This spring a large crowd will gather at the U.S. Naval Academy to dedicate Wesley Brown Field House, a state-of-the-art athletic facility. At the tradition-laden Academy, it's exceedingly rare to name a building for a living person. A generation ago, a similar honor was conferred on Admiral Hyman Rickover, the man who spearheaded the advent of naval nuclear power. Wesley Brown, in his way, also had a pioneering role in changing the culture of the service. In 1949 he became the first black graduate of the Academy.
Brown, who is now 80, is justifiably proud of his achievement but also quick to put it into perspective. In a recent interview for his U.S. Naval Institute oral history, he said that he wasn't a notable scholar or athlete or—he might have added—a famous combat leader. The naming, he said, is the Academy's way of symbolizing that it's committed to diversity and is seeking to recruit a population of midshipmen that truly represents America.
Brown's success in facing the challenges of Annapolis resulted from a combination of factors. One was timing. In 1944 James Forrestal had become Secretary of the Navy and actively pushed for improved opportunities for Negroes, as African Americans were then known. Also present were Brown's abilities and achievements. He had been a cadet colonel at top-flight Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., and had excelled in an Army training program at Howard University.
Still another factor was Brown's own personality. On the one hand, he has a sunny disposition and self-deprecating sense of humor. When members of his Naval Academy class got together for a reunion many years afterward, for example, he would greet a classmate and say breezily, "Hi, you probably don't remember me, but I'm Wes Brown." Some, who didn't get the joke, would reply, "Oh, sure, I remember you." All certainly remembered him, for he was the only black midshipman during three of his four years.
Along with the humor, though, there was also a lot of grit—in his temperament and willingness to persevere when some midshipman were actively trying to force him out. For a time report chits and demerits fell on him like leaves on an autumn day. Some unpleasant actions, such as trashing his dorm room, were obvious and didn't count against him. In other instances, Brown had no way of knowing—and certainly no way of proving—that he was being put on report for racial reasons rather than simply because he was a first-year plebe. Some upper classmen did make a point of offering kindness and encouragement; notable in that regard was Midshipman Jimmy Carter, who was on the cross-country team with Brown.
As the Annapolis years passed and Brown became more senior, the demerits dropped off dramatically. He had survived the especially tough tests of his first semester. Though his previous training had been in the Army, he had accepted the challenge of going to the Naval Academy precisely because it was unconquered ground. He also accepted the Navy's offer for even further education by taking postgraduate training to become an officer in the Civil Engineer Corps.
In his oral history Brown talked of his proud relationships with the Seabees, especially in construction projects overseas. He had a substantial role in civil outreach projects in Africa in the 1960s and before that in the rush-rush construction of an aircraft carrier pier at Cubi Point in Subic Bay in the Philippines.
As an officer, though, Brown ran into yet another obstacle along his career path. Whereas the cabal of racist midshipmen had not succeeded in running him out of the academy, he believes that a prejudiced CO was able to do him in during a tour in Hawaii. He considers his fitness reports from this skipper as probably the key factor in his failure to be selected for promotion beyond lieutenant commander. Brown's post-Navy success in facilities construction and planning suggests that he did indeed have the ability and potential to go further than the selection boards decreed.
Even so, he does not dwell on the negatives. Instead, Wesley Brown focuses on the huge changes that came about from the example he created. When he retired in 1969, the Naval Academy still had only a couple dozen black graduates. Not until the 1960s had the academy even made an active effort to attract minorities. When it did so, the results have been demonstrable, producing more than 2,000 black graduates.
Brown, whose story was told in historian Robert Schneller's 2005 book Breaking the Color Barrier, often makes public appearances during Black History Month to describe his experiences. In February of this year he was in the chapel at Annapolis during a history program led by Vice Admiral Jeffrey Fowler, the current superintendent. A lady who was there said afterward to Brown's wife, Crystal: "I notice your husband was crying. He wasn't feeling too well?"
She kind of laughed and said, "Well, that's not quite it."
So the lady said, "Do you know?"
Crystal Brown said: "Yes. Every time he sees a large number of black midshipmen in uniform, he cries."
The old man weeps because he remembers a time when his younger self could look across a sea of midshipman faces and see not even one other that resembled his own.