First Class Page 18
He observed that a lot of the cadets had poor time management skills and were unpleasantly surprised by the effect of curfew on their grades. The heavy workload and high expectations at Dunbar had taught him discipline when it came to schoolwork. “What Dunbar did for me, it taught me how to study…. I didn’t have time. I learned to get to the meat of the assignment.”
As a high school student, Brown had worked from after school until midnight as a mail clerk to help support the family. His mother was a laundress, his father a truck driver. “My family didn’t have any money or any political drag,” he later explained. “I had a very limited time to study…. I was working nights and drilling and participating in sports.” In addition to working in a mailroom and running track, he was the cadet colonel of the Dunbar High School Cadet Corps.
Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Brown during his first class (senior) year.
United States Naval Academy
Hundreds of Negro high school boys (as well as girls intermittently, and then full time beginning in the 1940s) learned discipline, integrity, and perseverance in the competitive Cadet Corps. More than an after-school military training activity or a club, the Corps was a life experience, one that fed the Dunbar ecosystem of excellence. The goal of the Corps can best be summed up by the US Infantry Drill regulations and the training manual from which lessons were modeled: “The object of all military training is to win battles. Everything that you do in military training is done with some immediate object in view, which, in turn, has in view the final object of winning battles.”12 The immediate objective at Dunbar was getting a good education. The final object was advancing the race. And what was success? Disciples of the drill knew the answer: “Success may be looked for only when the training is intelligent and thorough.”13
At one point, military instruction was a mandatory subject for the Dunbar fellas. The Corps was made up of companies that consisted of platoons broken down into squads. The ranks of colonel, captain, and the like were based on academic standing and military aptitude.
The cadets were a part of everyday life at Dunbar. They could be seen marching in formation in the armory, the open center of the first floor of the Dunbar building. The space was about two hundred feet wide and quite deep. It was the gathering place for students. But, as the name suggests, it was where the cadets practiced formations and kept their Browning assault rifles. There was a firing range in the school. The cadets were expected to look sharp. The uniform was a cadet cap, cadet coat clean and pressed with the collar ornament of the company to which the cadet belonged, trousers clean and pressed, white shirt , policed black shoes, clean white gloves. A cadet’s uniform was to be worn to at all drills and inspected. If not in the armory, the cadets practiced formations and the manual of arms behind the school. The precision of the rifle drills required focus and instant recall. Upon hearing the booming command “Port arms!” it was second nature for a cadet to snap his rifle to a diagonal position in one swift movement, using the right hand to carry the firearm across the front of the body, with the butt of the rifle in front of the right hip, the barrel of the weapon perfect aligned between the neck and left shoulder and the gun held four inches from the body. And this was one of the many sequences to remember. “Right shoulder arms! Left shoulder arms! Present arms!” They practiced over and over and over. Each combination had to be committed to memory and was put to the test at the annual drill competition.
The drill competition was the event of the year. Companies from the Negro high schools appeared before thousands of people. After 1914, the crowd could swell to twenty-five thousand people packing Griffith Stadium to see Dunbar, Armstrong, and ultimately two other Negro high schools which came later—Cardozo and Phelps Tech—compete. Girls wore armbands to signify which company their sweethearts were in. One year President Coolidge and the First Lady made a surprise appearance to watch the young men. One of the drills in the competition was the response to a simulated attack. The faux fight was recalled by a reporter much in the same way that color commentary is provided for today’s sporting events.
One of the most pleasing spectacles of the drill was the extended order which came at the end of the competitive drill program. Each company advanced on the enemy composed of a detachment from the National Guard ambush. Starting from one end of the field the companies moved toward the enemy in squads and platoons and as one volley was fired after each advance. The enemy was so weak and the attack so strong that the former was compelled to seek cover.14
The instructors were both mentors and tormentors. They insisted upon full attention to detail and expected a full effort. But the graduates say the instructors taught them more than formations and precision. They taught them how to become men.15 One name comes up over and over again: Lieutenant Bill Rumsey, a military science instructor. Rumsey was encouraging and motivating. He was a teacher who was not concerned with a student’s social class, only that the student develop class and character while under his command. He wanted the cadets to think about the bigger picture, about life and life as a Negro in mainstream America. But he could also be about the moment. He once took the cadets to a competition in a cattle car because it had no seats; he wanted the cadets to arrive at the drill with the stiff creases in their trousers intact.16
The colored high school corps started a few years after the white high schools began their military instruction in the early 1880s. After a couple of ragtag years, the colored cadets made their first public appearance at Metropolitan Baptist church in 1892. There was only one company. The instructor, Major Arthur Brooks, who stayed on for twenty years, began as an unpaid volunteer. And the young cadets wore uniforms that were borrowed, too big, and required padding because the pencil-thin boys could not fill them out. For a time they only had wooden “rifles.” Any real arms they used were borrowed or decrepit. Although seventy boys made up the first organized company, the number was whittled to fifty-nine because that was the number of uniforms available after a fund-raising push. The first commander and founder of the cadets was a colored war hero named Christian Fleetwood, and his background made him the right man for the job.
Fleetwood stood five feet four inches tall, and three feet of it seemed to be comprised of his barrel chest. His obvious strength served him well when he was in the Union Army, especially on the September morning when he was part of a legendary two-pronged attack on the capital of the Confederacy, the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm. The whole operation was the brainchild of an officer whose effectiveness was questionable but whose dedication to integrating the armed services could not be equaled.
Major Benjamin Butler, a basset hound of a man, had repeatedly called for the inclusion of colored troops. “I deny the ignorance of the colored men of the South” was his operating principle and his answer to those who questioned colored men’s ability to fight.17 Major Butler handpicked the regiments of the United States Colored Troops, which included Christian Fleetwood’s Fourth Regiment, for the Virginia attack. On Wednesday morning, September 28, 1864, twenty-three-year-old Fleetwood boarded a gunboat, arrived at Deep Bottom, marched on land, and bivouacked overnight near Richmond. The next morning, before dawn, six regiments of colored troops formed a line and attacked the Confederate camps. Fleetwood described the day succinctly in a diary entry: “Moved out and charged with the 6th [regiment] at daylight and got used up … saved colors … marching in line and flank all day … saw General Grant and staff…. retired at night.”
The simple sentences do not describe the carnage or valor of that day. “Used up” refers to the hundreds of casualties—the battle, which spanned four days, would result in about five thousand soldiers being killed. “Saved the colors” refers to Fleetwood rescuing the American flag mid-battle after two others who had tried to do so were shot and killed. Fleetwood won the Medal of Honor that day for his heroism, one of the handful awarded to colored soldiers during the Civil War, many of them earned during this assault. A vindicated Benjamin Butler later wrote, “The capacity of th
e Negro race for soldiers had then and there been fully settled forever.”18
Christian Fleetwood, the first commander of the colored cadets, had convinced Butler of colored soldiers’ worthiness. The same was not true for Wesley Brown at the Naval Academy eighty-five years later. Despite all Brown’s training in the Cadets and at the hands of the fine Dunbar faculty, there were some things he simply could not control or even foresee at Annapolis. Brown received an extraordinary number of demerits—so many that it was obvious he was being hazed. As a result, his grade point average and class rank slowly sank. In some of his course work, Midshipman Brown received low marks. He discovered in some cases there was not an objective form of grading.
They called aptitude for the service and leadership. So this is the most subjective thing you could do because it was not a subject review. You can’t say, “Hey, this is unfair….” Even if that person is saying, “Well, based upon my experience as a Naval Officer, I don’t think this guy has it.” So as a result I was barely passing.
Demerits and poor performance reviews did not destroy his record at the time, though. “But I’m still in the top half of my class,” he remarked.
While Midshipman Brown knew that the other cadets talked about him, used racial epithets to refer to him, and wouldn’t sit near him, he was unaware of a persistent lie being told about him.
A fellow cadet approached him in private and revealed, “There’s a rumor that you are being paid by the NAACP. That you are getting money for every day you stay, and a bonus every year and a bonus if you graduate.”
This was news to Brown, but he found out it was considered the truth by many classmates, one of them ominously saying within earshot, “Well, I am going to make sure he earns his money.” However, after having a class with Brown in which he held his own, the fellow recanted. “You’re a nice guy and a pretty capable student,” he said to Brown. “But I decided the rumor is not true, because if the NAACP was going to pay someone, they would have gotten a much brighter, sharper student.”
At the time of our interview, the then seventy-nine-year-old Brown was quick to say that some cadets were cordial or decent to him or at least had the decency to ignore him. In his home office—full of files, clippings, and history books—he didn’t want to dwell on the negative parts of his experience and those who treated him poorly. He looks back at that time with the curiosity of a cognitive scientist investigating why some cadets were bigoted.
“Some were, some were. Now the question is why?” Brown posed the question to himself rather than rhetorically. “I don’t know. I’d have to look in somebody’s mind and say, ‘Is this guy just a natural-born racist? Is he doing this because his parents taught him that way?’ But logic says, this doesn’t make any sense at all. Or is he afraid that the upperclassmen will punish him because he’s friendly to me? The one person that helped me a lot was a guy named Jimmy Carter.”
That Jimmy Carter?
“That Jimmy Carter.” He smiled as he answered.
The former president recalled the time this way: “I had been at Annapolis for one year. I was in my second year when he came, and I was interested in getting to know what kind of person he was, and I was able to do this because both of us went out for the cross-country team. So, we were running together in training for the cross-country meets, and that’s when I first met Wesley Brown.” Sixty-seven years later, former president of the United States Jimmy Carter can easily recall those days. “I knew that some of the other midshipmen didn’t like the idea, and they were concentrating on doing what they could to force Wesley out of the Naval Academy, which was a gross violation of proper conduct.”
Carter was not trying to be a hero. He had spent his youth in the South playing with children of all hues. He didn’t see Brown as a threat or a problem. He saw him as a fellow student. “I just treated Wesley Brown like I would any other midshipman.” At the time it seemed like the natural thing for Midshipman Carter to do: lead by example, especially for his fellow southerners. But of course, President Carter knows Wesley Brown wasn’t just any cadet.
“He was brave. And I think he was an outstanding person. I think had he been timid or had he lacked courage or had he been arrogant or so forth and he would not have been successful. This was before Jackie Robinson played baseball, and so forth. So this was a very early time. And he was brave, and he was very intelligent. He was well behaved; he responded to hazing and quiet persecution with equilibrium…. This was before the country moved toward equality in the armed services. It was not until two or three years later.”
Carter remembers where he was when he heard about Executive Order 9981.
I was actually on a submarine after finishing at the Naval Academy. I was gratified when Harry Truman, our commander in chief and president, ordained that there should be no more racial discrimination anywhere in the military services. In the army, navy, coast guard, air force, and so forth. And the US Marine Corps. But this was the first glimmer anywhere in America of real equality between African Americans and whites as students. And it was an innovative time, and this was probably ten years before Rosa Parks sat in the front of a bus, before Martin Luther King Jr. ever got famous. So this was far in advance of trials where they measured education institutions for segregation and equality.
At the time Negroes, coloreds, blacks who answered the call to serve their country were treated as though they were there to serve the white soldiers whose decision to enlist was somehow more meaningful or important. Still, many Negroes wanted to and did fight for America, even if America didn’t support their equal rights. The sanctioned bigotry of the army, navy, air force, and marine corps is well documented and was experienced by many Dunbar/M Street graduates who chose to volunteer.
Ollie Davis graduated from M Street and lied about his age to volunteer to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898. After forty-two years of military service, Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr. attained the rank of general in the army, the first black to do so. The path to the four stars was frustrating for Davis Sr. and at times seemed futile. As a teenager he wanted to attend West Point and despite a strong family connection was told President McKinley would not nominate a Negro cadet for political reasons.19 Instead, Davis enlisted and then excelled. After his stint in the colored national guard, at the turn of the century he managed to obtain a commission to the regular army as a second lieutenant, becoming one of two colored line officers.
Davis’s rise was a problem for the army. He could not be superior to or command white troops, and his assignments reflected this reality. He was sent to teach military training at all-black colleges. He was stationed in Utah and Wyoming, became the attaché to Liberia, and was shipped to the Philippines for a while. No matter the assignment, he mastered it and was promoted for it—to a point. As a result, his two biggest contributions to the army were not made during firefights. One was the result of an assignment, after being made general, to advise President Roosevelt on race relations in the army at the start of World War II. General Davis traveled the United States and Europe to devise a strategy to handle the unsustainable state of things. His work figured greatly into the passage of Executive Order 9981. His other greatest achievement was his son, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. This son was able to accomplish many of his father’s dreams because of what his father instilled in him and what his father had fought to achieve for him and those who came after.
Benjamin Davis Jr. was the fourth black graduate of West Point, an achievement his father was not even allowed the chance to try. A talented man with great leadership skills, Davis Jr. was given an assignment that on the surface seemed to reinforce all the negatives of segregation in the military. Yes, you can train Negroes to fly planes, but you have to do it separately, with bad equipment.
The year was 1941, and as Davis Jr. wrote in his autobiography, “In 1941 the Army still regarded all blacks as totally inferior to whites—somewhat less than human and certainly incapable of contributing positively to its combat mission.”2
0 His assignment to lead a flight squadron trained at Tuskegee seemed like a political escape hatch for an army under pressure to cure its own racism. The group became known as the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, made of the best and brightest Negro pilots, many of them Dunbar graduates.
Roscoe Brown (Dunbar 1939), was a Tuskegee Airman for two years. He joined up right after graduating from college. “During that period of time I flew sixty-eight combat missions and shot down a jet plane over Berlin and blew up a train.” Brown was the first Negro pilot to shoot down an enemy plane in World War II. That was before the airmen got their most important mission: to escort white bombers behind enemy lines. Their record was flawless; they never lost a plane. When asked if he was treated better in Europe than in his hometown, Brown laughed and said, “That’s like asking if the sun shines.”
“Davis was a great leader.” Brown remembers. “He was very demanding. Fair. He was very disciplined. Our job was to escort the bombers, and he indicated if we didn’t stay with the bombers and try to shoot down planes on our own, he would court martial us. Being six three and ramrod straight when he said that, we knew he meant it.”
The Davis family handled military racism by being great. Others, like Dr. Charles Drew, publicly pointed out the ridiculous nature of racism in the armed forces. Dr. Drew took aim at one of the military’s most illogical policies: segregating Negro blood from white blood.
When Charlie Drew was a senior at Dunbar High School, he was known as a super jock, not necessarily someone who would become a super scientist. He played football and basketball, swam, and ran track. It was a good thing, too, because as the eldest of five and the son of a carpet layer, Charlie needed an athletic scholarship to go to college. His studies led him to a discovery that has saved millions of lives around the world.