In Black America; The Golden 13, with Dan C. Goldberg

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. I was reading something and I came across the orbit of one of the last surviving members of the Golden Thirteen and I had never heard of this group and I had passed in familiarity of course with the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo Soldiers but I had never heard of the Golden Thirteen so I started looking around for a little more information on it and there's an oral history collection by Paul Stillwell but there was nothing, no book, no real research that had explained how this came to be, how and why the Golden Thirteen happened and how it was possible that the Navy in 1942 when World War II had already started wouldn't even allow to train black men, would only allow black men as cooks and

cleaners to just two years later commissioning the first black officers. I really wanted to understand what had changed in the country, what was behind this movement and then of course who these men were and how they came to fit into that picture. The Ann Goldberg Healthcare reported with Politico and author of the Golden Thirteen, how black men won the right to wear Navy gold published by Beacon Press. Through all histories and original interviews with surviving family members Goldberg springed to life 13 forgotten heroes. He revealed the opposition needs men's face, the racist civil science, the regga condemnation and repeated epithets and burial views and even violence despite these immense challenges to Golden Thirteen persisted under the power of integration, the opportunity for African Americans that they succeed and the consequences that they failed. These 13 men knew they had to be twice as good to receive as much.

I'm Johnny Ohenson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, the Golden Thirteen, how black men won the right to wear Navy gold with Dan Goldberg in Black America. Because the program was secret, first of all, at Great Lakes there was a segregated training station called Camp Robert Smalls, which was named after a civil war hero. But they didn't want anyone to know they were training officers. So they kept these candidates in their own barracks. They didn't let them talk to other officers or other black and listed men. They were only allowed to talk to their families. And that's how they lived between January and March of 1944. In March 1944, 13 African American sailors became officers. The first African American men to wear the Navy gold stripes. Yet even then, the fight wasn't over. White men refused to salute them. They refused to eat at their table and refused to accept that African American men could

be superior to them in rank. Still, the Golden Thirteen persevered, determined to hold their heads high and yet set an example that would inspire generations to come. For two months, they lived like lab mice, and in the end, their test scores were the highest average of any officers class in the history of the Navy. Author Dan Goldberg spent eight years recounting their journey. This diverse group of men, some with wives, some with cause degrees, and some without a high school diploma, proved it was not the color of the skin, but the content of their character. Recently, in back America, spoke with Dan Goldberg. I grew up mostly in New Queens, and then a little bit on Long Island. I went to school at SUNY Binghamton, a state school in New York, and then got my first job. I lived for a while out in California, about 90 miles north east of Los Angeles, and what's called the Antelope Valley, and then I moved back east for work.

Any brothers and sisters? I have one younger brother who's a teacher in North Carolina. What sparked that interest in journalism? I always like telling stories. I've always enjoyed explaining how and why things happen and how the world is and why. So I always wanted to find a way to talk to people in sort of a narrative fashion and make and find interesting things about the world that I could explain. So how did a healthcare reporter come up with an idea to write about the first African American offices in the United States, maybe? That's a good question. I was reading something and I came across the O-Bit of one of the last surviving members of the Golden Thirteen, and I had never heard of this group, and I had passed in familiarity of course with the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo Soldiers, but I had never heard of the Golden Thirteen, so I started looking around for a little more information on it, and there's an oral history collection by Paul Stillwell, but there was nothing, no book, no real research that had explained how this came to be, how and why the Golden Thirteen

happened, and how it was possible that the Navy in 1942, when World War II had already started, wouldn't even allow to train black men, would only allow black men as cooks and cleaners to just two years later commissioning the first black officers. I really wanted to understand what had changed in the country, what was behind this movement, and then of course who these men were and how they came to fit into that picture. And the more I researched it, the more I thought this is just an amazing story, and I really want to tell it. Now it took you eight years to write this book, what was your first step? The first step actually was to, I interviewed James Hare Jr., the son of, and he's since passed unfortunately, he was the son of one of the men, he happened to also live in New York, and that's why I was able to reach him first just because it's easy to get to. And we went out to a Starbucks, and I asked him to tell me about his dad, and tell me every detail he could remember, and all of a sudden I realized that the story had legs.

There was a lot here, and these men were so interesting, and their backgrounds were unimaginable to most people in the 21st century, although it's an interesting time to say something like that, I guess. But I just, I couldn't get their stories out of my head, and that's usually a good sign that you're onto something. Now obviously we cannot cover the whole book. It's a fascinating book, besides the men you gave me and those who read the book and I did what was life-like in society, but also in the Navy. Well let's start with President Roosevelt. Tell us about him during that period. Sure, sure. So President Roosevelt had, was juggling to competing interests. On the one hand, there were northern liberals who were pushing him to be more progressive on civil rights. In particular, they wanted him to have equality in the military and in the workplace.

As America was arming for war and factories were going into production, there were signs on factory walls that basically, if not literally, said no black people need a plight, and often they used harsher language, obviously. And on the flip side, there were southern Democrats who later would become Dixie Kratz, who were telling the president that if he wanted to maintain control of the Senate, if the Democrats were to keep the South, he could do nothing to provide any greater opportunity for black men. He had to keep them essentially as serfs. And so throughout the late 30s and early 40s, Roosevelt tries to balance these competing interests. Some of the ways in which he does that have been made quite famous, you know, Elinor Roosevelt for example, was always a little bit out ahead of him. And of course, you know, at that time, he could have ranged her in if he wanted to. He could have been more harsh, but he had this famous line where he used to tell people, well, that's my wife.

What am I supposed to do? And he would chuckle about it. But in reality, one of the ways in which he was able to move the ball, even if it was only a few yards, was to allow his wife to push for progress in ways in which he probably couldn't have set it. And so as we get closer to World War II in 1940 and 1941, what the dominant concern among African-American civil rights leaders becomes the military? Will there be equality in training? So black men have the same opportunities that white men have to learn new skills that everyone realizes are going to be incredibly valuable after the war. And there's a huge civil rights push with a particular focus on the Navy, where as I said earlier, black men were only allowed at that point to be cooked since cleaners. They weren't even trained to be engineers who are metalsmiths or anything like that, quarter masters, what have you. So the Secretary of the Navy is absolutely against it. Any integration he fears will lead to inefficiency, people will revolve, and there's no time to

integrate when they have to deal with the people of the Navy. Frank Knox, correct. Yes. Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, who was a Republican and actually ran against Roosevelt in 1936. He was the candidate for Vice President. But he was also a ardent believer that Hitler was the world's greatest threat, and that's why Roosevelt put him in the cabinet. He did not believe that integration was the right move in 1941. And it was Roosevelt who overruled him. Roosevelt said, I think there's something we don't have to go all the way at once, but there's something we can do. We can find some way to train black men and give them some opportunity. And throughout the first half of the war, it is the President who sort of just pushes a little bit here, a little bit there, for more opportunity for black men. And that is a large part of what gets us to 1944, where you have the first black officers. Now I don't mean to take anything away from the civil rights leaders, heroes like Walter Weiss, who led the NAACP, or A. Philip Randolph. These were very important figures who were pushing the President, and reminding him that

the black vote, which had only recently turned to Democrats, could easily turn back if he didn't deliver on his promises for more opportunity. Now of all the 16, 13 actually was commissioned, plus one, why did you begin the book with Jesse Arbor? That's a great question, nobody's asking about it, I love that question. The reason I began it that way is I thought I probably related to him most of all, I just really enjoyed, I never met any of these men, they all passed before I started the research. But the stories I heard about Jesse Arbor were the most enjoyable to me. And some of them didn't make it in the book, but he seemed to have a, as I said in right at the beginning, a cheeky sense of humor, didn't take himself too seriously, and years later when the men talked about their own relationships, they always highlighted Jesse Arbor as sort of the one that brought everyone together with some off-color remark or some inappropriate joke that could break the tension.

And I just thought that's the kind of glue that holds the group together. And I'll share one quick one with you, obviously when they were first commissioned, they were paid very little respect, white men across the street to avoid saluting them. But years later, as the times changed, they got more and more respect and some accolades. And Jesse Arbor once turned to a friend and said the only problem is I'm too old to drink all this free whiskey they're now giving us. And I just thought that the reunion, right? Yeah, one of the reunions. And I thought that's a person who has the understanding both not to take his work serious but not himself. Now, let's talk about James Hare, the H-A-R Hare instead of the H-A-R-E Hare. Yeah, so what happened with James Hare is he grew up originally in, well, he spent most of his adult years in Florida, a four-pierced Florida. And he was during the Depression, he was begging for work, he was working at a drug store owned by a family named The Brown. And James Hare was very light-skinned.

In fact, in the 60s, he used to pass his white when he would drive down south and be able to rent a hotel room at motels and hotels that were otherwise segregated. So he was light-skinned and his employers said, you know, you'll make a lot better in the world if you change the spelling of your name to the white way, which was H-A-R-E. And the reason they thought that was because there was a British tennis player named Charles Edgar Hare, and he spelled his name H-A-R-E. So James Hare, who normally spelled his name H-A-I-R, thought, I don't really care how they spell my name as long as the Czechs clearing every couple weeks, so sure. That's how I'll spell it if that's what you think makes a good, for a good employee. He went into the Navy with his name H-A-R-E. And after, you know, a couple decades over the years, he reverted it when he started his own family to the original spelling, but he never told the Navy. So 40 years later, when the Navy starts having reunions, they can't find James H-A-R-E. Hare. And they just assume he's dead.

And that's how James Hare ends up missing the first five reunions for the Golden Thirteen. Right. Right. When you were researching this, did you have an, obviously, you were searching their stories, but were there any particular eye-high moments that incurred, I mean, in terms of the men? With the men and the research that you were ascertaining? Yes. And a couple of them came from when I spoke to the wives. I was fortunate enough to speak to Ms. George Cooper before she passed. And, you know, for them to be able to give me the flavor of what it was like for her to be with her husband in the 1930s and 40s in Virginia. And what it was like to feel that racism and feel that hatred from people, even as her husband, were a military uniform and was ready to die for his country. I think there's no substitute for hearing something like that firsthand. I mean, the anecdotes are great, but when you can hear somebody's visceral bitterness

over how they were treated, that did a lot to help me at least try to understand what my life must have been like. But there was an idea of once these individuals were selected, and we're going to, well, let me back up. Obviously, there was a vetting process for these individuals to be selected. Tell us about that. Yes. So, once the Navy in late 1943 decides that they are ready to train African-Americans as officers, they have hundreds of candidates to choose from. And they window it down based on white officer recommendations. And then these men are all go through an FBI vetting. The FBI comes and visits some of their childhood homes, asks what kind of backgrounds they have. They were looking to see if there were any involvement with communists, any involvement in the labor movement, which at the time was associated with communism. Are they troublemakers? Do they start fights? Anything that might lend itself to giving the Navy a bad name.

And then, so once they narrow it down, they bring these 16 men back to Great Lakes Naval Training Station, which is just north of Chicago. And they inform them that they are, in fact, going to attempt to go through officer candidate school. But they can't tell anyone. The Navy doesn't want to let anyone know what's going on in case it fails. Now, they had a whole section to themselves, they're great late. That's right. Because the program was secret, first of all, at Great Lakes, there was a segregated training station called Camp Proper Smalls, which was named after a civil war hero. But they didn't want anyone to know they were training officers. So they kept these candidates in their own barracks. They didn't let them talk to other officers or other black and listed men. They were only allowed to talk to their families. And that's how they lived between January and March of 1944. Who was the commanding officer? The commanding officer at the time for Camp Robert Smalls was tenant commander and then commander Daniel W. Armstrong, whose father actually had founded Hampton Institute, which is a famous school in Virginia.

And that's partly how he got the job. He told the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, that he was familiar with how to train and work with black men. He had a very paternalistic attitude toward black and listees at the time. And so he convinced Frank Knox that he would be the right person to lead this new training of black men. And how did Hampton Institute play in this endeavor? They served as a technical school for what was then below deck ratings. So if you were training, for example, it would be a quarter master, you stayed at great lakes and got your advanced training there. If you were going to be an engineer or a machinist mate, you went to Hampton in Virginia after your basic training. And you did 12 to 16 weeks, depending on your specialty, at Hampton in Virginia. At Hampton was led by tenant commander and then commander Downe, who had in, everyone who worked under him, talks at him very glowingly. He was not nearly as paternalistic as Armstrong, at least according to the men's recollections, but very progressive for his day.

If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr., and you're listening to End Black America from KUG Radio and we're speaking with Dan C. Goldberg, healthcare reporter with political and author of The Golden Thirteen, how black men won the right to where go. Dan, talk to us about the December 5th, 1942 executive order, 927. That, so late 1942, there's concern about, well, let me take a step back for a second, actually. For the first year of the war, the Navy does not accept black men from the draft. They are too concerned that if they take everybody who's drafted, they'll have to integrate ships and that can't happen according to Secretary Knox. So they'll, people who are drafted into the Navy are just not inducted, they're sitting on the sidelines, especially African Americans. By the end of 1942, it's pretty clear that is not going to work if in a prolonged war against both the Germans and the Japanese. And so Franklin Roosevelt, and December 5th, 1942, as you mentioned, signs executive

order, 9279, and that ends volunteer enlistments for men between the ages of 18 and 38. So that, in a couple months by the beginning of 1943, all men entering the Navy would come through the draft. And what that has the practical effect of doing is it means that black enrollment is about to explode, and that Frank Knox would no longer be able to turn black men away. And that is a huge turning point, because 10 months later, in September of 1943, it becomes obvious that there are so many black enlistees, and there are no black officers, and the political pressure select to mount again, we can't have 60, 70, 80,000 black men in the Navy, and zero black officers. So it's a huge turning point. Talk to you about the V12 program. The V12 program was an officer training program that combined college and officers. It was announced as a way to sort of bring up men who are already getting educated in college into the Navy officer program.

And what was interesting about it is that when it was announced, no mention was made of whether it was going to be a segregated or integrated program. And the Navy just was silent on the issue. Of course, back then, many black men just thought, well, if it's the Navy, it must be segregated. So many didn't apply. But the Navy never said it wouldn't admit black men. And so a few do attempt to get in, and a few actually do. What happens is that Frank Knox asks President Roosevelt whether it will admit black men into the V12 program, and Roosevelt gives him a two-word reply, but he says, of course, but Knox doesn't let anyone know it until after the entrance exam has been given. And so at the end of World War II, I believe a few dozen black men have actually graduated the V12 program, but no one knew whether they would when it first began. Now this group of men, the 13th were the 16 that actually went off to officer training school. First group, some were old, some were younger, some were college educated, one didn't have

a high school diploma. So in your mind, I, what do you think the Navy saw these individuals? I think there are a couple things. One, almost all of them are athletic, and I think that did help. I think the fact that most of them were in, you know, prime physical condition made a difference. I think what the Navy was really looking for was character, and there's some evidence of that, you know, some of their instructors talk about it contemporaneously that these men were chosen because they weren't going to, they weren't going to open their mouths. You know, they were going to be, they were going to follow orders, sort of, sort of the same way that if you remember Branch Rickey talked about Jackie Robinson, that there was this idea that yes, you are going to face an enormous amount of disrespect, of humiliation, of racism, but you're not going to lose your temper, that you can understand that there is a bigger goal out there, and I think that, more than age, more than education, was

really something the Navy strove for, and two of the Navy's credit, they picked very intelligent men. They could have set these men up to fail if they chose, but I think it was Armstrong and down to help select these men. I think they wanted to make a real effort to pick candidates who could succeed, and obviously they did. And Adelaide Steven actually made this happen. So that's a great question. So Adelaide Stevenson is to use a cliche, the straw that broke the camel's back. Right. Adelaide Stevenson, who I'm sure your listeners know, with the two-time Democratic nominee for President in the 1950s. But during World War II, he was Frank Knox, the Navy Secretary, speechwriter, and probably closest confidant. And so they traveled everywhere together. They had lunch together, they played golf together, and Adelaide Stevenson was one of the most liberal members of the Navy's hierarchy at the time. In fact, Knox used to joke and call him his little new dealer, because Stevenson was

an absolute acolyte of Franklin Roosevelt. And so it was Adelaide Stevenson, who in September of 1943, looks around the Navy, looks at all the protests that had gone on about the military inequality, and says to Frank Knox, we've got to do something about this. We have to have a black officer. And one of the arguments he makes, he knows he can't appeal to Knox's sense of racial justice. So he tells Knox, look, all the educated black men are choosing the army, because they know there's more path for advancement. If we want to keep up, if we want the Navy to have the best fighting force, we have to open up opportunities for black men. And then he tells Knox something that's very smart. He says, don't make a big deal about it. We've got to treat it as a matter of course, like of course we would do this. So that's why there's no graduation ceremony, no honors, no flag ceremony, nothing like that. But it was actually, in its way, it was probably the right move, because then there was no backlash.

It just sort of happened as if it was for ordain. And this is a $50,000 question here, man, who coined the term golden 13? Captain Edward C. Crest, and if you want, I'll tell you where you can make that check out too. Captain Edward C. Crest, in 1977, he was a Vietnam veteran, and only one of the golden 13 stays in the Navy, and that's Dennis Nelson. And for 20 years, Dennis Nelson pushes for more recognition, not only for his own group, but for black officers in general. He keeps trying to open doors, and probably made a few enemies along the way for doing so. And by 1977, you know, the civil rights movement has already happened, the Vietnam War has happened, and the Navy is now looking to recruit more black men. And they suddenly look at the golden 13 as a source of pride, as something that can be singled out for recruiting. And so there's a reunion, the first reunions in Northern California. And Captain Edward C. Crest, coined the term the golden 13 as a way to sort of do a little

catchy PR. And they have reunions almost every year for about a decade after that. Now when they completed training, and they took the exams, they scored higher than their white counterparts, and some of the tests they had to take twice. Yeah, correct, correct. The Navy couldn't believe how good their scores were. They just, it was so, it was taken for granted that black men couldn't possibly score as well on exams as white men. And so, yes, some of the exams they were given a second time, and in fact they scored higher the second time. And you know, some of that, as obviously it proves that the color of your skin has nothing to do with your intelligence. There's also these men probably more than any class in history work together. You know, I mean, even today you go to anapolis or West Point, you want to be the top of your class.

I mean, you may help, you know, you may be courteous, but there's some competition with your classmates. I didn't happen here. On the first night these men got together, they understood that none of them could fail, that they had to be the best class ever just to get the same recognition as white folks. So they helped each other. They taught each other the material. You know, when they were done with their lessons in during the day, they stayed up well past curfew to teach each other the material. And because they were older than your typical officer class, they had life experience. There was an attorney there. There was a quarter master there. There were teachers in the group who knew how to convey complicated material. You know, there was a mechanic in the group who could explain how a boiler worked. And so they worked together. And that also really made a difference. And you know, it makes for a good story, obviously, but it shouldn't be taken for granted that these men did not compete with one another, that they had this sort of three musketeers motto from the beginning. Now, then, obviously, once they completed training, they were basically reassigned to what they were doing.

They weren't commissioned to be on ships, but obviously that changed in a month or some after. Right. So when they first are commissioned, the Navy has no idea what to do with black officers. The idea of a black man commanding a white man, especially in battle, is too absurd for them to even think about. So for the first couple of months, they're assigned sort of menial tasks. You know, they give a lecture on V.D., you know, they're patrolling the California coast in a converted yacht with two officers. It takes a few months before the Navy is ready to give them real assignments. And even then, none of these men during World War II see any battle. Dan Goldberg, health care reported with political and author of The Golden Thirteen, how black men won the right to where the Navy go. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions as to future in black America programs, email us at inblackamerica at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station your heart is over.

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