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The Golden Thirteen - The first black American officers

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The mysterious messages came in different forms, but the recipients all felt the urgency. Jesse Arbor was in the midst of a poker game when someone told him a car was waiting downstairs and his trainwould leave in 35 minutes. He didn’t even have time to get some of his clothes out of the washing machine. James Hair was out on a tugboat when he was sent back to shore to retrieve a big brown envelope. As he broke the red wax seal, what he found inside wasn’t an invitation. It was an order to report to a location north of Chicago. That order was delivered to sixteen men around the country. They ranged from their mid 20s to mid 30s and came from varying walks of life —the group included a mechanic, a bookbinder, a porter, a lawyer, and a sheet metal worker. It was January 1944, and they had no idea what was in store for them. In the heat of World War II, they would have a chance to make history. They were about to become the first Black men to enter officer training in the U.S. Navy.

Among the branches of the military, the Navy was known to be particularly prejudiced. Just a quarter century earlier, the Navy had banned Black citizens from enlisting altogether. When the policy finally changed, Black men were limited to servile roles as cooks and shoe shiners. Now political pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt had cracked the door open for them to join the officer ranks, but many leaders doubted whether they were smart enough to command white sailors. When they arrived for officer training, the Black candidates were in their own cohort, segregated from the white sailors. They endured racial slurs and demeaning comments from the very instructors who were assigned to teach them. To them, the message was clear: they were expected to fail.

Some of the men had additional reasons to doubt themselves. A few had struggled academically in the past. Jesse Arbor was a C student who had failed introductory economics, and Charles Lear hadn’t made it past tenth grade. And William “Syl” White had no military experience at all, having just finished his basic training at boot camp. “It was demanding,” White recalled. “Officer training was kind of like fighting in the dark.” To make matters worse, with the country at war the training period was cut in half. The candidates had to complete a full semester of coursework in just ten grueling weeks. They would wake up each day at 6 a.m. to march, take eight hours of classes, and study well into the night. They were tasked with mastering seamanship, navigation, gunnery, law, naval regulations, aircraft recognition, signaling with flags and Morse code, and survival—all in record time. In a typical Navy officer training class, only three quarters of candidates passed their exams. But that first class of Black officer candidates didn’t just scrape by—all sixteen of them soared far above the bar. Leaders in Washington were immediately suspicious. To prove they hadn’t cheated or benefited from grading errors, the men had to retake some of their exams. They ended up scoring even higher, finishing with a collective GPA of 3.89 out of 4.0. Years later, they would learn that they attained the highest marks in Navy history. Their potential was no longer hidden.
Thirteen of the candidates ended up being called to serve as Navy officers.[*] As the first group of Black men in America to wear gold stars and stripes, they’re known as the Golden Thirteen. Instead of succumbing to the forces of gravity weighing them down, the Golden Thirteen managed to rise above them. As Samuel Barnes observed, “We were determined to succeed in spite of the burden that was being placed on our shoulders.” The Golden Thirteen got something right that the rest of us often get wrong. In the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, it can be tempting to give up. It’s just too hard; the forces against us are just too strong. At times like this, we’re advised to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. The message is that we need to look inside ourselves for hidden reserves of confidence and know-how. But it’s actually in turning outward to harness resources with and for others that we discover—and develop— our hidden potential. When the odds are against us, focusing beyond ourselves is what launches us off the ground.

Since Navy tradition held that not everyone would make the cut, officer candidates tended to see one another as rivals, not teammates. Yet the Golden Thirteen met in their barracks and made a prosocial vow: All for one and one for all. “We decided early in the game that we were all going to either sink or swim together,” Cooper stated. “Fortunately, at least one of us was already familiar with almost every subject we were exposed to.” To manage the overwhelming course load, the Golden Thirteen resolved to rely on one another. They would become sponges by pooling and filtering the knowledge in the room. Each member would teach his expertise to the rest of the group. When they got their textbooks, they went through the topics and waited for someone to shout out, “That’s mine.”