Military Officer - February 2008 - (Page 56) Graham, who now lives in Roosevelt, N.Y., has a special place in his heart for the Mason — he was one of its 160 black crewmen. By accepting the challenge of service, he and his shipmates helped bring an end to the segregationist policies within the Navy that limited black men to working only as stewards and cooks. “The Mason was a test case,” says Mary Pat Kelly, author of Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason (Naval Institute Press, 1995). “At the time, the Navy was the most segre- gated of all the services. If the crew of the Mason had failed, it would have been very easy for the Navy to say, ‘Well, desegregation isn’t going to work for us.’ But their success helped fuel [President] Truman’s 1948 executive order to desegregate the United States military, which had huge ramifications not only within the military but within our society.” The Navy opened its ranks to general black enlistment June 1, 1942, and established a segregated training facility at Great Lakes Naval Center, Ill., named Camp Robert Smalls, after an escaped slave who eventually was commissioned a captain in the Union Navy during the Civil War. Black men enlisted from all over the country, each for his own reason. “I was a 19-year-old kid and full of adventure,” Graham says of his decision to join the Navy. “I was dying to get into the service and wanted to be an Air Force pilot but was told there were no ‘colored’ boys in the Air Force. On the way home, a Navy recruitment officer called my friends and me into his office and asked if we wanted to enlist in the Navy. I said no, I wasn’t going to wash and clean up after anybody. He said, no, we could go in on the same footing with the white guys.” Lorenzo DuFau, who now also lives in New York, was working in an Army hospital when the war broke out. He read in the newspaper that the Navy finally was offering better rates to black enlistees and saw enlistment as a way of fighting for his home as well as opening doors for future generations. Benjamin Garrison of Tampa, Fla., was a federal employee in Fort Jackson, S.C., when he heard about the Navy’s new enlistment policy. “My draft number was about to come up,” he explains, “and I knew that I didn’t want to be stuck on an Army post for the duration of the war, so I joined the Navy, which was an elite force.” The USS Mason was an Evertclass destroyer escort named for Ensign Newton Henry Mason, a 56 MILITARY OFFICER FEBRUARY 2008
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