On MLK Day, Honoring Dorie Miller
When Dorie Miller took gun in hand—
Jim Crow started his last stand
Our battle yet is far from won
But when it is, Jim Crow'll be done.
We gonna bury that son-of-a-gun!
From Langston Hughes, Jim Crow’s Last Stand
Good morning Austin:
It’s 01/20/2020. That’s gotta have some kind of numerological significance.
It is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day
On Friday, William Cole of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, broke the news that the Navy was going to announce on MLK Day that it will be naming an aircraft carrier for Dorie Miller, who hailed from Waco.
U.S. aircraft carrier (finally) named for Dorie Miller, cook in the Jim Crow era Navy who rose to heroism during the attack on Pearl Harbor. https://t.co/1JK2t4pNMx
— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) January 19, 2020
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, at Pearl Harbor, the Navy is expected to announce that a $12.5 billion aircraft carrier will be named after Mess Attendant 2nd Class Doris Miller, the first African American to receive the Navy Cross for valor for his actions on Dec. 7, 1941, when he manned a machine gun on the USS West Virginia to fire back at attacking Japanese planes.
“I think that Doris Miller is an American hero simply because of what he represents as a young man going beyond the call of what’s expected,” said Doreen Ravenscroft, president of Cultural Arts of Waco (Texas) and team leader for the Doris Miller Memorial.
In 1941 an African American was not allowed to man a gun in the Navy, and as far as rank was concerned, “he could not really get above a messman level,” Ravenscroft said. Miller’s actions started to turn the tide, she added.
“Without him really knowing, he actually was a part of the civil rights movement because he changed the thinking in the Navy,” Ravenscroft said Friday.
“In the end, the fact that he didn’t think about what could be repercussions — that wasn’t a thought when, at the time and in war, he did what was needed in his way to defend the United States of America,” she said.
He will be the first African American to have an aircraft carrier named after him, according to Navy records. The big ship is not expected to be home-ported in Hawaii.
CBS Sunday Morning did a wonderful report on the news.
This is terrific. There aren’t too many ways to correct the 80-year failure to award Dorie Miller the Medal of Honor, but putting his name on a Ford-class nuclear supercarrier—an honor usually reserved for presidents—comes very, very close. https://t.co/fZxNw3LViW
— Dave Lopez (@DaveLopezNE) January 19, 2020
Back in 2004, I wrote a story about the long struggle to duly honor Miller.
I came to write that story thanks to Marion Tumbleweed Beach, who is quoted in it.
Beach was a most extraordinary women, a poet and activist, who, at the time I wrote the story, had been part of the long campaign to get Miller his due for 60 years.
I met Beach, who died in 2005 at the age of 78, 20 years ago in Selma, Ala., where she lived on Martin Luther King Street.
I was in the midst of a long journey with photographer Michael Falco along streets named for King that yielded a newspaper series and, in 2003, a book, Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street.
Beach knew King and King knew Beach. She was one of those indispensable people who was with King during the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Selma voting rights campaign, and the Memphis-to-Jackson Meredith March and his work in Chicago, where she lived most of her life.
(I was interviewed last week by TNT for a piece about MLK streets that will be part of the 3:30 CT pre-game show for today’s New Orleans at Memphis Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Game.)
Here is what I wrote in 2004:
Six Decades after WWII’s End, Dorie Miller’s Faithful Fight for Medal of Honor
May 25, 2004
c.2004 Newhouse News Service
WASHINGTON _ As the United States dedicates the National World War II Memorial nearly six decades since the war’s end, it is well to remember that even before that war was declared, America had a hero, a black hero — or, as he was known in the months before the Navy had the grace to name him, “an unidentified Negro messman.”
The name was an unlikely one: Doris Miller (his mother had been hoping for a girl). But his deeds of valor on that day of infamy, Dec. 7, 1941, were considered more unlikely still. The son of sharecroppers from outside Waco, Texas, he rose above station and expectation to risk all for a nation startled and even unsettled by his bravery, a nation that remains, in the view of those most faithful to his memory, unwilling to grant him a last full measure of thanks.
Dorie Miller, as he came popularly to be known, was collecting laundry aboard the USS West Virginia when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. Amid the chaos of enemy strafing, Miller helped remove his mortally wounded captain and others to greater safety before manning a machine gun, for which the Navy had allowed him no training. For 15 minutes, the West Virginia a sinking inferno, Miller trained his fire upon the incoming Zeroes until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship.
Dorie Miller awoke at 6 a.m. on #USSWestVirginia when the first torpedo hit. What he did afterward earned him the Navy Cross. #PearlHarbor75 pic.twitter.com/bhkfevajcY
— Department of Defense (@DeptofDefense) December 8, 2016
To his people, he instantly became a new Joe Louis, proof of their capacity, worthiness and patriotism. The black press and black protests forced a grudging Navy to release Miller’s name, grant him a commendation, and then, thanks to President Roosevelt, bestow upon him the Navy Cross.
#DorieMiller visited #Tacoma and explained Pearl Harbor to audiences around town. #tacomapubliclibrary. Richards_Collection_D158695 pic.twitter.com/Y8TyIzVtcQ
— Noah (@NoahAhlstrom) January 19, 2020
But unlike 15 others who distinguished themselves that day, Miller — who in 1943 was lost at sea when his ship, the Liscome Bay, was torpedoed in the Pacific — never received the Medal of Honor, the highest military award the nation has to give.
“We’re still on a mission to get him that medal,” said Juliete Parker of Lumberton, N.C., who last year wrote, “A Man Called Doris,” the second book in recent years about Miller. The first, “Doris Miller: Pearl Harbor Hero,” is the work of his niece, Vickie Gail Miller, of Midland, Texas.
Parker was inspired to write her book by the childhood memory of her mother telling her about Miller. “It was more of an emotion I caught from her,” Parker said. “Her eyes would light up and she would say his name with reverence.”
Philip Klinkner, a professor of government at Hamilton College in Upstate New York, believes Miller’s story encapsulates the black experience in World War II. “Despite discrimination and maltreatment they rose to the occasion; despite not being able to share in all the blessings of being American, they helped defend their country,” he said.
Miller provided a rallying point for challenging segregation.
“When Dorie Miller took gun in hand,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote in 1943, “Jim Crow started his last stand.”
Or, in the more caustic voice of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Negro Hero” _ “I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.”
In 1942, U.S. Rep. John Dingell of Michigan (father of the current representative) and Sen. James Mead of New York submitted a bill authorizing FDR to give Miller the Medal of Honor, but Parker said it was scuttled by lawmakers from Miller’s home state.
In the last several congresses, U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, with the support of the Congressional Black Caucus and a few other members, has filed legislation to waive the statute of limitations so that Miller could receive the Medal of Honor.
As we remember the attack at Pearl Harbor we continue to honor and pay tribute to those brave men and women like Dorie Miller. https://t.co/32cDFbAYv4
— Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (@RepEBJ) December 7, 2017
No blacks won the Medal of Honor during World War II, but in 1997 President Clinton awarded it to seven black soldiers, all but one posthumously, who an Army study commission concluded were denied their due because of the Army’s “racial climate.” A Navy study including Miller’s case found no cause for similar action.
“The Navy has concluded that the Navy Cross, the highest award that can be approved and awarded by the Secretary of the Navy, appropriately recognizes Petty Officer Miller’s heroic actions,” Lt. Mike Kafka, a Navy spokesman, said this week. Kafka said those seeking to upgrade Miller’s award can offer new evidence or ask the Navy to look at the case anew, a request Johnson may make.
It is impossible to entirely extract race from consideration of Miller’s case. His performance was so extraordinarily above and beyond the call of duty in part because that call was so colored by his race.
“No one expected him to do anything but wash dishes and polish those officers’ shoes,” said Marion Tumbleweed Beach, a poet, teacher and activist now living in Chicago, who has worked to secure Miller the Medal of Honor since 1944.
After receiving the Navy Cross, and before shipping off to sea again, Miller traveled black America drumming up support for the war effort.
Beach was 15 when her grandmother took her to see Miller at a war bond rally in Alabama. “Our black men stood in line to volunteer to go into the service in the name of Dorie Miller,” she recalled. “He was quite a shy lad and very handsome, very dark.”
#PearlHarbor “Dorie Miller”An American “Hero”of Pearl Harbor. Messman 3rd class in the USN.He manned the anti-air craft guns with No formal training in their Use and Attended to the wounded. He was awarded the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart. #NeverForget #HERO pic.twitter.com/w8eARZzhGV
— Princess Fire & Ice { K } (@SaveOur1st) December 8, 2018
At 13, Ross Fowler, a retired Coast Guard commander from Detroit, saw Miller at a war bond rally at the Regal Theater in Chicago, chaired by Fowler’s mother, a teacher. “I was in awe,” Fowler recalls. “He was humble. He was big and he was humble.”
They sold $1 million in bonds. Fowler has been a passionate advocate of Miller’s cause for the last 15 years.
Like others, Fowler believes Miller was denied the Medal of Honor because it would have required every officer and enlisted man he encountered to salute this black messman.
There were, of course, many whites who were unabashedly inspired by Miller’s story.
It became part of Ronald Reagan’s lexicon of classic American tales. As Edmund Morris writes in “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan,” “Dorie Miller, the black hero of Pearl Harbor, was, as Reagan precisely described, `a Negro sailor whose total duties involved kitchen-type duties,’ who had shot down four dive bombers with a borrowed machine gun.”
In fact there is no agreement about how many, if any, planes Miller downed. Reports range from zero to six. The citation accompanying the Navy Cross is silent on the question.
But Rep. Johnson is not.
Miller “lived on the edge of the neighborhood where I grew up,” said Johnson, who turned 6 in Waco just days before Pearl Harbor.
She recalled “a big party” when Miller came home. “I don’t know if I was there or not but I did walk around with my father to collect money for an ID bracelet (for Miller). It was silver.”
For Johnson, Miller remains forever the young black hometown hero.
“To the black Americans at the time and every moment since, he was the one that prevented us from having war on these shores in the U.S.,” she said.
Gwendolyn Brooks was ready for this moment a long time ago. Read her poem "Negro Hero (to suggest Dorie Miller)," published in the 1940s:https://t.co/AMV3GbfdX0. https://t.co/QEqkYuDkcA
— Evie Shockley (@seminewblack) January 19, 2020
Negro Hero (to suggest Dorie Miller)
Gwendolyn Brooks
I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.
However I have heard that sometimes you have to deal
Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
Or they will haul themselves and you to the trash and the fish
beneath.
(When I think of this, I do not worry about a few
Chipped teeth.)
It is good I gave glory, it is good I put gold on their name.
Or there would have been spikes in the afterward hands.
But let us speak only of my success and the pictures in the
Caucasian dailies
As well as the Negro weeklies. For I am a gem.
(They are not concerned that it was hardly The Enemy my
fight was against
But them.)
It was a tall time. And of course my blood was
Boiling about in my head and straining and howling and
singing me on.
Of course I was rolled on wheels of my boy itch to get at
the gun.
Of course all the delicate rehearsal shots of my childhood
massed in mirage before me.
Of course I was child
And my first swallow of the liquor of battle bleeding black
air dying and demon noise
Made me wild.
It was kinder than that, though, and I showed like a banner
my kindness.
I loved. And a man will guard when he loves.
Their white-gowned democracy was my fair lady.
With her knife lying cold, straight, in the softness of her
sweet-flowing sleeve.
But for the sake of the dear smiling mouth and the stuttered
promise I toyed with my life.
I threw back! — I would not remember
Entirely the knife.
Still–am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright
enough to be spilled,
Was my constant back-question–are they clear
On this? Or do I intrude even now?
Am I clean enough to kill for them, do they wish me to kill
For them or is my place while death licks his lips and strides
to them
In the galley still?
(In a southern city a white man said
Indeed, I’d rather be dead;
Indeed, I’d rather be shot in the head
Or ridden to waste on the back of a flood
Than saved by the drop of a black man’s blood.)
Naturally, the important thing is, I helped to save them, them
and a part of their democracy.
Even if I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to
do that for them.
And I am feeling well and settled in myself because I believe
it was a good job,
Despite this possible horror: that they might prefer the
Preservation of their law in all its sick dignity and their
knives
To the continuation of their creed
And their lives.
“. . . I helped to save them,
them and a part of their democracy.
Even if I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to
do that for them. . . .”
—from “Negro Hero” by Gwendolyn Brookshttps://t.co/FJKBasmkLh
Soldiers in Holsinger Collection:https://t.co/lspvQVUzA4 pic.twitter.com/jhXOyqYgRR
— j smith (@mustelina) November 11, 2019
