new york university press New York and London www.nyupress.org Editing, design, and composition © 2007 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sherwood, John Darrell, 1966– Black sailor, white Navy : racial unrest in the fleet during the Vietnam War era / John Darrell Sherwood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4036-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8147-4036-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—African Americans. 2. United States. Navy—African Americans—History—20th century. 3. United States. Navy—History—Vietnam War, 1961–1975. 4. African American sailors—Social conditions—20th century. 5. African American sailors—Civil rights—History—20th century. 6. Protest movements—United States—History—20th century. 7. Racism— United States—History—20th century. 8. Race discrimination— United States—History—20th century. 9. Zumwalt, Elmo R., 1920–—Relations with African American sailors. 10. United States—Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title. DS559.8.B55S53 2007 940.54'5108996073—dc22 2006102458 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America 10987654321 Prologue Storm Warning Great Lakes Correctional Center, 8–9 February 1970 At 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, 8 February 1970, a group of black and white inmates glared at each other in Post 3 of the Navy’s brig at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, a large boot camp located forty miles north of Chicago. A dispute had erupted earlier in the day over the pro- gram to be watched on television: white inmates wanted to watch a movie, and blacks, a basketball game. Because whites outnumbered blacks in Post 3 by a large margin (eighty-five to nine), black prisoners contended that a simple majority vote would not solve the problem eq- uitably. The whites refused to listen, arguing that blacks often got their way at the facility. “Every time the niggers wanted something, puff they got it,” complained one white inmate.1 The black prisoners of Post 3 (a large prison dormitory) finally de- cided to settle the issue by force at dusk on 8 February. Reinforced by black prisoners from other posts, these inmates returned to the post, in- tent on solving the matter physically if necessary. Blacks and whites formed into two loosely knit groups at either end of the dormitory, with a significant number of both races mingling between the two groups. At about the same time, two black inmates struck two separate white in- mates. An unidentified white then threw a chair at the black group. See- ing the fight breaking out, many white inmates started fleeing out of the post. Marine guards, most of whom were white, allowed whites to leave but kept the blacks confined in Post 3. The guards then lobbed tear gas canisters into Post 3. The sparks from the canisters started small fires throughout the post, and prisoners trapped inside, both white and black, stumbled into the post’s bathroom to cover their heads with tow- els and sheets doused with water. Guards removed additional white prisoners from the post via a back door but still refused to let the blacks xi xii | Prologue out. After several more minutes, the guards finally removed the subdued black inmates without incident. A total of twenty-one men required medical treatment of some form after the incident ended, and five men were admitted to the base hospital. But the story does not end here. Guards segregated all of the brig’s thirty-six black inmates, whether or not they had participated in the riot, into Post 4 while the command decided how best to ease tensions at the prison. The next day, prison authorities decided to house all black prisoners in Post 5, the facility’s punishment post. The authorities argued that the move was for the blacks’ own protection, but the prisoners perceived it as a disciplinary move and refused to go. At 8:00 p.m., a group of angry whites, some armed with sticks and knives, suddenly broke out of Post 1 and headed toward Post 4. Some of the white inmates believed that armed racial conflict at the prison was inevitable and therefore decided to attack the black prisoners preemptively. “Why should we take beatings one at a time?” white inmate G. R. Tingley explained. “The general sentiment was, ‘Let’s go out and get it finished now. Let’s get them.’ ”2 A black prisoner, who saw the group heading for Post 4, claimed that some of the whites were yelling, “Come out nigger.”3 Rather than trying to thwart the white attack with riot troops, camp authorities forcibly evacuated the black prisoners from Post 4 and moved them to Post 5. Again, guards lobbed riot control gas canisters into the post and then shifted all the black prisoners three at a time to Post 5. Eleven men required medical treatment after the forced move, and five needed to be admitted to the hospital.4 Lieutenant Commander Dallas Pickard, the officer assigned to inves- tigate the affair, concluded that the decision to segregate all black pris- oners, regardless of their involvement in the disturbance of the 8th, into Post 5 was an “overreaction” and “acted to reinforce other instances of treatment which had been considered prejudicial.”5 Pickard, however, did not view the affair as general evidence of conflict between blacks and whites in the Navy. Despite noting racial tensions among individual inmates at the facility and pointing out grossly prejudiced behavior by the guards during the fight on 8 February and events that occurred the following day, Pickard blamed the whole episode not on racial unrest per se but on such factors as overcrowding, lack of trained correctional center staff, and aggressive leaders among both white and black groups. “The disturbances of the 8th and 9th of February 1970 would most probably have developed over any situation, had there not been racial Prologue | xiii tension to use as a vehicle for the outbreak of violence,” concluded Pickard in his report.6 Pickard’s findings allowed the Navy leadership to rest easy after this violent race riot. Military prisons, the report reasoned, were unique in- stitutions with unique problems—problems unconnected to the larger institutional culture of the Navy or the country as a whole. To quote William J. Corcoran, the Navy’s judge advocate general (JAG) in 1970, in his endorsement of the report: Persons confined at the Correctional Center are a part of the minority of servicemen who find it difficult to adjust to the requirements of the organization. The respective numbers of confinees at various posts, as noted above, tend to indicate that this is a matter of individual person- ality differences not afflicting disproportionately any particular ethnic group.7 Corcoran, like many influential Navy leaders at the time, refused to draw larger conclusions from thunderclaps such as the one that oc- curred at Great Lakes despite the fact that Army and the Marine Corps had already experienced severe racial strife in 1968 and 1969. His view, as stated in the report’s synopsis, was that “the racial aspects of the February disorders do not appear to have been associated with revolu- tionary or counter-revolutionary movements, nor deep seated animosi- ties.”8 It would take the racial unrest experienced on the aircraft carri- ers Kitty Hawk (CV 63) and Constellation (CVA 64) in 1972 to finally convince many of the service’s senior leaders that the Navy had a seri- ous problem with race relations. Even then, however, some retired naval officers as well as members of Congress and other government officials would continue to argue that the Navy’s racial unrest was not a reflection of “institutional racism” but the result of the actions of a very small number of black militants combined with a general atmosphere of “permissiveness” in the ranks. This permissiveness, these critics claimed, was much more dangerous to the service than racism and was a by-product of liberal reforms of the enlisted ranks initiated by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations (CNO). Zumwalt was one of the few high-ranking of- ficers in 1970 who believed that the Navy had a problem with institu- tional racism. A widely accepted definition of institutional racism can be found in xiv | Prologue Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s seminal book, Black Power (1967). They argue: Institutional racism relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti- black attitudes and practices. A sense of superior group position pre- vails: whites are “better” than blacks; therefore blacks should be subor- dinated to whites. This is a racist attitude and it permeates the society, on both the individual and institutional level, covertly and overtly.9 Carmichael and Hamilton go on to state that the institutional strand of racism allows people who are not overtly racist to benefit from inequal- ity in society and its institutions. In the Navy context, Zumwalt main- tained that institutional racism was endemic in the entire structure of the Navy from its smallest boats to its highest headquarters—a deep- seated, historically based form of discrimination that affected black per- sonnel of every rank and at every stage of their careers. Black Sailor, White Navy examines racial unrest in the Navy during the Vietnam War era in a number of ways. First, it explores the context of racism in the Navy. Was the racial unrest of 1972 rooted in the ser- vice’s history? If institutional racism existed prior to 1972, why did the Navy not suffer major racial unrest in 1968 and 1969—the period in which the ground services experienced widespread unrest? To put it dif- ferently, why did the ground services experience racial unrest three to four years before the Navy did? The book then takes a close look at the man most responsible for re- forming the Navy’s policies toward African Americans in the twentieth century: Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr.