At a time when the United States was fighting a global war to free the persecuted, its naval officer corps was, ironically, as white as it had been a century earlier, before the Civil War. Some 100,000 African American enlisted men were in the Navy at the midpoint of U.S. involvement in World War II, so its leaders timidly, reluctantly set about to commission a few black officers as well. To be sure, the step was a political one, taken in response to growing pressure from U.S. civil rights organizations. The national consciousness was slowly beginning to realize that the elimination of injustice abroad could hardly be served by a military force that perpetuated injustice at home.
In January 1944, 16 black enlisted men gathered at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois to begin a crash course that would turn them into the first African American naval officers on active duty. Although the Navy had to be compelled to take this step, it chose the officer candidates well. All had demonstrated top-notch leadership as enlisted men. The pace was demanding and forced the 16 men to band together so that all could succeed. Their common perception was that they would set back the course of racial justice if they failed. All 16 passed the course, but not all became officers. Twelve received commissions as ensigns; the 13th made warrant officer. The three who did not fit within the quota returned to enlisted duty.
Years later the pioneer officers came to be known as the Golden Thirteen. In 1944, however, Navy leadership treated them more as pariahs than pioneers. In many instances they were denied the privileges and respect routinely accorded to white naval officers. Once commissioned, their assignments were usually menial and ' not worthy of their abilities and training. They were token blacks. But they had at least opened the door for all those who would follow. In the years since 1944, the Navy has kept pace with the nation in racial awareness and integration. In some cases it has made even greater ; strides. The Golden Thirteen were there at the outset.
For a variety of reasons, only one of the 13 made a ' career of the Navy, and he was instrumental in opening still more doors for those to come after. Other members of the group made their marks in civilian life. Their achievements provide a measure of their talents and I their determination to deal with a society that was too often reluctant to deal with them. Their number included a professional engineer, a justice of a state appellate court, the first black member of the council of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a respected social worker, a successful attorney, a teacher and coach who inspired a generation of students, an official of the Urban League, a professional model, and the first black department head in the city government of Dayton, Ohio.
In 1986, at the suggestion of Lieutenant Mark Crayton of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, I began an oral history project to capture the memories of the eight surviving members of the Golden Thirteen; one has since died. Later the project grew to include the recollections of three white officers who served with and supported their efforts during World War II. In all, the transcripts comprise more than 2,000 pages. A new Naval Institute Press book by the same title is a compilation of the best material from those oral interviews.
Few oral history projects have provided me with so much satisfaction and enjoyment. In part that is because the men of the group were so kind and cooperative and in part because the stories of these extraordinary individuals probably would have been lost if not for oral history. If written records of the group’s training still exist, they are buried so deeply that they have not resurfaced, despite numerous inquiries. Thus, the only record likely to survive and perpetuate the achievements of the Golden Thirteen is this collection of their own oral recollections. Memory is admittedly an imperfect tool, but it can convey a great deal of authentic human experience.
Graham Martin, for example, remembers the 1930s when boxer Joe Louis and sprinter Jesse Owens stunned the world with their athletic achievements. He found it difficult to reconcile their success with the oft- repeated notion that black people were inherently inferior. James Hair, the son of a slave, broke down in tears during one interview as he recalled the lynching of a brother-in-law whom he had idolized. George Cooper told of going out of his way to convince white enlisted men that he was a fellow human being, not “a black son of a bitch wearing officer shoulder boards.” Jesse Arbor told of shaming a white senior officer who referred to a “goddamned nigger in the wood- pile ” after he lost a game of poker. Sam Barnes recalled that white people in the South preferred to address a black man by his first name rather than according him the respect that went with the term “Mister Barnes.” John Reagan, given only menial duties in World War II, had the satisfaction of being recalled to active duty shortly before the Korean War and eventually becoming executive officer of a fleet unit. Frank Sublett looked back on his naval experience as the highlight of his entire life. Justice William Sylvester White suggested that the Navy could have come up with many more capable black officers than just 13 when it finally decided to integrate its officer corps.
The Golden Thirteen demonstrated repeatedly that they were a remarkable group of men. This, the medium of oral history, preserves their stories so that others may benefit and learn from their example.
Justice William S. White
“Prejudice is not a logical thing,” Justice William S. White told Paul Stillwell in this excerpt from the new Naval Institute Press book, The Golden Thirteen. Here, in conjunction with Black History Month, Justice White recalls how the Navy defied conventional logic and commissioned the first black naval officers—he was one of them.
My father was a chemist and a pharmacist, a graduate of Fisk University and the University of Illinois. My mother was a public school teacher, a graduate of Fisk University and the University of Chicago. During the Depression, they sacrificed and I sent their only child to college and law school.
I knew that the opportunity to go to school was a precious opportunity which should not be wasted. Civil servants and small business people don’t live so high on the hog that they can afford to waste a chance for their son to go to school. My father used to tell me that his mother told him that almost anything you get, the white folks can take away from you, except learning.
Few professional fields were open to blacks when I was going to school. The choices were essentially law, medicine, religion, and education. Early on I found that law depended more on the powers of reasoning rather than memorization, so I preferred it to medicine, where you call a certain bone the tibia simply because that is its name. . . .
In 1939 a friend of mine who had gone both to Hyde Park High School and to the University of Chicago asked me how I would like to be an assistant United States attorney. I said, “I’d like it very much. I’d like to be a United States senator. I’d like to be President of the United States. What else is new?”
He said, “No, no kidding.” It developed that he had worked with a man who was about to be appointed the United States attorney, and he was going to clean the office and put in new people. He asked this friend of mine, Charles Browning, to suggest who should be the token black. Almost everything good that has happened to me since then has happened as the result of that chance conversation I had with Charles Browning. . . .