They Got The Highest Scores. The Navy Failed Them Anyway

In 1944, the US Navy set up its first 16 black officer candidates to fail, giving them eight weeks to complete a 16-week course.

When they passed with the highest scores in history, the Navy’s response was a stunning betrayal.

By the end of World War II, the United States Navy had perfected the art of exclusion.

The system was so thorough, so deeply embedded that it had effectively erased black men from naval leadership for generations.

The degradation had accelerated in 1893 when the Navy created the messmen and steward branches, ratings specifically designed to segregate black sailors into servant roles.

From that point forward, black men entering the Navy could only work as cooks, cleaners, and personal attendants to white officers.

They were, as the black press accurately described them, seagoing bellhops.

But even that limited service was stripped away in 1919.

After World War I, the Navy stopped enlisting black men entirely.

For 13 years, from 1919 to 1932, no black Americans could join the service at all.

The few who had enlisted before the ban were allowed to stay until retirement, but no replacements would follow them.

When the Navy finally reopened enlistment to black men in 1932, it was exclusively for steward positions.

By June 1940, there were 4,07 black personnel in a navy of 170,000.

All were enlisted.

All but six were stewards.

Not a single one could become an officer.

This wasn’t accidental neglect.

It was deliberate policy articulated clearly in official documents.

A 1917 memo from the Secretary of the Navy explained the reasoning.

Limiting black sailors to certain ratings prevented them from achieving positions of authority over whites.

The Navy was willing to accept black labor, but only if it came with built-in subordination.

The contrast with the army was stark.

By World War II, the Army already had a black general.

The first black army officer had graduated from West Point in 1877, 67 years earlier.

The Navy had none.

Zero black commissioned officers in nearly two centuries of existence.

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 should have changed everything.

The nation mobilized for total war, and every branch of the military faced desperate manpower shortages.

Black men volunteered by the thousands, eager to serve.

The Navy rejected them or channeled them into steward positions.

The response from civil rights leaders was immediate and fierce.

The NACP, the black press, and activists across the country recognized that this was a moment that demanded action.

They weren’t willing to repeat the experience of World War I when black Americans had deferred protest in the name of patriotism, only to face lynchings and brutal repression after the armistice.

This time they insisted on what they called the double vive campaign.

Victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home.

If black men were going to fight and die for American democracy, that democracy needed to include them.

The Navy’s response to the mounting pressure was grudging and minimal.

In April 1942, under direct orders from President Franklin D.

Roosevelt, the Navy finally opened general service ratings to black men.

They could now train as quarter masters, machinists, electricians, real technical positions, but they trained separately at a segregated facility called Camp Robert Smalls within Great Lakes Naval Training Station.

By January 1944, there were nearly 100,000 black sailors in the Navy.

They worked as technicians, operated equipment, performed skilled labor.

12,000 more were enlisting every month.

Yet not one of them could be promoted to officer.

The rank required to lead men and command respect.

The absurdity was becoming impossible to ignore.

First Lady Elellanena Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Adlay Stevenson applied increasing pressure on Navy leadership.

How could the service function with 100,000 enlisted men but zero black officers? Who would lead these men? How could the Navy justify asking black families to sacrifice their sons when it refused to allow those sons any path to leadership? The Navy’s solution was calculated.

In January 1944, they would commission black officers, but under conditions designed to prove that black men couldn’t handle command responsibility.

On January 1st, 1944, 16 black enlisted men reported to Camp Robert Smalls for officer training.

They’d been selected from across the Navy based on their exemplary service records, their education, and their leadership potential.

Most had college experience.

Several had advanced degrees.

Some were athletes.

All had demonstrated exceptional ability in their enlisted roles.

The 16 men were Jesse Arbor, a Pullman Porter and Taylor from Chicago, Philip Barnes and Samuel Barnes, no relation despite the shared name, Dalton Boore, who’d attended college in Arkansas, George Cooper, already a chief petty officer.

Reginald Goodwin, who would later become a successful attorney, James Hair, Charles Lear, Graham Martin, Dennis Nelson, known for his flamboyant personality.

John Reagan, a Chicago native, Frank Sublett, who grew up on Chicago’s Northshore.

William White, who had both a bachelor’s and law degree from the University of Chicago, Augustus Alves, a former merchant mariner.

JB Pinkney and Lewis Williams, a social worker and union organizer.

On their first day, they received the training schedule.

The standard officer training course lasted 16 weeks.

The Navy was giving them eight.

The message was unmistakable.

The Navy expected a 25% attrition rate for white officer candidates in the full 16-week program.

By cutting the time in half while maintaining the same curriculum, Navy leadership was engineering failure.

If these black men couldn’t complete the accelerated program, it would prove, or so the reasoning went, that black men lacked the capacity for officer responsibilities.

The 16 candidates understood exactly what was happening.

They’d been set up.

Their failure would be used to justify continued exclusion.

Their success was the only way forward.

In the oral histories collected decades later, the men recalled making a crucial decision in those first days.

Samuel Barnes later explained, “We decided not to compete with other members of the group, so we had many study sessions together.

We were determined to succeed in spite of the burdens that would be placed on us.

We knew that we were the foot in the door for many other black sailors, and we were determined not to be the ones who were responsible for having the foot removed.

They would work together.

They would ensure that every man succeeded.

Not most of them, all of them.

Their training facility was segregated from both the white officer candidates and the black enlisted men.

They lived in their own barracks, drilled separately, ate alone.

Some of their white instructors made their contempt obvious.

One instructor later admitted, “I just want you to know that I tried to make the course difficult so that you would not be successful.

The physical racism was constant.

White enlisted men crossed the street to avoid saluting them.

Even though they outranked the candidates, they were black.

And that superseded military protocol in many minds.

The subtle hostility was everywhere.

So the 16 men adapted.

Lights out was at 10:30 p.

m.

That’s when their real studying began.

They covered their barrack windows with blankets and sheets so no light would escape.

They studied by flashlight until the early morning hours.

Each man brought his particular expertise, technical knowledge, academic skills, practical experience, and they taught each other.

They created study groups that broke down every subject.

They quizzed each other relentlessly.

They worked through problems together.

No one was allowed to fall behind.

When one man struggled with a topic, the others stayed with him until he mastered it.

The pace was brutal.

They were covering 16 weeks of material in eight.

The subjects ranged from naval regulations to navigation, from ship handling to military law, from engineering fundamentals to command principles.

Every day brought mountains of information to absorb, procedures to memorize, concepts to understand.

They worked 20our days.

They survived on minimal sleep.

They drove themselves beyond exhaustion.

And they did it while carrying the weight of knowing that failure meant not just personal disappointment, but the destruction of opportunity for thousands of black sailors who would come after them.

In March 1944, the 16 candidates took their final examinations.

When the scores came back, every single man had passed.

All 16.

Zero attrition.

More than that, they’d scored higher than any officer candidate class in Great Lakes Naval Training Station history.

Their collective grade point average was 3.

89 out of 4.

0.

The Navy’s response revealed everything about the assumptions underlying the entire program.

High-ranking officials in Washington refused to believe the results, and all black class couldn’t possibly outscore every white class in history.

The scores had to be wrong.

The men must have cheated somehow.

The 16 candidates were ordered to retake their examinations.

Think about that moment.

They’d completed an accelerated program specifically designed to ensure their failure.

They’d worked twice as hard to learn the material in half the time.

They’d achieved the highest scores in the station’s history, and they were being told their achievements didn’t count, that they’d have to prove themselves again.

The humiliation was calculated and deliberate, but the men returned to their study groups.

They reviewed the material again, and they took the tests a second time.

All 16 passed again.

Their scores actually improved slightly.

The 3.

89 average stood.

The Navy ran out of excuses, but it found one final way to maintain the illusion of black inferiority.

Despite all 16 men passing with record scores, only 13 would be commissioned.

12 men would become Nsigns.

One man, Charles Bird Lear, would be made a warrant officer, a rank below commissioned officer status.

The remaining three, Augustus Alves, JB Pinkney, and Lewis Williams would be returned to the enlisted ranks.

No official explanation was ever provided for why three men who had passed every test would be denied commissions, but the calculation was clear.

With this pass rate, the black class’s success rate would match the average white class.

The Navy could commission black officers without admitting they’d performed exceptionally.

On March 17th, 1944, 12 men were commissioned as enens in the United States Naval Reserve.

Jesse Arbor, Philip Barnes, Samuel Barnes, Dalton Boore, George Cooper, Reginald Goodwin, James Hair, Graham Martin, Dennis Nelson, John Reagan, Frank Sublett, and William White.

Charles Lear received his warrant officer commission.

Together, these 13 became the first black officers in US Navy history.

There were no graduation ceremonies, no celebrations, no public acknowledgement of what they’d achieved.

The Navy kept their commissioning quiet, releasing minimal information to the press.

For three decades, they would be known simply as those negro officers or those black officers.

The name Golden 13 wouldn’t be coined until 1977 when Captain Edward Serest, himself, a black Vietnam veteran assigned to Navy Recruiting Command, created the term as a public relations tool to inspire a new generation.

Receiving a commission should have meant respect, authority, opportunity.

For the 13, it meant navigating a new form of discrimination.

They wore the gold stripes.

They held the rank, but the Navy had no intention of treating them like real officers.

Their assignments made this clear.

Navy policy explicitly barred black officers from serving on combat ships or commanding white sailors.

So the 13 were given positions that kept them safely segregated, training black recruits at shore facilities, overseeing all black logistics units, commanding harbor tugs and small vessels with mostly black crews.

Samuel Barnes was assigned to run athletic programs at Great Lakes.

He was a valued member of the base community.

His work was recognized as excellent, but he was never permitted to enter the officers club.

None of the golden 13 were.

They held officer rank, but officers clubs across the Navy remained whites only.

When Barnes shipped out to the Pacific in 1945, his assignment underscored the Navy’s true view of black officers.

He became division officer of logistic support company 64, an all black steodor unit performing manual labor, loading and unloading ships in Okinawa.

This was the typical assignment for black officers, overseeing labor battalions, doing menial work.

Frank Sublet’s experience mirrored Barnes’s.

After working in Navy machine shops, he was eventually deployed as executive officer of a steodor battalion at naval operating base anywhere.

Manual labor units led by black officers.

This was the Navy’s vision of integrated leadership.

The daily indignities were constant and calculated.

White enlisted men routinely refused to salute black officers, violating basic military protocol with impunity.

Officers clubs emptied when the 13 entered.

Dining facilities made it clear they weren’t welcome.

Housing was substandard or non-existent.

The men couldn’t fight back.

Any display of anger, any confrontation would be used as evidence that black men lacked the temperament for command.

They had to remain calm, professional, and above reproach, even as they endured treatment that would have ended the careers of officers who subjected them to it.

One of the instructors who trained the Golden 13 later recalled visiting them after they’d been commissioned.

He found them eating alone at a table.

When white officers entered the mess, they moved to different tables rather than sit with black officers.

The instructor noted the absurdity.

These men had been trained to lead, but they couldn’t even share a meal with their peers.

Dennis Nelson, always outspoken, later described applying for a regular Navy commission after the war.

When asked what basis he had for requesting acceptance, he replied, “I’m just going to reverse the question.

” What reason would you have for denying it? He became the only member of the Golden 13 to make a career of the Navy, serving 20 years before retiring as a left tenant commander.

The story of the Golden 13 would have profound consequences, even if those consequences took years to materialize.

In July 1948, 4 years after the 13 were commissioned, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, officially desegregating the US military.

The existence of black Navy officers, the proof that they could perform excellently despite institutional obstruction, had made continued formal segregation indefensible.

The path wasn’t smooth.

The order desegregated policy, not culture.

Black officers continued facing discrimination for decades, but the door was open.

By the time the Golden 13 held their first official reunion in 1977, the Navy had transformed.

There were hundreds of black officers.

Black sailors served on every ship, in every rating, at every rank.

The segregated service of 1944 had given way to something approaching actual integration.

The men themselves went on to remarkable civilian careers.

Samuel Barnes became athletic director at Howard University and served on the executive committee of the NCAA, the first black person to do so.

Dalton Boore taught at the Navy Engineering School and later at MYT.

William White became a US judge, serving as presiding judge of Cook County Juvenile Court and later as justice of the Illinois Appallet Court.

Regginald Goodwin became a successful attorney.

Their achievements validated what had always been true.

The Navy’s exclusion of black officers was never about capability.

It was about preserving white supremacy within the institution.

In 1987, the Navy reunited seven surviving members to dedicate building 1405 at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in their honor.

Today, that building, where new recruits first arrive for basic training, is named the Golden 13.

Every sailor entering the Navy walks through their legacy.

In 2006, North Chicago broke ground on a World War II memorial honoring the Golden 13 and Doris Miller, the black mess attendant who manned anti-aircraft guns at Pearl Harbor despite no combat training.

The memorial stands at Veterans Memorial Park, ensuring their stories remain visible.

The Golden 13 story reveals something essential about institutional racism.

It’s designed to create outcomes that can then be used to justify the racism itself.

The Navy didn’t just exclude black men from officer positions because of prejudice.

It created conditions, limited training opportunities, accelerated timelines, hostile instructors, segregated facilities specifically intended to produce failure that could be presented as evidence of black inferiority.

When that engineered failure didn’t materialize, when the 16 men refused to accept the script written for them, and instead achieved record-breaking success, the Navy simply refused to acknowledge it.

It forced them to retake tests.

It denied commissions to three men who’d passed.

It kept their achievements quiet.

It assigned them to positions designed to minimize their visibility and impact.

This wasn’t accidental bureaucratic dysfunction.

It was systematic suppression of evidence that contradicted racial ideology.

The Navy couldn’t allow these 13 men to disprove the assumptions underlying segregation.

So, it worked to ensure their excellence remained invisible.

The men understood this perfectly.

That’s why they made their pact to ensure everyone succeeded.

That’s why they studied together until dawn.

That’s why they maintained composure under conditions designed to provoke failure.

They knew they weren’t just fighting for themselves.

They were fighting for every black sailor who would come after them.

Decades later, at reunions and commemorations, the surviving members would be asked about their experience.

Their responses emphasized the weight they’d carried.

Jesse Arba said simply, “I remember our first thought when we got our commissions was relief.

Then it was determination that we would be an image for others and that they could not say that because we failed others were not capable of doing it.

The Navy had given them an impossible task and expected them to fail.

They succeeded spectacularly and in doing so they proved that the impossible was only impossible because institutions made it so not because people couldn’t achieve it.

Frank Ellis Sublet Jr.

The last surviving member of the Golden 13, died in 2006 at age 86.

By then, the Navy he’d helped integrate was unrecognizable from the one that had reluctantly commissioned him in 1944.

Black officers serve at every level of the modern Navy.

In 1971, Samuel L.

Gravely Jr.

, who’d been commissioned through the V12 program in November 1944, just months after the Golden 13, became the first black admiral in Navy history.

Today, black sailors have commanded carrier strike groups, led major naval operations, and served as senior advisers at the highest levels of defense.

None of that was inevitable.

It happened because 13 men refused to let the Navy’s manufactured barriers define what was possible.

They studied by flashlight in covered barracks.

They retook tests they’d already passed.

They endured humiliation and discrimination while wearing the uniform they’d earned the right to wear.

They did it not for personal glory, but because they understood that their success would open doors for thousands who would follow.

The Navy tried to bury their story.

It kept their commissioning quiet.

It denied them basic respect.

It minimized their achievements at every turn.

But the door they forced open never fully closed again.

And that makes them more than successful officer candidates.

It makes them revolutionaries who dismantled institutional racism from the inside one impossible achievement at a time.

In March 1944, 12 black men became Nsigns and one became a warrant officer.

The Navy thought it was running an experiment in controlled failure.

Instead, it was witnessing the beginning of its own transformation, led by men who understood that excellence under impossible conditions was the only weapon that couldn’t be taken away.

The Golden 13 proved that when institutions claim something is impossible, what they often mean is that they’ve made it impossible on purpose.

And they proved that purposeful barriers can be shattered by people who refuse to accept the limitations placed on them.

That’s the legacy that survives in building 1405 at Great Lakes.

That’s the story that matters.

13 men broke through a barrier designed to be unbreakable and changed the Navy forever.