Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy's First Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality (review)

Breaking the Color Barrier discusses the efforts to integrate the U.S. Naval Academy as well as the experiences of the first six African-American midshipmen. Using archival sources along with the memoirs of midshipmen and naval officers, Robert J. Schneller analyzes how the Naval Academy responded to the integration demands of African American and white civilians, civil rights activists, and politicians, and how the lives of the individual African-American midshipmen were affected. He argues that an African-American midshipman's success in any given time period "depended upon national politics, the Navy's racial policy, other midshipmen's racial attitudes, and the black midshipmen's own abilities" (p. x).

Race relations at Annapolis always seemed to mirror those of American society and since segregation was fully entrenched in America between 1865 and 1945, it was very hard to find a congressman who was willing to appoint an African American to Annapolis; only about twenty-four African American men received appointments during that time.

During Reconstruction, national politics demanded that Navy and Annapolis officials level the playing field for the three African Americans appointed during the 1870s. Because Annapolis leaders condoned social segregation, white midshipmen were able to harass African-American midshipmen and eventually prevent them from graduating. Academics were always hard but they were particularly hard for African Americans who were once forbidden to educate themselves.

During the Jim Crow era all African Americans were returned to a state resembling enslavement and between 1919 and 1933, African-American civilians were barred from the Navy altogether. The only ratings available to African Americans who enlisted between the world wars were as cooks and stewards and Annapolis maintained its color barrier.

By the 1930s, the Great Migration had allowed African Americans to elect African-American congressmen and African-American activists saw integrating Annapolis as another step on the way to securing full equality. More African Americans would have become midshipmen between 1929 and 1941 had they passed the entrance exams but Navy officials falsified the test results.

While the two African Americans who did matriculate in the 1930s received some backing, they did meet resistance and received even less support from the Academy's Executive Department, thus ensuring that they would never graduate.

Many changes would have to occur before the first African-American midshipmen would graduate. One was the pressure of African-American politicians in the 1930s and 1940s. The increased social and ethnic diversity of incoming classes during this period allowed for more tolerance. But nothing made a bigger impact than the shift in official naval policy required by the demands of World War II—manpower demands called for a more inclusive policy that would accept all recruits regardless of their race.

The bright, athletic, likable Wesley Brown came to Annapolis in 1945. Several upperclassmen tried to drive him out by overloading him with demerits but Brown but was determined to succeed—and succeed he did. But his experience was very different from that of his predecessors. Brown not only had administrative support but also the support of a number of white plebes and upperclassmen, including future president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. In 1949 Wesley Brown became the first commissioned African-American officer in the U.S. Navy.

One criticism does arise. Dr. Schneller notes that West Point was more adept at graduating minorities than Annapolis but he never really explains why.

This is a fine narrative history of the struggle to make America keep the promises made by the Fourteenth Amendment. This book will be of particular...