US Coast Guard intergration during WWII.

first-person creative nonfiction narrative, active voice.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt made clear that African Americans would be integrated into the Coast Guard and Navy’s general ranks, Secretary of the Navy Knox announced in April 1942 that African Americans could train for all job specialties. The first group of 150 African American volunteers was recruited and sent to Manhattan Beach Training Station in New York in 1942. Here, they received instruction in seamanship, knot typing, lifesaving, and small-boat handling. Classes and other official activities were integrated, with sleeping and mess facilities still segregated. After the four-week introductory course, African Americans qualified for specialized training became radiomen, pharmacists, yeomen, coxswains, electricians, carpenters’ boatswains’ 2nd mate.
Organized induction and assignment of a limited number of African American volunteers were terminated in December 1942, when President Roosevelt ended volunteer enlistment of most military personnel. As a result, for the r remainder of World War II, the Coast Guard came under the Selective Service Law, which included a racial quota system.
Many African Americans continued to be assigned to steward duties and were often ordered to serve at important battle stations. However, the majority were assigned to shore duty, including security and labor details and working as yeomen, storekeepers, and other capacities.
With so many African Americans assigned to shore duty, manpower planners found it difficult to rotate white Coast Guardsmen from sea to shore duty without transferring African Americans to cutters, which would result in integrating the vessels. In June 1943, LT Carlton Skinner proposed that a group of African American seamen receive practical seagoing experience in a completely integrated operation. The Commandant agreed and LT Skinner was promoted to LCDR and assigned to the weather ship USS Sea Cloud (IX-99) as her commanding officer. He had an integrated crew of 173 officers and men, of whom four officers and 50 petty officers were African American.
The Coast Guard undertook the federal government’s first official experiments in desegregation. In 1943, the Coast Guard began sending African-American officer candidates through its Coast Guard Academy-based Reserve Officer Training Program and commissioned its first African-American officers. By late 1943, the Coast Guard assigned 50 black officers and enlisted men to the Coast Guard-manned USS Sea Cloud. The experiment proved successful and set the standard for integration in other Coast Guard and U.S. Navy vessels. Both the commissioning of African-American officers and the Sea Cloud experiment came a year before similar milestones in the U.S. Navy. By 1945, the Coast Guard also appointed its third black ship commander. In addition, five African-American women enlisted to become the first black females to don a Coast Guard uniform. African-American war heroes received numerous honors and awards, including the Bronze Star Medal, Navy & Marine Corps Medal, Navy Commendation Medal, Silver Lifesaving Medal, and Purple Heart Medal.
By the end of the war, 5,000 blacks had served in the Coast Guard, with one of every five reaching petty officer or warrant officer levels. These men and women included Jacob Lawrence, a crewmember aboard Sea Cloud, who became a famous modernist painter in the 1950s and 1960s. Others included SPAR Olivia Hooker, a distinguished professor of psychology at Fordham University, retiring at 87. Alexander “Alex” Haley enlisted in 1939 as a steward’s mate. She rose to become the first chief journalist in the Coast Guard. After 20 years, he retired to pursue writing. And won awards as the author of such books as “Roots” and the “Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Later, Haley received the first honorary degree awarded by the Coast Guard Academy and became the namesake of a Coast Guard cutter. In 1945, Lt. j.g. Harvey Russell became the third African American officer to command a federal vessel. After he left the service, he joined the Pepsi-Cola Company. In the early 1960s, Russell broke America’s corporate color barrier when he rose to vice president of that multi-national corporation. In 1943, Russell’s friend and Sea Cloud shipmate, Lt. j.g. Joseph Jenkins had received an invitation from the African nation of Liberia to serve as the civil engineer in charge of design and constructing that country’s infrastructure projects. However, Jenkins remained in the service and, after the war, returned to his hometown of Detroit, where he oversaw the construction of the city’s rapidly expanding freeway system. After the war, Coast Guardsman Emlen Tunnell became a professional football star with the New York Giants. He was the first African-American inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame. Experts today rank him as one of the 100 greatest players in NFL history.

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