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Article: African-american-coast-guardsmen-in-defense-of-america
The Coast Guard has served in every war from the American Revolution through the Persian Gulf Conflict. During World War I, 15 Coast Guard cutters, some 200 officers and 5,000 enlisted men went into action as part of the U. S. Navy. By World War II, the Coast Guard had 802 vessels, and its personnel manned 351 Navy and 288 Army craft. Shore stations increased from 1,096 to 1,774, and by the end of the War, Coast Guard personnel numbered 171,168.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt made clear that African Americans would be integrated into the general ranks of the Coast Guard and Navy, Secretary of the Navy Knox announced in April1942 that African Americans would be accepted in capacities other than messmen. The first group of 150 African American volunteers was recruited and sent to Manhattan Beach Training Station in New York in the spring of 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. African Americans who qualified for specialized training after the four-week basic course became radiomen, pharmacists, yeomen, coxswains, electricians, carpenters’ boatswains 2nd mate.
Organized induction and assignment of a limited number of African American volunteers was terminated in December, 1942, when President Roosevelt ended volunteer enlistment of most military personnel. For the remainder of the 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. The majority were assigned to shore duty, including security and labor details and working as yeomen, storekeepers, and in other capacities. The second all-African-American station (Pea Island was the first) was organized at Tiana Beach, New York. Other African Americans served on horse and dog patrols as lookouts for enemy infiltration along the coast.
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 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.
Prominent among them was the world-recognized American painter, Combat Artist PO3/c Jacob Lawrence, whose work is represented in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, Chicago Art Museum, and the Vatican Gallery. Jacob’s work has hung in the White House, and he has been featured on a Time cover, in an article in Fortune, and in many contemporary art books. Drafted into the US Coast Guard in October, 1943, Lawrence was given a Steward’s Mate rating. Upon assignment to the Sea Cloud, he obtained the rating of Public Relations (PR) PO3/c and was assigned the painting of documentary works of Coast Guard life.
Honored along with Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W.E.B. DuBois by New Masses magazine, Lawrence is currently Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Washington, Seattle. Although Sea Cloud was decommissioned in November 1944, its year of operation demonstrated that no racial incidents occurred and that the integrated crew was in every way as efficient as any other. The experiment paved the way for other African Americans to serve in crews not completely segregated. During World War II, the other Coast Guard vessel with a significant degree of integration was the frigate USS Hoquiam (PF-5), operating out of Adak in the Aleutian Islands during 1945.
A well-known example of African American military expertise was the crew of stewards that manned a battle station on the cutter Campbell (WPG-32) which rammed and sank a German submarine on February 22, 1943. Louis Etheridge, Captain of the African American gun crew, was presented the bronze medal on February 25, 1952, and a personal letter of congratulations from the Commandant. The crew earned medals for "heroic achievement."
One African Americans who died in the line of duty is Charles W. David, Jr., a messman aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Comanche (WPG-76) that came to the aid of a torpedoed transport in the North Atlantic. David repeatedly dived overboard to rescue several men. LT Langford Anderson, executive officer of the cutter, was the last man rescued by David, before he lost his life attempting to save others.
As the war progressed, African Americans advanced into the petty officer ranks. By August 1945, 965 African Americans were petty officers or warrant officers, often in the general services. Many of these officers worked at shore stations and served as instructors at Manhattan Beach, the customary commissioning source for African Americans.
Receiving commissions were Joseph Jenkins, who went from Manhattan Beach to Officer Candidate School (OCS) at the Coast Guard Academy. Jenkins graduated as the first African American Ensign in the Coast Guard Reserve in April 1943, almost a full year before African Americans were commissioned in the Navy. Harvey C. Russell assigned to the Hoquiam, located in the Philippines to serve as executive officer on a cutter in the Philippines, there he assumed responsibility of a racially integrated vessel shortly after the war. Clarence Samuels, a warrant officer, was commissioned as a LTJG and assigned to the Sea Cloud.
The Coast Guard was the first service to accept women into its academy and the first to assign them as commanding officers of armed vessels and air stations. Service by women in the Coast Guard goes back 50 years. The Coast Guard Women’s Reserve began in November 1942 during World War II.
In the fall of 1944 the Coast Guard recruited five African American women as reservists, four weeks after it was announced that the recruitment of women, except for replacements, would be stopped November 23, 1944.
Now fully integrated, the Coast Guard utilized African American personnel in every capacity during the Vietnam War. No longer are African American personnel limited from serving as integral team members in wartime or in the Coast Guard’s many peacetime humanitarian missions.
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