Integration of the Navy (1941-1978)

Before World War II, the Navy had developed a policy of restricting black sailors to the messman branch in order to maintain a segregated force. Because American society itself practiced segregation and limited opportunities for blacks in almost all areas, this action met little opposition or concern. During World War II, however, the Navy and the other armed services became targets of an invigorated civil rights movement. Black leaders approached the war determined not to repeat the experience of World War I, when they had deferred agitation on racial issues in the interest of the war effort, only to be rewarded with lynchings and repression after the armistice. In World War II, blacks insisted that the nation pursue a double victory—over fascism abroad and racism at home.

Black demands for change began even before the country had entered the war. To forestall a planned march on Washington, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1941 ordered equal employment opportunities in the burgeoning defense industries. The Navy, however, remained intransigent about its racial policies. Letters protesting the forcing of blacks into servant billets received the standard reply used for many years, defending the policy as a necessary recognition of white hostility toward working and living with blacks.

Outside pressure mounted until, in July 1941, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox established a committee to investigate black opportunities in the Navy and Marine Corps, despite the fact that Knox himself supported segregation in the service. Reporting on 24 December 1941, the committee found that “no corrective measures are necessary” because the enlisted force was "representative” of U. S. citizens.1

A controversy that grew out of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor illustrates both the attitude of the Navy toward black seamen and the forces that were brought to bear on the naval establishment. Dorie Miller, a black mess attendant second class on board the USS West Virginia (BB-48), helped carry his mortally wounded captain to shelter and then assisted in the operation of an antiaircraft gun. When early Navy reports from Hawaii mentioned only an unnamed messman, critics charged that the department had deliberately withheld the man's name in order to avoid recognizing the heroism of a black sailor. The Navy refused to identify Miller until March 1942. In April, he received a letter of commendation and a one-rate advancement. Finally, after several congressmen proposed a Medal of Honor for Miller, the Navy awarded him the Navy Cross in late May.

Public opinion also led to the Navy’s ultimate enlistment of blacks for general service. More politically sensitive than Knox or professional officers, Roosevelt prodded the department, which felt little inclination to change. On 9 January 1942, Roosevelt wrote to Knox, “I think that with all the Navy activities, Bunav might invent something that colored enlistees could do in addition to the rating of messmen.”2

After Roosevelt’s suggestion, Knox asked the General Board to consider enlisting 5,000 blacks outside the messman branch, but the Navy opposed even this minor concession. At the board’s hearing on the proposal, a captain from the Bureau of Navigation objected that the 5,000 would constitute “an opening wedge” and that “the sponsors of this program desire full equality on the part of negroes, and will not rest content until they obtain it.” The captain resisted enlisting blacks for general service because, he said, “the high type of man that we have been getting for the last twenty years will go elsewhere and we will get the type of man who will lie in bed with a negro.” The board reported on 3 February that it saw no need to abandon traditional practices, arguing that restrictions in the service merely reflected “discrimination throughout the United States.”3

Although foreswearing any desire “to go the whole way at one fell swoop,” Roosevelt continued to urge the Navy to expand the duties open to blacks. As a result, the question went again to the General Board, which on 20 March yielded and recommended that the Navy employ blacks in general service ratings ashore but continue to restrict them to the messman branch in the fleet. On 7 April, the department announced this new policy, and beginning 1 June 1942, it started enlisting blacks for ratings other than messman. Because of existing shortages of messmen, it barred men already in the service from transferring.

When the Navy allowed blacks into general service billets, it assumed that it would enlist them in relatively small numbers and that it could confine I them to segregated units. The first plans of the Bureau of Naval Personnel called for the use of blacks in small local defense and district craft. Here the Navy had a suitable variety of billets and could maintain segregated assignments within the continental United States. In October 1942, the Seabees also began accepting blacks, and in July 194.3 the department assigned blacks to a few shore patrol I units. Black shore patrolmen, however, were used to control only members of their own race—even when breaking up a fight involving both races, they were told to limit their contact to black sailors.

Throughout 1942, black and white recruits entered the Navy through voluntary enlistments rather than the draft. The Army, which depended on conscription, complained that naval recruiting skimmed off the most desirable men. Acceding to Army demands, in December 1942 Roosevelt ordered that the Navy receive men of draft age only through the selective service system. This dispute, of course, revolved primarily around the supply of white men. The use of selective service, however, also affected the Navy’s policies toward blacks, because with the draft came an insistence that the Navy take its share of black registrants. After additional presidential urging, Knox agreed to accept a larger number of blacks until the force was about 10% black—or about the proportion in the American population. The Navy never attained this level; its high during the war years reached only 4.8% in 1945.

Yard craft, Seabee units, and shore patrols could employ only a small fraction of the blacks who entered the service under the draft. Indeed, by March 1944 the Navy had replaced virtually all whites from its yard craft, but these assignments absorbed only 7,700 out of approximately 130,000 blacks. By 1944, the Seabees, which were still segregated, accounted for only 10% of the blacks in the service. Despite the increasingly untenable situation, however, the Navy continued to resist assigning blacks to non-servant billets in its warships.

Throughout 1943, the department maintained that “there will be no mixing of crews on large combatant ships other than personnel of the Stewards Mates branch.”4 Rather than integrate warships, it assigned blacks to laborer positions on Navy bases and also began forming "base companies” for assignment to Pacific islands. In the base companies, and indeed in most of its shore assignments for blacks, the Navy created units in the seaman branch with broadly defined duties, most entailing manual labor. By creating billets that fit the classification of blacks coming from training stations, the Navy fulfilled its pledge to use blacks in positions related to their skills, but avoided sending the men to sea.

In spite of these new jobs, the department still had not solved the problem of assignment. Blacks felt bitterness about their status, and whites resented blacks' occupying the limited number of shore billets. Furthermore, because most nonrated black men worked in laborer positions, blacks complained that the service had created another separate and inferior branch for them.

Black resentment of their treatment by the Navy led to a series of disturbances during 1943 and 1944. Although most of the confrontations were relatively minor and attracted little outside publicity, a few made headlines and helped focus national attention on black grievances.

One of the most famous of these incidents followed an explosion on 17 July 1944 at the Port Chicago (California) ammunition depot. The accident killed more than 300 men, about 250 of whom were black. When the Navy assembled the survivors at another installation a month later, the men balked at resuming work, voicing concern about the safety of the assignment. Finally, after persuading most to return to duty, the Navy tried and convicted the 50 holdouts for disobeying orders. Critics seized this incident to indict the service’s racial policy. Crisis, a monthly journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), reported that “Thurgood Marshall, NAACP special counsel, . . . says flatly that the men were tried for mutiny solely because of their race and color.”5

Since the high proportion of blacks in laborer jobs ashore stemmed from the Navy’s refusal to send blacks to sea except as messmen, reformers within the Navy periodically proposed broadening the use of blacks in the fleet. Knox consistently rejected such ideas; he did not relent until 23 February 1944, when the department announced the beginning of an experimental program to place all-black crews with white officers on board the destroyer escort Mason (DE-529) and the submarine chaser PC-1264. Each vessel started with white petty officers who were to be replaced as blacks qualified for these billets, but only the PC-1264 achieved a completely black enlisted force.

As the experimental assignment of black crews was getting under way, Knox died. James V. Forrestal, his successor, proved more receptive to change than Knox had been and moved quickly to allow some shipboard integration. On 20 May 1944, he wrote to Roosevelt that he intended to assign blacks who were not in servant billets to a few large auxiliaries; on 9 August the department announced this policy. At first the Navy limited the number of blacks outside the messman ratings to 10% of each crew and recommended, but did not require, integrated living compartments.

With the beginning of the end of restricted assignment, segregated training quietly disappeared. During late 1944, the Great Lakes training station integrated some small classes in its advanced schools. Success with these programs encouraged further efforts, and by 1 June 1945, the last advanced school that had been established for blacks earlier in the war had closed. Henceforth, blacks attended regular classes and competed directly with whites. On 11 June 1945, the Bureau of Naval Personnel also ordered total integration of recruit training.

Accompanying these developments ashore, the Navy further increased opportunities afloat. On 13 April 1945, the Bureau of Naval Personnel opened all auxiliaries to blacks, but still limited the proportion of blacks, excluding stewards, on board any one ship to 10% of the crew. At the same time, the bureau announced a policy of ‘‘racial nondiscrimination.”6 Finally, in February 1946, it removed all restrictions on board all ships. To undo the concentration of blacks in shore establishments and simultaneously to limit the proportion of blacks in crews, it also directed that by 1 October 1946, blacks could compose no more than 10% of the personnel of any ship or activity.

The department also belatedly opened commissioned ranks to blacks during the war. The Navy had never before had a black officer. When the draft sent large numbers of blacks into the service, however, the department found itself in an increasingly difficult position. In 1943, faced with more than 100,000 black enlisted men but no black officers, the department attempted to check mounting outside criticism by allowing a few blacks to become officers. After rejecting a proposal for commissioning 75 blacks, Knox accepted a plan to obtain 10 black staff officers from civilian life and 12 black line officers from the enlisted force. In March 1944, having completed 10 weeks of instruction, 12 black sailors received commissions. No special ceremony marked the event. By the summer of 1944, the Navy had also commissioned 10 black staff officers. Other black officers later entered the service through the V-12 program at civilian colleges.

Paralleling efforts to open the officer corps was a drive to get the Navy to accept black women. The department regarded the women’s reserve, which had been created in 1942, as an all-white unit whose members would replace white sailors ashore. Civilian groups such as the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the Congress of Women’s Auxiliaries for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) applied steady pressure on the Navy to change its policy. These groups rejected both the assumption that black women could replace only black men and that any women’s reserve unit should be segregated. Finally capitulating to those outside the service who had lobbied so long, in October 1944 the Navy announced that it would accept black women in the WAVES. Furthermore, it adopted integrated training and assignment of women.

Altogether, 58 black men and two black women became naval officers during the war. Symbolic of the new—though still limited—acceptance of black officers in the Navy was the presence of Wesley A. Brown among the plebes arriving at the Naval Academy during the summer of 1945. Unlike the five previous black midshipmen who had been driven out, Brown stayed and in 1949 became the first black graduate in the Academy’s history.

Despite the gains blacks had achieved during the war, features of the old system persisted into the postwar era. At the end of the war, for example, 45% of the 165,000 blacks in the Navy belonged to the steward branch, and blacks composed only 4.8% of enlisted personnel. In addition, by mid-1946 only two of the 60 black officers who had served during the war remained on duty. These shortcomings created problems for the department after President Harry S Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in July 1948 requiring "equality of treatment and opportunity” in the armed services.”7

The newly independent Air Force had already developed a plan to end the segregated units that had existed during the war. The Army, in contrast, continued to maintain separate black regiments until the Korean War, when a desperate need for reinforcements compelled it to use black garrison troops stationed in Japan to fill gaps in white companies.

The success of this program encouraged the Army to expand integration. By October 1953, 95% of black soldiers served in integrated units.

In sharp contrast to the other services, the proportion of blacks in the Navy decreased during the Korean War, falling from 4.5% of the enlisted force in 1949 (almost the same level as in 1945) to 3.6% in 1954. The percentage of black enlisted personnel in the Army and Air Force during the same period rose from 9.6% to 12.3% and from 5.1% to 8.6%, respectively.

Not only did the Navy in the early 1950s enlist a declining proportion of blacks, but to a large degree the old patterns of segregation survived. Almost half of the blacks in the Navy were stewards, and there were virtually no black officers. In July 1953, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., denounced the service as a “modernized twentieth- century form of slavery” and asserted that "intelligent, ambitious Negroes are boycotting the United States Navy because they are not interested in making the world safe for democracy by shining shoes, nor are they interested in fighting communism with frying pans.”8

Apparently responding to such criticism, in March 1954 the Navy ended separate enlistments for the steward branch. Henceforth all recruits would complete the same training and only afterward could they select general service ratings or the steward branch.

Because a single form of enlistment would probably decrease the number of blacks becoming stewards, the department required an alternative means of staffing that branch. Undoubtedly anticipating this problem, in December 1952 the United States had signed an agreement with the Philippines permitting Filipinos to enlist in the Navy.

In spite of its continuing de facto segregation in the steward branch during the early 1950s, the Navy in fact was more integrated than much of American society. As a consequence, naval personnel occasionally found themselves in conflict with Jim Crow laws. In 1951, for example, Baltimore police stopped a baseball game between an integrated team from the USS Ashland (LSD-1) and a local all-black club because city ordinances barred whites from the park, which was reserved for blacks.

Segregated facilities such as the Baltimore park became the target of the civil rights movement that gained momentum in the 1950s. Since all the services had usually followed local custom and segregated some facilities on southern bases, they, too, came under fire. In 1953, responding to complaints from the NAACP and other organizations, the Navy abolished segregated treatment of civilian employees on southern bases. Just before the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision striking down “separate but equal” school facilities, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson banned segregation in all post schools. The Navy operated three of the 21 military bases that this order affected.

Because civil rights advocates concentrated in the late 1950s and the 1960s on abolishing segregation in public accommodations and ending de jure segregation in schools, the Navy experienced little direct pressure for change in that period. By the late 1960s, however, civil rights leaders increasingly emphasized their concern for equal opportunity, an issue on which the Navy found itself vulnerable. The number of blacks in the service remained small, and they were concentrated disproportionately at low levels. In particular, few served as officers. In 1968, for example, only 0.4% of naval officers were black, compared with 1.8% for the Air Force and 3.3% for the Army.

The slight number of officers reflected the paucity of black midshipmen at the Naval Academy. After the first black was graduated in 1949, none completed the program until 1952. From 1949 through 1969, only 36 black midshipmen received commissions through the Academy—about 0.2% of the 17,500 midshipmen graduated in that period.

Such figures had become an indictment of the Navy. Although the Academy had recruited some students from black high schools and colleges early in the 1960s, it was not until the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson that the service undertook a major drive to increase its proportion of blacks. When Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, in July 1965 brought to Johnson’s attention the fact that only 9 of the 4,000 midshipmen were black, the president immediately directed Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze to find ways to enroll more. With this order, the Navy expanded its efforts and recruited 7 of the 12 blacks entering in 1966. By 1972, the plebe class contained 73 blacks, and in 1978, 187 of the 4,300 midshipmen were black.

Action at the Academy paralleled other steps to attract blacks to the officer corps. In 1967, Jack Moskowitz, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, announced that as part of an effort to double the number of black officers within two years, the Navy would open its first naval reserve officer training unit at a predominantly black college. In May 1968, the unit began operation at Prairie View A & M in Texas.

In addition to the issue of officers, the department also had to address the question of equal opportunity for blacks in the enlisted force. During the 1960s, the proportion of blacks in the force had remained almost static, ranging from 5.2% in 1962 to 5.5% in 1970. It was not until after Admiral Elmo R.Zumwalt, Jr., became Chief of Naval Operations in 1970 that the percentage of black enlisted men began to grow, increasing from 5.4% in 1971 to 7.7% in 1973 As part of its efforts to recruit more blacks, in 1973 the Navy hired an advertising agency specializing in the black media.

Equal opportunity obviously involves treatment as well as numbers. On this issue, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction had long existed among black enlisted men. In 1967, a reporter on board the carrier Enterprise (CVAN-65), for example, said that racial tension in the ship was so great that brawls between black and white crew members had broken out. Blacks felt that punishment and efficiency ratings were unfairly assigned. They protested that they were denied promotion and charged that although 15% of the crew was black, there were no black officers, warrant officers, or master chief petty officers on board.

The department found charges of this nature difficult to correct or even to admit. In the case of the Enterprise, it denied the presence of racial tension. In fact, the Navy did not undertake a major effort to deal with such disillusionment before Admiral Zumwalt became CNO. Shocked by the feeling among “black personnel that there is significant discrimination in the Navy,” in December 1970 Admiral Zumwalt issued Z-Gram 66, “Equal Opportunity in the Navy,” in which he pledged not only to open communications with minority personnel but also to eliminate grievances such as discrimination in off-base housing.9

Admiral Zumwalt’s efforts did not avert racial conflict. In October 1972, tension flared into open warfare on board the carrier Kitty Hawk (CVA-63), and 46 men were injured in the ensuing melee. Soon after this incident, some black crew members on board the Constellation (CVA-64) staged an all-night sit-in. A reporter on board the carrier Hancock (CVA-19) in 1973 found that "feelings among some black sailors border on the mutinous.” In 1974, 43 black sailors refused to report to the Midway (CVA-41), alleging bias and mistreatment.10

Although official studies found no discrimination against blacks, the Navy did take measures such as establishing human relations councils and affirmative action programs to redress black grievances. This commitment has produced some results. Most notably, the proportion of blacks in the Navy has increased significantly. By 1978, 9.3% of the enlisted force and 2.1% of the officer corps were black. Despite this improvement, however, the Navy remains behind the other services in each category.

Solving the question of genuine equality for blacks has been even more difficult than dealing with sheer numbers. Many white sailors as well as black, for example, agreed with the statement in a 1973 survey that “being white is important for getting ahead in the Navy.” Empirical observation has undoubtedly buttressed this sentiment, for although blacks now work in virtually every job and only a small percentage are messmen, they still tend to be concentrated at the bottom of the naval hierarchy. Approximately one half of black enlisted men occupy the lowest three pay grades, but only one third of white sailors serve in those grades, and these proportions have not changed significantly over the past decade. This maldistribution means that for every black master chief petty officer the force contains 27 black seaman recruits, whereas for every white E-9 it contains only seven white E-1s. Similar disparities—and worse— exist up and down the line. As long as this situation prevails, the Navy will find it hard to convince blacks that their race is not an obstacle to “getting ahead in the Navy.”11

Today confrontations over civil rights issues have again subsided. Without the pressure of immediate crises, racial policy has once more become a matter that the service handles routinely, comparatively free from the public spotlight. This era of calm, however, does not mean that the question has been settled. Indeed, the problem has proved intractable for the Navy and the nation, as both face a legacy of racism and discrimination.

Dr. Harrod is an assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. After graduating from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1967, he received a master of arts degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1969 and a doctorate in 1973. From 1973 to 1976 he was assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Mil-waukee. His main research interest has been U. S. military and social history.