Navy LST Was Island In Ocean Of Racism

As an African-American during World War II, Vernon Thompson felt he had a haven from racism aboard the Navy ship where he served as cook. The prejudice Thompson experienced off ship -- such as having his Naval service delayed until enough eligible blacks enlisted or being shooed from places that served his white colleagues but not blacks -- wasn't allowed on board by his captain, Gordon Moore, of Vicksburg. ``The guys I was with on the LST (landing ship tank) 529 had no prejudice,'' said Thompson, now 80 and a resident of the Kalamazoo area for nearly 60 years. ``They would eat with you, talk with you,'' he said. ``I never experienced racial problems.''
Moore was part of setting that tone, and the two forged a friendship that lasted decades until Moore died in 1990. But whatever camaraderie individuals might have had during World War II, Thompson and others experienced the limits placed on blacks and other minorities by the military establishment. The segregation that pervaded civilian life was also prevalent in the armed forces. There were separate units for black soldiers. Or, depending on the branch of the service, blacks were often limited to menial jobs. At the time Thompson joined the Navy in 1943, minorities ``could be stewards, cooks, domestic workers, things like that,'' he said. Of 130 people aboard the 529, Thompson was one of five blacks. Though he loved to cook and wanted that job, the imposition of such strictures ``would concern me now, but there was nobody to fight for you then, so you accepted that and you tried to make the best of it,'' he said. The war hit during a time when America was also ``a domestic battleground where arrests and riots occurred simultaneously with foreign service,'' according to Christopher Paul Moore's 2005 book ``Fighting for America: Black Soldiers -- The Unsung Heroes of World War II.'' Moore's book called the participation of blacks in the country's wars ``one of the richest veins of historic contributions to be mined by supporters of equal rights.'' In the 1940s, black leaders of the day campaigned for a ``double V'' victory, urging ``African-Americans to support the war effort as a way to fight racism,'' according to Moore. Thompson, who is from Baltimore, waited months after enlisting before there were enough other eligible black enlistees to train together. The Navy didn't mix racial groups during training of servicemen, he said, and afterward only reluctantly. Twenty-five was the magic number, and Thompson was told, ```When we get 24 more, you can come in.' ... That was their rule.'' In the book ``The Invisible Soldier,'' author Mary Penick Motley writes, ``The black soldier was invisible in the U.S. Army during World War II because he was not mentioned; he was invisible in the Navy because, until President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9279 in December 1942, the black American was hardly there.'' Following the order, the Navy began to accept an increasing number of black enlistees and draftees, according to Motley's book. In 1939, fewer than 4,000 blacks served in the military, according to Moore's book; by 1945, the number had swelled to 1.1 million. Thompson doubts whether today's men and women in the military know their history. Go ``in the service now and you mix with whites, everybody,'' he said. ``... The younger people don't realize what we went through to make it that way. (Now) you can follow your education wherever it will take you.''