Military names can echo down through the ages, a fact underlined by the current fight in Washington, D.C., between President Trump and Congress, which has voted to strip the names of Confederate generals from several Southern Army bases.
The president has vowed that won't happen, but the battle might not be resolved before election day.
The Navy, meanwhile, has quietly charted a new course. A supercarrier now on the drawing boards will be christened the USS Doris Miller.
It's the first to be named for an enlisted sailor, and the first to be named after an African American.
Most supercarriers are named for U.S. presidents — the USS John F. Kennedy. USS Ronald Reagan. USS Abraham Lincoln. Henry Kissinger called them "100,000 tons of diplomacy" and that power has long been reflected in the Navy's conventions for naming them.
Doris Miller, who went by "Dorie" in the Navy, was one of the first American heroes of World War II.
During the attack on Pearl Harbor, as his battleship, the USS West Virginia, was sinking, the powerfully-built Miller, who was the ship's boxing champion, helped move his dying captain to better cover, then jumped behind a machine gun and shot at Japanese planes until his ammunition was gone.
As a Black sailor in 1941, he wasn't supposed to even fire a gun. This means that when he reached for that weapon, he was taking on two enemies: The Japanese fliers and the pervasive discrimination in his own country.
"One of the ways in which the Navy discriminated against African Americans was that they limited them to certain types of jobs, or what we call 'ratings' in the Navy," said Regina Akers, a historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command. "So, for African Americans, many were messmen or stewards. Dorie Miller was a messman, which meant that he basically took care of an officer, laid out his clothes, shined his shoes and served meals."
Akers said much of the attention at the time, and since, has been on Miller firing the anti-aircraft gun, which he wasn't even trained to do. In fact, it's a moment Hollywood briefly portrayed in several movies about the attack.
But Akers said what Miller did afterward is just as important: he began pulling injured sailors out of the burning, oil-covered water of the harbor, and was one of the last men to leave his ship as it sank, and continued getting sailors to safety after that.
An official Navy commendation list of those whose actions during the attack stood out mentioned a Black sailor.
But it didn't bother to name Miller, a 22-year-old sharecropper's son from Waco, Texas.