Beyond the Commission
In March 1944, the United States Navy commissioned twelve Black ensigns and appointed a thirteenth candidate as a warrant officer. Collectively remembered as the Golden Thirteen, these men entered an officer corps that had historically excluded African Americans from its ranks and continued to restrict most Black sailors to segregated service units. Their commissions represented an important institutional concession, but they did not immediately provide the authority, assignments, or professional opportunities customarily associated with an officer’s rank. The Navy therefore created a fundamental contradiction: it recognized Black men as commissioned leaders while maintaining a racial hierarchy that limited whom they could command, where they could serve, and how far they could advance. [1]
This research begins with that contradiction. Rather than treating the emergence of Black naval officers simply as one step toward desegregation, the project examines how race shaped the meaning and exercise of commissioned authority. Officer rank traditionally carried leadership responsibilities, professional status, and the expectation that subordinates would recognize an officer's authority. For the Navy's earliest Black officers, however, rank existed alongside racial restrictions that had not disappeared with their commissions. The project therefore investigates how the Navy reconciled these competing systems and how race affected assignments, command opportunities, promotion, and professional advancement.[2]
This subject occupies an important intersection of African American, military, naval, and institutional history. Historians have extensively examined Black military service, segregation within the armed forces, World War II, and the movement toward President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948. [3] Those histories establish an essential framework for understanding naval integration. However, focusing on commissioned officers offers another way to examine institutional change. The transition from excluding Black men from the officer corps to granting them commissions did not necessarily produce immediate professional equality. Distinguishing between obtaining rank and exercising its associated authority therefore represents one of the major historical problems driving this research.
Comparative analysis will further strengthen this approach. Although the Golden Thirteen serve as an important starting point, the project will examine additional Black officers when surviving documentation permits. Comparing assignments, duties, leadership responsibilities, promotions, and career trajectories can reveal patterns that might remain hidden within individual biographies.[4] The project will therefore use case studies to investigate the broader relationship between race and commissioned authority rather than assuming that one officer's experience represented all Black naval officers.
Such an approach also requires careful source criticism. Official records reflect institutional priorities and may obscure discrimination that appeared more clearly in personal testimony or contemporary Black newspapers. Conversely, memoirs and oral histories may have been produced decades after the events they describe.[5][6] Comparing these different forms of evidence allows the researcher to identify silences and contradictions while avoiding dependence upon a single institutional or personal perspective.
The researcher is prepared to undertake this work through academic training and sustained engagement with African American and naval history. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history and is currently pursuing doctoral study in the discipline. Her previous scholarship on Wesley A. Brown, the first African American graduate of the United States Naval Academy, examined the intersection of race, professional military education, and naval institutions and was presented at the McMullen Naval History Symposium at the U.S. Naval Academy. Her doctoral research continues her examination of African American experiences within U.S. naval history, particularly within naval aviation. Additionally, her work as a volunteer educator at the National Naval Aviation Museum provides experience interpreting naval history beyond the academic setting.
Primarily, this dissertation aims to look beyond the commissions. Receiving a commission represented an extraordinary achievement, but it also marked the beginning of a new struggle over what commissioned rank meant for a Black officer. Where could these men serve? What authority could they exercise? Could they command white sailors? How did their careers develop as official racial policies changed? By following Black officers beyond the moment of commissioning, this research seeks to uncover the distance between institutional change and lived reality. Their entrance into the officer corps demonstrated that one racial barrier had been breached. What followed reveals how much further the Navy still had to go.
Footnotes
Paul Stillwell, ed., The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993), 1–16.
Dennis D. Nelson, The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 1776–1947 (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1948), 147–74; Stillwell, Golden Thirteen, 17–42.
Michael Shawn Davis, “‘Many of Them Are among My Best Men’: The United States Navy Looks at Its African American Crewmen, 1755–1955” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 2011), 348–90.
Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–1965 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1981), 3–14, 74–102; Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: Free Press, 1986), 158–94.
Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History 55, no. 1 (June 1968): 90–106; Charles C. Moskos Jr., “Racial Integration in the Armed Forces,” American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 2 (September 1966): 132–48.
Stillwell, Golden Thirteen, 1–16; Robert J. Schneller Jr., Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 3–12, 141–74.