In September 2022, a congressionally mandated Naming Commission recommended renaming two Navy ships, the USS Maury (T-AGS-66) and Chancellorsville (CG-62), because of their ties to the Confederacy.1 Mission accomplished; however, to use a Southern analogy, the commission “stepped over an alligator to kill two bullfrogs.” The “alligator” is the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), an aircraft carrier named for a segregationist whose ideology was based on white supremacy.
With the Supreme Court’s decision striking down race-conscious admissions at civilian schools and the likelihood of a challenge to such policies at the service academies, it is important to understand why those policies exist and how state representatives in Congress helped shape the results we see today. It boils down to this: Southern legislators, including Mississippi Senator John Stennis, enacted an unwritten but effective policy blocking nominations of Black candidates to the military academies for decades.
President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948 by executive order, a move Senator Stennis decried. Stennis’s reply to a 1955 letter from a constituent disparaging Black soldiers (Figure 1) is illustrative of his position on racial integration in the military:
I agree with you 100% and I want to doubly assure you that I have done and I am doing everything that I possibly can regarding this grave and serious problem in our Armed Forces. In my years of service here I have constantly and continually stressed the very point you mention—that our boys have the chance to serve in all-white units.
Stennis would make good on his promise for decades to come, with devastating effect on the integration of the military academies.
One prominent example of this unwritten policy is the case of Major General Leo V. Williams, recently honored as a distinguished graduate of the Naval Academy. In his acceptance speech at the Naval Academy in May 2023, General Williams noted:
When one of my best friends, Edwin Shirley, and I became interested in the Naval Academy, it seemed we were invisible because the men who gave out the nominations in Virginia and across the American South didn’t want to see folks who looked like me have the privilege of matriculating in these hallowed halls. But we had the will, and our community found a way.
Another case is that of Calvin Huey, the first Black football player to play in the Army-Navy game, in 1964. After requesting a nomination from his home state Mississippi representative, Huey received a terse rejection letter, which stated he was not being recommended because “should you fail to graduate, it would be a stain on the state of Mississippi.”2 Undeterred, he received a nomination from a representative in California.
Many successful Black graduates left the southern states to seek nominations to the Academy. Their choices are largely lost to history, but in Blue and Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy, naval historian Robert Schneller notes: “Until the civil rights movement dethroned Jim Crow, no southern congressman was likely to jeopardize his political career by appointing an African American.” The first congressional nominations from the South that Schneller was able to identify occurred in 1967–68, following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.3
Naval Academy staff researched the archives and found that the ripples of this policy still have an effect.4 We compared the rankings of each state in terms of its demographic (in this case, percentage Black) to its rankings in terms of Naval Academy nominations. A ratio of 1.00 would indicate the nominations were proportional to the demographics of the state. By this analysis, most of the former Confederate states are below the 1.0 ratio, and of the 50 states, Senator Stennis’s home state, Mississippi, has the lowest ratio of all (see Figure 2).
Why This Matters Today
Generations of Black Americans were denied the opportunity to serve as military officers, not by law or policy, but through the congressional nomination process and the determined efforts of long-serving men such as Senator Stennis and Representative Carl Vinson. Collectively, Stennis and Vinson could have put forth more than 1,200 nominations from Mississippi and Georgia during their careers; extrapolate that to the 11 former Confederate states, and that number grows to more than 13,000.
If those nominations had included a proportion of Black candidates, the renewed affirmative action debate might be moot and the integration of military academies likely would have occurred much sooner than it did. Those lost nominations equate to generations of officers, mentors, role models, boosters, and alumni who could have encouraged subsequent generations of graduates.
The impact of this “unwritten rule” is stunning in its own right, but that may not be the most compelling reason for changing the name of the John C. Stennis; it is that it is offensive to Black Stennis sailors, some of whom reached out and told their stories. Sailors of all races assigned to the carrier, aware of the senator’s history of racism and opposition to civil rights, are choosing to not wear items emblazoned with his name ashore, an almost unheard of action for a member assigned to a ship or unit. One former John C. Stennis sailor said, “Every time I stepped across the quarterdeck, it felt like a slap in the face.” Another, a pilot, who learned the history of the carrier’s namesake after embarking, shared, “Every time I trapped on the deck after that, it was like an emotional gut punch.” Even the nickname of the ship—“Johnny Reb”—invokes the image of a white Confederate soldier, a tough fact for many members of the crew who may be asked to identify with that moniker. That Black sailors have fewer role models is a direct result of the actions of legislators such as Stennis. That this is the individual for whom their carrier is named robs them of something sailors on almost all other Navy ships have: a hero to look up to and emulate.
A Call to Action
Renaming the John C. Stennis is both prudent and necessary. Ultimately, it is not about changing history but learning from it and acting on what we have learned.
No commission or study is necessary. Change the name.
1. According to Navy records, at a cost of about $250,000 each.
2. Obituary of Calvin Huey, U.S. Naval Academy Athletics, 7 September 2018.
3. Robert Schneller, Blue, Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2008).
4. Data Collection from Naval Academy archives showing all nominee demographics from 1978 to 2020, released with permission.
