U.S. Navy Segregation, 1943

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy's First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 27-29:

At the bottom of the ship’s social hierarchy was the ship’s contingent of African American mess attendants, known after 1943 as steward’s mates. The Navy—and the Cowpens—was a microcosm of 1940s America, demonstrating its injustices as well as its virtues. One such injustice was the Navy’s policy on racial integration. Since 1932, African Americans had only been able to serve as enlisted men on Navy combat vessels, and only as steward’s mates, where they were effectively domestic servants. They did a variety of menial tasks, including cooking, waiting on officers’ tables at meals, and doing their cleaning and laundry.

It had not always been this way. The Navy was integrated throughout much of the nineteenth century, and during the Civil War as much as 20 percent of its sailors were Black. But in 1919, [Woodrow Wilson's] Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels closed the door to any recruitment of African Americans. FDR had served under Daniels as assistant secretary of the Navy, and as president he sought to strike a middle ground between the demands of White segregationists and civil rights activists. Under his watch, the Navy allowed African Americans in only noncombat roles such as messmen, shore workers, dockhands, and in construction battalions, and like the other armed services it remained racially segregated.

It was not until 1944, when James Forrestal became secretary of the Navy, that the service began shifting toward integration. But in the meantime, the Navy came down hard on any resistance to segregation. In the so-called Philadelphia Mutiny of 1940, fifteen African American messmen aboard the cruiser Philadelphia wrote to one of the leading Black newspapers—then a powerful voice in the fight for racial equality—warning other African Americans not to join the Navy, for they were little more than “sea-going bell hops, chambermaids, and dishwashers.” All fifteen were dismissed from the service, which denied them any veterans’ benefits.

Cowpens had a contingent of twenty-eight steward’s mates aboard under the supervision of a White officer, but unfortunately no account of their experience survives. The account of one messman on Independence gives us some idea of what their life aboard the Moo might have been like, however. Willie Thomas was an eighteen-year old from Cincinnati, Ohio, who volunteered for the Navy because he saw little opportunity to contribute to the war at home. Willie’s primary responsibility was taking care of the pilots’ ready rooms and officers’ quarters, making sure coffee and donuts were available after every mission. But like many steward’s mates across the Navy, he also volunteered for additional tasks that pushed the boundaries of the racial restrictions that prohibited him from combat duty. When the ship was under attack, he carried clips of 40mm ammunition from the ship’s magazines to its antiaircraft guns so they could maintain a steady rate of fire. Despite working in a system that was biased against him, Willie was upbeat about the relationship of the steward’s mates with the majority-White crew, saying that “we were all on this big ship together.”

While Willie was charitable about the state of race relations aboard, George Terrell thought there was some room for improvement. He wrote in his journal about how shocked he was to encounter overt segregation and racism for the first time. “I was young and impressionable and terribly innocent about these things,” he recalled years after the war. “Many of the older career officers on the ship were natives of the Deep South… they really believed that these black boys were inferior human beings.” Terrell gradually learned that the prejudice was not universal, saying how it was “not shared by all the officers, not even by all the southern officers. And it was certainly less prevalent among the lower ranks.” For example, the enlisted Marines’ berthing compartment was right next to the steward’s mates, and the two groups got to know each other and often socialized. Getting to know each other, Terrell concluded, taught him how “screwed up” segregation really was.