One overcast Saturday last summer, I attended the commissioning of the cutter Alex Haley (WMEC-39) at the Coast Guard Yard near Baltimore. She is the former Navy salvage ship Edenton (ATS-1), originally commissioned in 1971. The ship has been refurbished for patrol duty out of her new homeport of Kodiak, Alaska. That the Coast Guard must build its fleet by taking over an old Navy ship is a demonstration of the nation’s miserly support of a service that accomplishes a great deal for the populace. That the Coast Guard is willing to recycle a cast-off says much about its can-do spirit.
As the young Coast Guardsmen proudly went aboard and manned the rail of the Alex Haley, I wondered just what their seabags of experience contained. How many of them had been to Alaska? How many had been at sea in a raging gale when the rain is coming at them horizontally and the ship is bucking like a raging bull? How many of them had known the satisfaction of saving a life at sea? These are things that they would find out as the days and months accumulated.
As for another sort of experience, it occurred to me that a number of the crew members were not even born or old enough to understand in 1977 when Alex Haley’s book and miniseries Roots blazed into the national consciousness. Nor had they been around for the Supreme Court’s desegregation of schools in the 1950s or the great civil rights struggles of the 1960s. And they certainly were not around in World War II and afterward when a young Coast Guardsmen named Alex Haley demonstrated to his shipmates and senior officers that he was a talented individual, capable of making a contribution even though segregation in the armed services often denied him opportunities.
For those of us who do remember, Roots was a monumental event. It seemed that nearly everyone with a television set was watching the eight-part series as the saga of an American family unfolded itself generation after generation. Slavery can be an abstract concept on the pages of a book. But when the screen shows people beaten bloody, their humanity subjugated, completely at the mercy of others, the images can take a powerful hold on one’s soul.
Serving on board the newly commissioned cutter will educate the crew about the man their ship honors. Certainly the outpouring of dignitaries who came to the July event began the process. One speaker was the Secretary of Transportation, a black man named Rodney Slater. It would have been unthinkable for a black person to be in the President’s Cabinet when Haley joined the Coast Guard. The Commandant, Admiral James Loy, spoke at the commissioning, signifying by his presence the importance he attached to the occasion. Also on the podium were Master Chief Vince Patton, the senior enlisted man of the Coast Guard, and Captain Leroy Gilbert, the Coast Guard’s senior chaplain. Both are black men, further examples of the opening of opportunity in the Coast Guard since Haley served.
During the ceremony, actor John Amos told of the privilege he felt in portraying Kunta Kinte in the epic miniseries 22 years ago. Kunta Kinte was a 16 years old when he was captured near the Gambia River in West Africa in 1767 and transported to America on board a ship named the Lord Ligonier. Once here, he was sold into slavery and renamed Toby. By dint of an amazing amount of research both in the United States and Africa, Haley was able to trace his genealogy and forge direct links with Kunta Kinte.
In the book, Roots, he acknowledged that one of his useful research sources was a booklet called Shipping in the Port of Annapolis, 1748-1775, written by Vaughan H. Brown and published in 1965 by the Naval Institute Press. Haley wrote about the excitement he felt over examining Brown’s monograph, because it reported the exact date that the Lord Ligonier docked in Annapolis with Kunta Kinte on board. Haley made a point of being on the dock in Annapolis on 29 September 1967, the 200th anniversary of his ancestor’s arrival. That one piece of information in the monograph was like a piece of gold for the great-great- great-great-grandson of Kunta Kinte.