Author: Robert Luster

The following chronology follows the contributions of African Americansn in the history of the U.S. Navy courtesy of thev U.S. Navy History from its early years to the present day. The chronology is not all encompassing as the history of the achievements of African Americans in the U.S.Navy is still being written according to the U.S.,Navy.

1775-1783: African American Naval Participation in the American Revolution: Over 10% of the Continental Navy was African American during the American Revolution—a higher percentage than in the ground services. Even greater numbers of African Americans served aboard state naval vessels and privateers.

The Continental Navy recruited both free and enslaved Blacks, partly out of a need for laborers and partly because many African Americans were experienced seafarers, having sailed before with the Royal Navy, state navies, and merchantmen. Black sailors usually performed menial tasks on ships but some served in other roles, including carpenters and even pilots.

One of the most famous African American seaman from this era was James Forten, who enlisted on a privateer as a powder boy, and spent time on a British prison barge [1]. After his release, he became a successful sailmaker in Philadelphia and a prominent abolitionist.

A sizable number of African Americans identified with the British causes, especially after John Murray, the earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s royal governor, issued a proclamation on 7 November 1775 offering freedom to slaves and indentured servants who would leave their “patriotic” owners and join the British Army [2]. One sailor who allied with the British cause was Thomas Jeremiah, a prominent South Carolina free Black man, pilot, and fisherman. Jeremiah urged other African Americans to assist the Royal Navy in capturing Charleston harbor because Britain had come “help the poor negroes.” Accused of inciting a slave insurrection, Jeremiah was convicted, hanged, and his body burned by city authorities. Historians have estimated that a quarter of all escaped slaves who joined the British cause served in some capacity on British merchant and naval ships.

August 1798: Ban on Black Sailors: Shortly after the United States entered into the Quasi-War with France, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert banned “negroes and mulatoes [sic]” from naval service. This followed similar proclamations made earlier by the Secretary of War in March of the same year regarding the Marine Corps and the Army. Despite this official prohibition, Blacks maintained a consistent presence in the U.S. Navy throughout the Early Republic and the War of 1812.

1812: African American Naval Participation in the War of 1812: Blacks represent one-sixth of naval personnel in this conflict. They distinguished themselves at the Battle of Lake Erie and other significant campaigns. The USS Constitution Museum has identified the names of three African-American sailors who served on that ship during the War of 1812: Jesse Williams, James Bennett, and David Debias. By looking at the records of 6,000 American prisoners of war held at Dartmoor Prison in England, historians have estimated that 1,000 were Black men from privateers, naval vessels, letters of marque, or Royal Navy sailors who refused to fight against America.

3 March 1813: Reversal of Race Ban: The Navy officially reversed the August 1798 ban on African Americans sailors in the fleet, allowing for “persons of color” to serve on “public vessels” of the United States.

December 1819: First Seizure of Slave Ships by a U.S. Navy Warship and the Beginning of the Anti-Slave Trade Patrol: While in Africa on a mission to escort a ship of immigrants to Liberia, Cyane, under the command of Captain Edward Trenchard, captured nine small American slavers after discovering them at Rio Galinas in present-day Sierra Leone. This incident marked the first seizure of slave vessels by a Navy ship following America’s withdrawal from the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and its assurances to Great Britain in 1814 to work to end the slave trade. Enforcement of the slave trade ban was sporadic until the Navy deployed a permanent African Squadron in 1842.

13 September 1839: Five Percent Limit on Blacks in Naval Service: On 13 September 1839, acting Secretary of the Navy, Isaac Chauncey, issued a circular declaring that in view of complaints, the number of Blacks in naval service would be no more than five percent of the total number entered under any circumstances and no slave was to be entered under any circumstances. Commodore Lewis Warrington, Commandant of Gosport Navy Yard, compiled a list enumerating Blacks who had entered into service for the year prior, which revealed a higher percentage.

5 August 1842: Announcement of Racial Quotas: Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur promised southern Congressmen that “no more than one-twentieth part of the crew of any vessel” would be African American [6]. Although Upshur was a staunch advocate of naval expansion, his slaveholding roots as a plantation farmer on Virginia’s Eastern Shore allied him with southern law makers intent upon limiting Black participation in a growing U.S. Navy.

U.S. Brig PERRY Captures the Slaver MARTHA, June 1850
U.S. Brig Perry Captures the American Slaver Martha off Ambriz, Angola, June 1850 (NHHC USN 902981).

9 August 1842: The United States Establishes the African Squadron to Bolster the Anti-Slave Trade Patrol: With the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the United States and Great Britain formally agree to end the slave trade on the high seas.[7] The treaty’s anti-slavery provision called for each nation to “prepare, equip, and maintain in service, on the coast of Africa, a sufficient and adequate squadron, or naval force of vessels . . . for the suppression of the slave trade.” The agreement resulted in the formation of a permanent African Squadron of warships and cutters. In 1843, the United States sent a total of four ships carrying 88 guns to West Africa. This flotilla accounted for roughly 9% of the entire U.S. Navy at that time. The African Squadron participated in anti-slave patrols with the British until the start of the U.S. Civil War, April 1861. It captured about 100 slave ships. These anti-slave patrols represented the first international naval coalition established to combat human trafficking.

Despite these efforts, the slave trade increased in the 1850s, owing to the high demand for slaves in Latin America, the small numbers of British and U.S. warships relative to the expanse of sea space needing to be patrolled, and stringent rules of engagement that prohibited U.S. warships from searching and seizing French or Spanish flagged vessels and Royal Navy vessels from doing the same for U.S. flagged ships.

Black crew members sewing and relaxing on the forecastle aboard USS Miami (1862)
Black crew members sewing and relaxing on the forecastle of Miami (1861), circa 1864-65 (NH 55510).

1861: African American Participation in U.S. Navy during the Civil War: In a letter dated 25 September 1861, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles authorized the recruitment of escaped or liberated slaves in the Atlantic Blockading Squadron [9]. These former slaves made up a considerable number of Black U.S. Navy sailors in the squadron, and by extension, the entire enlisted U.S. Navy. Overall, twenty percent of the U.S. Navy was African American [10]. Blacks served on 700 ships in the U.S. Navy and eight received the Congressional Medal of Honor: Aaron Anderson, Robert Blake, William H. Brown, Wilson Brown, Thomas English, John Henry Lawson, James Mifflin, and Joachim Pease. After the Civil War, the Navy continued the process of short-term contracts for Black enlisted Sailors and excluding Blacks from the officer ranks until 1942.

Although the Navy Department did not establish a formal system of racial separation during the Civil War, Secretary Welles’s guidelines for recruiting and rating Black sailors limited their assignments to menial roles—landsmen and servants. Of the approximately 17,600 men whose base rating is recorded, more than 14,400 (or 82 percent) were rated as boy or landsman.

13 May 1862: Robert Smalls, a former slave and the pilot of the Planter, a Confederate transport, commandeered the ship with the assistance of other crew members and delivered the ship to the Union forces under the guns of five Confederate forts. He also delivered the captain’s codebook containing Confederate signals and a map of torpedoes that had laid in Charleston harbor. As an experienced pilot, he was able to convey other valuable intelligence to the Union Navy. Among those on board Planter were the wives and children of the crew members. Smalls later served in the Union Navy on Keokuk, and then again on Planter as a pilot and acting captain. After the war, Smalls served in the South Carolina House of Representatives, the South Carolina Senate, and in the U.S. House of Representatives.

21 September 1872: James H. Conyers became the first African American admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA). He was cursed at, spat upon and physically abused. Some of his classmates even attempted to drown him. He resigned in October 1873 because of hazing and poor grades. Two other African Americans attempted to break the color barrier at the USNA in the 1870s (Henry Edwin Baker Jr. and Alonzo Clifton McClennan) but pervasive racism and other issues prevented them from graduating.

1896: Segregation increases in the Navy: Following the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that constitutionally sanctioned separate but equal, or Jim Crowism, violence against Blacks increased and opportunities for Blacks decreased.

1898: African American participation in the Spanish American War: Despite the onset of Jim Crow, African Americans were still recruited for the Navy in sizable numbers in 1890s (9.5% of enlistments in 1890 alone). Most served as cooks, stewards, and landsmen but some worked as firemen, storekeepers, carpenters, water tenders, oilers, and other specialized billets. For the most part, they messed and berthed with shipmates from a variety of races and ethnicities, including white sailors, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos. None rose above the rank of third class petty officer.

There were other Black naval heroes as well from this war. Fireman First Class Robert Penn received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism aboard Iowa (BB-4) off Santiago, Cuba. According to his citation, “performing his duty at the risk of serious scalding at the time of the blowing out of the manhole gasket on board the vessel, Penn hauled the fire while standing on a board thrown across a coal bucket one foot above the boiling water, which was still blowing from the boiler.” No Black sailor has received this decoration since Penn.

1913-1917: Segregation Increases in the Navy: The Wilson Administration resegregated the Federal government in 1913 and by 1917, only three percent of the service was Black. In April 1917, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a strong proponent of segregation from North Carolina, justified a policy of segregation and institutional racism in a letter to New Jersey Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen. “As a matter of policy,” he wrote, “it has been customary to enlist colored men in the various ratings of the messman branch . . . and in the lower ratings of the fireroom; permitting colored men to sleep and eat by themselves.”

21 March 1917: Women enter the Navy: The Navy began enlisting women, known as Yeoman (F.), on 21 March 1917 when Loretta Perfectus Walsh, a civilian clerk at the Philadelphia recruiting center, became the first woman to enlist in the Naval Reserves, which later known as “Yeowoman and Yeomanette.” With the support of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, more women followed and by the end of World War I, 11,880 women had enlisted.

The first Black women to serve in the U.S. Navy entered through the Yeoman (F) program late in the war and worked in the Muster Roll Section at the Washington Navy Yard. Of those women, only the names of the “Golden Fourteen” are definitively known: Armelda H. Greene, Kathryn E. Finch, Pocahontas A. Jackson, Fannie A. Foote, Ruth A. Davis (nee Wellborn, and shortly Osborne during service), Olga F. Jones, Sarah Davis, Sarah E. Howard, Marie E. Mitchell, Anna G. Smallwood, Maude C. Williams, Carol E. Washington, Josie B. Washington, and Inez B. McIntosh.

All female yeoman were discharged by 1920. Congress then amended the Naval Reserve Act of 1916 that allowed any U.S. citizen to serve to read any male citizen.

1917-1918: African American Sailors in World War I: Six thousand seven hundred and fifty African American sailors served in the U.S. Navy during the First World War (1.2% of the Navy’s total enlistment) but were only allowed to serve as coal heavers, messmen, stewards, and cooks. There were no African American officers. Only a small number of African Americans remained in the Navy during the interwar period.

1919: Racial Unrest outside of Naval Bases: As part of the larger anti-communist “Red Scare” riots, white sailors and Marines attacked members of Black communities in Washington, DC, Charleston, and Chicago. These incidents were part of a series of white supremacist, racial, anti-immigrant, and anti-socialist riots that took place that summer across the country.

4 August 1919: Navy suspends first enlistments of African Americans because officers believed that Filipinos made better messmen than Blacks. Those African American sailors who had joined before August 1919 were allowed to serve until their retirement.

1932: Recruitment of African Americans resumes: The changing status of the Philippines in the 1930s led the Navy to resume recruitment of African Americans. In 1932, there were only 441 Black sailors in the Navy—half of one percent of the force.

May 1940: Jim Crow Navy: When Germany invaded France in May 1940, only 4,007 out of the U.S. Navy’s 215,000 personnel were Black—2.3% of the force. Most of these sailors served as mess attendants, officers’ cooks, and stewards.

Fall 1941: Pressure to Integrate Navy Mounts: Black leaders had advocated for desegregation of the armed forces and racial equality in the military for some time and a number of them met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the fall of 1941. In response to pressure from the NAACP and other Black organizations, Roosevelt suggested placing Black musical ensembles on battleships to facilitate race relations among the crew. He also called for 5,000 Blacks to be recruited to serve on small harbor craft and at naval shore establishments in the Caribbean. Black leaders’ opposition to the Navy’s racial policies persuaded Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to select a committee composed of naval and Marine Corps officers, and Addison Walker, a civilian special assistant to Ralph Bard, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Knox asked them to determine if there was evidence of discrimination in the Navy and Marine Corps based on race, creed, color, or national origin, and then recommend changes. The committee concluded that allowing Blacks to serve in other billets would disrupt naval operations, and thus no policy changes were needed. Addison Walker disagreed, maintaining that Blacks could be assigned to small craft and trained by white officers. He argued that racial tension was an obstacle to naval efficiency. Consequently, the committee produced one report, but Walker wrote another. He also resigned his position as a special assistant to Bard.

7 December 1941: Doris Miller was the first African American to be awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism on the battleship West Virginia (BB-48) during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He operated a machine gun on the ship and assisted the seriously wounded, including the captain, Mervyn Bennion. Miller was a mess attendant. Half of all Black sailors in World War II served as cooks, mess attendants, and stewards.

1 June 1942: Black Sailors enlisted into General Service: In January 1942, Secretary Frank Knox ordered the Navy’s General Board to devise a plan for the recruitment of 5,000 Blacks and to suggest a wider variety of duties. The General Board was responsible for studying all aspects of naval policy and making recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy based on its observations. After meeting, the board concluded that Blacks should be restricted to serving as messmen because there were few non-rated billets on patrol ships and integrating Blacks and whites in non-rated billets on larger ships would cause friction and lower efficiency. The board also concluded that “if restricting [Blacks] to the messman branch was discrimination, it was consistent with discriminatory practices against [Blacks] and citizens of Asian descent throughout the United States”.

The Board decided after at its second meeting in February 1942 to ask the Bureau of Navigation, responsible for personnel matters, to supply a list of stations and assignments for Blacks that included service units throughout the naval shore establishments, yard craft, and other small craft employed in Naval District local defenses, composite Marine battalions, and construction battalions. After some discussion, Roosevelt instructed Knox to implement the necessary measures. Consequently, the Navy announced on 7 April 1942 that Blacks would be enlisted in general service as well as the messman branch beginning 1 June 1942. On 1 February 1943, more than two thirds of the 26,909 African American sailors were messmen. The Navy’s decision not to make maximum use of all available resources 14 months into the war placed the burden of combat duties on white sailors.