Customer Reviews

Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)

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While no one will claim that in America there has been a complete integration of races, there have been worthy changes for the better. One of the success stories has been the integration of the military, and a specific success has been the integration of the United States Naval Academy. It isn't the biggest or most dramatic story of successful integration, but it is worth knowing about as a microcosm of society. In _Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy_ (Texas A & M University Press), naval historian Robert J. Schneller Jr. gives a satisfying story of how once the Navy decided to make integration happen, it put plans into action that really did bring changes to the Academy's atmosphere and functioning. Not all was done as early or as quickly as it could be, but Schneller concludes that "... by the end of the twentieth century, the Naval Academy had become an unparalleled opportunity for African American men and women." His book not only looks at the Academy and the military, but at the history of integration in America, and it concentrates on memoirs and interviews with dozens of African American former midshipmen, giving personal histories to flesh out the social, political, and military history recounted here. There are some chilling stories of racism, but there are also accounts of heroes of both races who helped make the Academy something close to being bias-free.

Schneller's history starts after WWII, in 1946 when there was a modest effort to recruit black officers. President Truman's 1948 order requiring desegregation of the military had little initial effect. There were changes brought in the civil rights revolution, when in 1965 President Johnson wrote a memo to the Secretary of the Navy, noting that there were nine blacks among the 4,100 midshipmen, and wondering how to encourage more "... Negroes to apply." It was then that the Academy started to take seriously the problem of low numbers and discrimination, and credit must be given to the Navy's chain of command for the steps described here that made full integration thinkable. Schneller describes many aspects of the Academy's efforts: "regulations prohibiting discrimination, human resources organizations, extracurricular activities, racial awareness training, even the minority midshipmen study group". All of these "gave black midshipmen the sense that the Academy took racial issues seriously. The more impressive part of Schneller's story, however, is describing the ways that African American midshipmen survived in a discriminatory system. They learned they could generally count on their classmates regardless of race. "You had to pitch in and do things together," said one. "I helped out white guys and white guys helped me out all through my time there." Athletics, too, helped form bonds; a varsity player remembered, "I don't give a hoot what you played. If you were an athlete, other athletes looked out for you." The black midshipmen drew upon support from the black community within the town of Annapolis, which took great pride in them, and from the black workers within the Academy itself. The black midshipmen themselves formed close relationships with other black midshipmen, often with upperclassmen who could help with tutoring or intervene with a white upperclassman who was putting on undue pressure.

This is an optimistic book about a real success story. In its final pages, Schneller considers the other enormous social change, that of letting females become midshipmen. In many ways, this is the greater change; no one argues that black people should not be midshipmen nowadays, but thirty years after women were first admitted, there are those who seriously maintain that women have no place at the Academy, and prejudice against women seems more ingrained and difficult to eradicate than was that against blacks. This effort is ongoing, but the Academy has shown that organizations can resolve problems of prejudice. Schneller's book profiles the brave black midshipmen (and some brave white ones) who helped make it happen.

This is a good book, but not quite as comprehensive as I had hoped. That is why I gave it four instead of five stars. "Blue & Gold and Black" tells a success story in the integration of the races in the United States, how African Americans were incorporated into the United States Naval Academy. The author offers it as a microcosm of society. While the story is one of two steps forward and one step backward, Schneller concludes that "by the end of the twentieth century, the Naval Academy had become an unparalleled opportunity for African American men and women." This is a warm-hearted story, concentrating on memoirs and interviews with African American former midshipmen. Accordingly, it puts a human face on a story of overcoming racism. The overwhelming thesis of this work is this "overcoming of racism" story, but it is one that many would find far from complete.