My reason for going into the Navy was to duck the Army. I had three brothers who already were in the Army. They told me: “Go anywhere you can go other than this place. Don’t come.” Then I got my “welcome” from Uncle Sam. I went to Mexico, not expecting to come back, but I got busted. I came back to Chicago and looked in my mailbox at all those brown envelopes. That Saturday morning, in September 1942, I went downtown on Plymouth Court and joined the Navy.
Following my training at boot camp and quartermaster service school at Great Lakes, Illinois, they sent me over to Pier One in East Boston. Blacks no longer had to be cooks and stewards, so the Navy didn’t know what to do with rated seamen. After they found out that I knew semaphore and flashing lights, they put me directing British and Australian ships in to the docks.
I was called off the docks one day to go aboard a minesweeper as a quartermaster third class. After being out there about six weeks or two months, I was then transferred to an advanced course in navigation at Dutton Hall at Harvard University there in Boston. After I had completed that course, I came out as quartermaster second class. They sent me back to sea on a little larger minesweeper then.
One day the Navy announced that they were going to commission a destroyer escort, the Mason [DE-529], and going to put on an all-colored crew. That was the term they used in those days. Boy, my chest flew wide open. I lashed up my seabag, went down to board it. They put on my buddy, a third class, instead and told me, “No, Arbor, you can’t go.” They didn’t tell me any reason why. This was November 1943.
Instead I received hurry-up orders to report back to Great Lakes for training in January 1944. As I learned later, I had been picked for a special officer-training program. I got there around one o’clock, and they rushed me right on over to a warm barracks. Two or three guys were sitting around. By that night, all 16 of us were there—all enlisted men. On the top deck, there were 16 bunks, 16 chairs, and two long chow hall tables drawn together so we could study.
We were in Camp Robert Smalls, set up to train black sailors for further service. Commander Daniel Armstrong was in charge of the program. His father had opened Hampton Institute in Virginia as a vocational school for freed slaves after the Civil War. So Commander Armstrong thought that made him an authority on anything black—black people, even black shoes. That’s on record. I was out to George Cooper’s [another member of the Golden Thirteen] house about four years ago. He said, “Jess, I know you haven’t seen all this crap, all this stuff that Armstrong stigmatized the Navy with because of his father’s position.”
After we had successfully completed the course, only 13 of us were to become officers; for some reason the other three remained enlisted. The next morning, they told us, “Go to the battalion commander’s office.” One by one, they gave us our commissions. No formal graduation exercise, no anything. I went into his office alone.
I shall never forget Armstrong. He said, “You’re Arbor.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
“How did you get here?”
I said, “Sir, I don’t know.”
He said, “You mean to tell me you don’t know?”
Maybe that was because I hadn’t had any contact with him before being picked for the program. In any event, his next remarks to me were, “Now that you’re an officer, how do you feel?”
I said, “Sir, having never been an officer before, I will first have to be an officer a day or two before I know how I feel.”
He said, “I understand all of you made good grades over there, and that’s commendable. Now you know you will have to make choices as an officer instead of an enlisted man.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Now, in the event that you would be in a position where there was a colored sailor and a white sailor in a fight, whose side would you take?”
I said, “Sir, I have to wait until that occasion arises.” He looked at me. I said, “The first thing I would think of to do is approach it as an officer, as has been taught to me. It’s the only thing I could rely on. My personal judgment would not enter into the case.”
He reared back. He said: “Well, that sounds pretty good. Now you know there are no quarters for you in the BOQ [bachelor officers’ quarters].”
I said, “I didn’t know that.”
The second thing he said was, “I don’t want any of you fellows going to the officers’ club.”
That was Jesse Arbor’s introduction to be-coming one of the Navy’s first black officers.