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II.
In February 1943 the Navy began taking all draft-age men via Selective Service. Estimating that more than 100,000 black draftees would enter the Navy by the end of the year if quotas were met, Frank Knox scrambled to formulate a plan to accommodate them, calling for the creation of twenty-four new “all-colored” construction battalions. Knox also authorized the establishment of “colored crews in the harbor craft and local defense force,” “service companies at all ports of embarkation,” an “increase in the number of colored cooks and bakers in the commissary branch for shore establishments within the United States, and finally “an increase in the percentage of colored personnel at section bases, ammunition depots, net depots and naval air stations on this continent.” As before, Secretary Knox and the Navy failed to see blacks as more than a source of labor, giving priority to the Bureau of Ordnance requests for ammunition handlers at naval ammunition depots. Secretary Knox was as emphatic as ever that there would be no “mixing of crews” aboard ships. When black civil rights leaders called for the introduction of “all-Negro” units for transports, cargo and ammunition ships, fleet oilers, and other naval auxiliary vessels, where black petty officers would not be called upon to exercise authority over anyone other than “subordinates of their own race,” Knox dismissed that notion, too. If the black community hoped that the Navy was on the cusp of change and that its men would be able to serve aboard combat ships, Knox’s proposal fell far short of its expectations. The General Board (the advisory body of the U.S. Navy) had already weighed in on this issue, stating abstrusely that “[t]his prospect would involve an effort out of all proportion to the return in effective seagoing units which could be expected on the basis of the Navy’s actual experienc
e with vessels manned by crews of other than the white race.” Because of its stance, the Navy was forced to curtail the training of blacks in seagoing positions.
CHAPTER 13: A DESOLATE PLACE
Descriptions of Bronzeville’s boundaries differ. According to Percy Robinson, its boundaries were 29th Street on the north, 63rd on the south, Cottage Grove on the east, and State Street on the west. As the population of Chicago exploded (44,130 in 1910 to 233,903 by 1930), the Black Belt expanded. In 1910 it was a narrow strip of land stretching from 18th Street to 39th Street, bounded by State Street on the east and the Rock Island Railroad tracks and LaSalle Street on the west.
Percy Robinson, like a lot of South Side blacks, never knew the name “Bronzeville.” James J. Gentry, a theater editor for Anthony Overton, the publisher of the Chicago Bee, suggested that the paper use the word “Bronzeville” to identify the community, since it more accurately described the skin tone of most of its inhabitants.
Like his father, Percy Robinson was a fight fan. The hero of many South Side blacks was Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world. Johnson was a bold, in-your-face black man with a preference for white women, and whites’ hatred for him was legendary.
Six years after retiring, James Jeffries, who had been a heavyweight champion, announced that he was returning to the ring to take back the heavyweight title “for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.” The matchup, with its racist overtones, was billed as “the Fight of the Century.” On July 4, 1910, the hostile crowd booed Johnson, but nothing, it seemed, could shake the confidence of the grinning black fighter. He knocked Jeffries down twice, and might have done more damage had Jeffries’s corner not thrown in the towel. The Los Angeles Times tried to discourage post-fight racial pride. “Do not point your nose too high,” it said. “Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly.… Your place in the world is just as it was.” Some blacks encouraged Johnson to conduct himself in the “modest manner” of Booker T. Washington. Washington’s secretary even wrote to Johnson asking him to follow Washington’s example of “simplicity and humility of bearing.” But blacks across the country wildly celebrated Johnson’s victory, while angry white citizens and all-white police forces tried to stop them. Trouble ensued, with white-on-black and black-on-white clashes erupting in fifty U.S. cities in what were the first-ever nationwide race riots in the United States. In 1912, when Johnson was charged with violating the Mann Act—the trafficking of white women across state lines for immoral purposes—a pastor remarked that lynching “would be light punishment for his sins.” Historian Jeffrey Sammons wrote that Johnson’s rise “foreshadowed, and in some ways helped to create, the New Negro.” Reverend Reverdy Ransom, founder of Chicago’s Institutional Church and Social Settlement, said in a 1909 sermon, “What Jack Johnson seeks to do to Jeffries in the roped area will be more the ambition of Negroes in every domain of human endeavor.”
Again, some details about Great Lakes are taken from Lieutenant T. A. Larson’s History of the U.S. Naval Training Center Great Lakes, Illinois, In World War I, and a thirty-five-page Naval Intelligence Service (Ninth Naval District) confidential memorandum regarding racial tension at the Naval Training Center, Great Lakes.
By the middle of 1943 Great Lakes had changed its criteria for selecting the white officers who trained the black recruits. One officer explained that at Great Lakes, “We no longer follow the precept that southern officers exclusively should be selected for colored battalions.… We have learned to steer clear of the ‘I’m from the South—I know how to handle ’em’ variety.”
Under Armstrong, Wednesday-night “happy hours” and talent shows became common occurrences. To bolster morale, he organized art and drama groups and entertainment departments. He encouraged recruits to perform, but also brought in professional entertainers. He established “Negro bands” and featured “Negro spirituals” during Sunday-evening Vesper hours. Promoting “Negro pride,” he arranged exhibits celebrating black contributions to the arts, sciences, industry, education, and athletics. In May 1943 he presided over the dedication of a new school building with state-of-the-art classrooms and laboratories. He was also concerned with the recruits’ free time. The regimental halls—the 18th Regiment at Robert Smalls, the 16th at Lawrence, and the 14th at Moffett—showed movies three nights a week with fifteen-minute sing-alongs preceding the showings. Finally Armstrong saw to it that each camp was outfitted with a recreational hall with table games, jukeboxes, and modern libraries.
For those, like Percy Robinson, who loved music, there was no place in the entire country that showcased talent like the three Great Lakes Navy Bands. The A Band, the best at Great Lakes, was the forty-five-piece Ship’s Company Band at Camp Robert Smalls; the B Band, the next best, was the resident band at Camp Lawrence; and the C Band was out of Camp Moffett. According to Clark Terry and Jimmie Nottingham, two legendary trumpeters stationed at Great Lakes, and other instrumentalists who later went on to successful jazz and symphony careers after doing stints in the Navy, “There had never been so many good musicians at any one place, at any one time.” FDR, a lover of jazz, was delighted. “The blacks have an abundance of musicians,” he said, “and I want the Navy to have something in it besides messmen and stewards.”
The Great Lakes Ship’s Company Band was one of the most illustrious ever assembled. It included Terry and Nottingham in addition to Major Holly, Ernie Wilkins, Jimmy Wilkins, and Al Grey, as well as symphony orchestra performers Donald White, Thomas Bridge, and Charles Burrell. FDR’s comment was the green light that Len “the Fox” Bowden, a St. Louis arranger, composer, and conductor who was second in charge of all the bands at Great Lakes, needed. With the president’s enthusiasm and the support of the assistant chief of Naval Personnel, Bowden recruited the musicians he needed to build a top-notch band. Bowden was in charge of the Ninth Naval District, which extended from Colorado east to the Atlantic and from Tennessee north to Canada, and handpicked his other recruiters, who traveled to gigs from New Orleans to St. Louis to Kansas City to try to persuade black musicians, who suspected that the Navy was the exclusive preserve of white America, to join up. At Great Lakes, instead of being forced into roles as cooks and bakers, they could be rated as Musicians 1st or 2nd Class and could perfect their craft in the company of equally talented men.
Once Bowden and his team brought aboard the musicians—men like Mitchell “Booty” Wood went on to fame as a trombonist with Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie—they set out to prove to the world that their Great Lakes band was the best there was. What was obvious to everyone was that the Navy had recruited even better talent than one could find at Chicago’s Club De Lisa, the Rhumboogie, or the Three Deuces. In fact, until the Chicago Federation of Musicians complained, and Navy musicians were no longer allowed to take their instruments off base, the Great Lakes bands would sometimes gig in Bronzeville’s clubs to the delight of audiences that knew groundbreaking music when they heard it.
What it meant for the musicians there was that during two- and three-hour jam sessions they were interpreting jazz in revolutionary ways and blowing wide the doors of music. Bowden was so proud that he formed a “Radio Band” made up of the best musicians from the three bands at Great Lakes. On a program known as the “Men O’ War Radio Show,” the Radio Band’s music was broadcast throughout Chicago every Saturday night on the CBS network’s area station—WBBM. A two-hundred-voice regimental choir, a vocal octet that included singers who had sung with the Hall Johnson Negro Choir, and a vocal quartet also performed.
For nightlife the Great Lakes recruits usually went into Chicago. Chicago had its race problems, but of all the northern cities, it was considered to be the most congenial to blacks, of which it had a large population—300,000-plus—over 10 percent of the city’s total. Its mayor, Edward Kelly, who hailed from Bridgeport, an Irish enclave on Chicago’s South Side, established a Committee on Race Relations and had a decent reputation with t
he city’s black voters. What’s more, on the South Side, black servicemen had over a sixty-block area in which to play. There, courtesy of the mayor’s soft stand on gambling and prostitution, they could find anything they wanted. Service Center Number 3, at 49th and Wabash, had free sleeping quarters and nearly two hundred beds, which it assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. The YMCA on the 3700 block of South Wabash had another two hundred beds. For those searching out a more wholesome kind of fun, the South Side offered playing fields, swimming pools, beaches, and theaters, too. The various black organizations—the NAACP, the Urban League, the March on Washington, and the National Negro Congress—and their Chicago chapters saw to it that there was no shortage of recreational opportunities for the serviceman. For those intimidated by Chicago’s reputation as Boykin had been, the local town of Waukegan, Illinois, had five separate black neighborhoods, enlightened black citizens who took their membership in the NAACP seriously, and a brand-new black USO. There was also Milwaukee, Wisconsin, north of the state line. The city’s Sixth Ward was especially friendly to black servicemen, and on weekends drew large groups from Great Lakes. The Urban League was active in Milwaukee, as was the NAACP, which was run by activist attorney James Dorsey.
According to the War Diary, Lieutenant Delucchi arrived at Port Chicago on July 17, 1943.
Riots broke out across Detroit, fueled by rumors that whites had thrown a black woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge. Enraged blacks stormed through a neighborhood breaking windows and looting stores, while white rioters approached from the opposite direction, burning cars and plundering businesses. City police and state troopers were soon overwhelmed—six were shot and another seventy-five injured—and began firing indiscriminately into the rebellious black crowds. A white doctor, entering a black neighborhood on a house call, was pulled from his car and beaten to death.
The Color of War Page 44
