The Golden Thirteen: First Black Naval Officers in U.S. History

Black sailors served in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War and in the U.S. Navy from its founding in the 1790s. During the War of 1812, Black sailors comprised an estimated 10–20% of naval crews. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, after his victory at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, specifically praised his Black sailors' performance. Historian Carter Woodson documented that the early Navy was more racially integrated than the Army, primarily because ships required all available hands and couldn't afford racial exclusion as easily as land forces.

This integration was always of a specific kind: Black sailors served as seamen, cooks, and mess attendants — never as officers. The Naval Act of 1798 did not explicitly bar Black men from officer commissions, but no Black man received one. The practice of exclusion hardened over the 19th century, accelerating after the Civil War when the Navy was reorganized. By the 1890s, Black sailors were being systematically confined to the "messman's branch" — roles as cooks and servants for white officers — through Navy regulations. By 1919, a Navy policy directive formally restricted Black sailors almost entirely to messman duty. The U.S. Navy had institutionalized a servant class, and it was Black.

As the United States moved toward entering World War II, Black civil rights leaders pressed the Roosevelt administration to desegregate the military. A. Philip Randolph — who had built the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters into the most powerful Black labor union in the country — threatened to organize a mass March on Washington in 1941 unless Roosevelt acted on racial discrimination in the defense industry. Roosevelt, fearful of the optics of a race march during wartime mobilization, signed Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, banning racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal agencies.

The Navy interpreted its obligation as narrowly as possible. In April 1942, under direct pressure from the NAACP and Black newspapers led by the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, Navy Secretary Frank Knox grudgingly agreed to accept Black sailors in roles beyond messman duty — but explicitly maintained the ban on Black officers. The Army Air Corps had opened officer training to Black men (producing the Tuskegee Airmen) in 1941. The Navy held the line. Knox reportedly told colleagues that Black officers would create "intolerable" situations — by which he meant white officers would have to take orders from Black men.

By late 1942, there were approximately 100,000 Black sailors in the Navy, all enlisted, none officers. The Marine Corps accepted its first Black recruits in 1942 but also commissioned no Black officers. The Coast Guard, operating under Treasury Department rather than Navy regulations, commissioned its first Black officer — Ensign Joseph Jenkins — in April 1942, more than a year before the Navy moved.

By late 1943, political pressure from the Black press, civil rights organizations, and the White House had become impossible to ignore. Navy Secretary Frank Knox died in April 1944 (he was replaced by James Forrestal, who would prove more progressive), but even before his death, the Navy's leadership had been forced to plan for Black officers. They selected candidates in late 1943.

The selection process was itself a study in obstruction dressed as rigor. Twelve Black enlisted men were selected from across the Navy's ranks — chosen for educational credentials, performance records, and officer potential — along with one civilian, John Reagan, who was brought in directly. The candidates held degrees from institutions including Howard University, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago. Several held master's degrees. Their average educational level substantially exceeded that of white officer candidates going through the standard ninety-day officer training program.

They were sent to Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois — specifically to the segregated section called Camp Robert Smarts, named for Robert Smarts, the Black Civil War naval hero who had commandeered a Confederate vessel. They were trained in a program condensed to nine weeks rather than the standard twelve, while being assigned a heavier academic load than standard officer candidates. They were not told initially whether they would receive commissions at the end — this ambiguity was deliberate, designed to test their resolve. Several Navy officers expected them to wash out and were preparing to use that failure as evidence that Black men were unfit for officer duty.

They did not wash out. All thirteen completed the program.

On March 17, 1944, twelve men were commissioned as ensigns and one — Charles Lear — as a warrant officer. They were the first Black commissioned officers in the 168-year history of the United States Navy. Their commissioning ceremony was held quietly at Great Lakes. There was no public announcement. The Navy did not issue a press release. The Black press found out through their own networks and published the story, but the mainstream white press largely ignored it.

They were given the name "The Golden Thirteen" — the gold referring to the gold ensign bars of their commissions. The name was not official Navy terminology; it emerged from the Black community and Black press as a mark of honor. The Navy itself would not publicly celebrate their commissioning for decades.

A commission is a beginning, not an end. After receiving their commissions, the Golden Thirteen were assigned to roles that the Navy considered appropriate for Black officers: shore-based administrative work, supply operations, and — most significantly — recruiting other Black men into segregated enlisted roles. They were the Navy's proof that integration was happening. They were not given command of ships. They were not assigned to combat vessels. They were not placed on a path to advancement in the Navy's officer corps.

This was not accidental. The Navy maintained a formal and informal system of racial assignment that persisted through the end of World War II. Black officers were expected to serve in capacities that maximized their visibility as symbols while minimizing their authority over white servicemen. The logic: a Black officer giving orders to white sailors was considered a potential source of "friction." The resolution was to assign Black officers to all-Black units or to administrative roles where they would not exercise command authority over white personnel.

The Port Chicago mutiny of 1944 — in which 50 Black sailors refused to load ammunition after a catastrophic explosion killed 320 men, two-thirds of them Black, because Black enlisted men were disproportionately assigned to the most dangerous munitions work — illustrated the conditions under which Black naval personnel served. None of the Golden Thirteen were stationed at Port Chicago. But the conditions that produced the mutiny were the same institutional logic that shaped their assignments: Black naval personnel were tools to be used where convenient, not officers to be developed and promoted.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, ordering "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." The order created the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services — the Fahy Committee — to oversee implementation.

The Navy was among the slower services to comply. The Marine Corps resisted most aggressively. The Army maintained segregated units through the Korean War, where Black soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment served in segregated formations until the Army finally desegregated its units in Korea in 1951 — three years after the executive order. True integration of the officer corps, in the sense of Black officers having equal access to assignments, promotions, and command authority, took decades longer.

The Golden Thirteen's commissioning in 1944 was a crack in a wall that would take another generation to fully breach. By the time the Navy was genuinely integrated at the officer level — by assignment, promotion, and command authority, not just on paper — most of the Golden Thirteen had left the service.

For more than four decades, the Golden Thirteen were largely absent from official naval history. The Navy did not commemorate their commissioning. No monuments were erected. Their names did not appear in the standard histories of the Navy's integration. The men themselves — most of whom went on to careers in education, law, and medicine after leaving the service — were known to Black communities but invisible to the broader American historical record.

In the 1980s, historian Paul Stillwell began tracking down the surviving members and recording their oral histories for the Naval Institute Press. His work, published as The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers (1993), is the primary historical document of their experience. Several of the thirteen were still living when Stillwell found them; others had died without public recognition of what they had done.

In 1987, the Navy formally recognized the Golden Thirteen at a ceremony. In 2019, a portrait of the group was unveiled at the Naval Station Great Lakes — the same station where they had trained 75 years earlier. The building where they were commissioned is now a national historic landmark.

The pattern their story follows — barrier broken under duress, minimized at the time, suppressed in official memory, recovered by community historians decades later — is the same pattern documented across this archive. The Golden Thirteen were not an aberration. They were one instance of a recurring structure: Black Americans forced to prove their humanity at an elevated standard, followed by a deliberate effort to ensure that proof was never incorporated into the official record of what America is.