Sam Barnes racked his brain one chilly morning in January 1944, wondering what he might have done wrong. Barnes, a popular African American petty officer working at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois, had been in the Navy for 15 months and had never been disciplined. Why, he wondered, was he being ordered to the white side of the segregated station, a command usually reserved for sailors who were in trouble?
The 28-year old Ohio native walked the mile from Camp Robert Smalls, the black-only camp at the northwest corner of the station, to the main offices and found several other black men waiting. He recognized a few faces, but most were new to him and none could say why they had been summoned.
Commander Daniel W. Armstrong, a tall, handsome, aristocratic-looking man with an upright gait and an immaculate uniform, looked the 16 black men over. He was the white officer in charge of the black camp, a man whose willingness to work with African American enlistees earned praise from the higher-ups in Washington.
“Do you know why you are here?” he asked.
Silence.
“Well, the Navy has decided to commission Negroes as officers in the United States Navy, and you have been selected to attend an officer indoctrination school,” Armstrong went on, as Barnes later recalled in an oral history edited by Paul Stillwell, a retired Navy officer, historian and author.
The statement was matter-of-fact, unemotional. Armstrong did not congratulate; he did not encourage; he made no comment about historical significance. And yet his simple sentence marked one of the most radical decisions the Navy had ever made. Officer positions in the U.S. Navy had previously been off limits to black men, and these 16 enlistees had been summoned from training schools and shore installations across the United States to break that color barrier. They were going to attempt to integrate the officer corps.
For the 16 men, the stakes could not have been higher. There were nearly 100,000 black men in the Navy. If any of them were ever to wear an officer’s uniform, if any were ever to command a ship or graduate from the Naval Academy, if any were ever to lead white men in battle, then these 16 would have to succeed. These men, who before the war had been metalsmiths, teachers, lawyers and college students—the children and grandchildren of slaves who had seen a family member lynched and been denied jobs because of their skin color—would have to prove that black men had the temperament for command and the leadership qualities necessary to wear the gold stripes.