Last year, a generous donation from the class of 1980 allowed Special Collections & Archives to digitize a number of videotape recordings in the obsolete formats of U-matic, BetaCam, and VHS. Several of the videos concerned a 1979 documentary produced by the academy's Public Affairs Office and Educational Resource Center (former name of the current Multimedia Support Center) called A Greater Challenge. The 20-minute video looked at the past and present of African-Americans at the Naval Academy, and a number of academy trailblazers were interviewed for the piece.
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| Title screen to the documentary, A Greater Challenge. |
Assistant Professor Jack Sweetman from the History Department discussed the first black midshipman James Conyers, who entered the academy in 1872, a time when the hazing of plebes was prevalent. Sweetman noted that academy officials tried to prevent excessive hazing of Conyers but ultimately failed, leading to Conyers resignation a year later and the passage of more than 70 years before a black midshipman successfully graduated from USNA.
That midshipman was Wesley Brown, who graduated in 1949 and who was followed in 1952 by Lawrence Chambers. Both men were encouraged to apply to the Naval Academy following President Harry Truman's order that ended segregation in the military but found it tough early on at the academy and in Annapolis where segregated facilities were normal. Both endured the challenges and difficulties common to all plebes. Brown, who already had had a taste of college at Howard University, said his biggest challenge was added restrictions. "My life was regulated and I wasn't used to it," he said. Chambers commented, "I suspect I was as much a part of why I didn't do very well as was the institution" when discussing the peer-rating and senior-rating systems in place at the time.
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| Wesley Brown speaking about his Naval Academy experience. |
Yet did encounter racially based hazing and harassment that made both reconsider their decisions despite good academic performance. "Generally there was an air of hostility particularly among the upper class," noted Brown. After one week, Chambers had already called his family twice to say he was quitting when he received a call from the colonel who ran junior ROTC programs at black high schools in the Washington, DC area and who had encouraged Chambers to go to Annapolis. "Colonel Atwood reminded me that Lieutenant General B. O. Davis Jr. [had] gone to West Point, and for four years nobody spoke to him," Chambers said. "No matter what I thought my treatment was, it wasn't anything near the treatment that B.O. Davis Jr. had suffered, and so I went back to work and decided I wasn't going to call home anymore and I was going to stick it out." Not only did Chambers stick it out, but he became the first black academy graduate to attain a flag rank and was still serving as a rear admiral at the time of the documentary. Brown meanwhile had retired from the Navy and was back at Howard University as a facilities analyst.
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| Rear Admiral Lawrence Chambers being interviewed for A Greater Challenge. |
While effort to recruit more minority midshipmen continued into the 1970s, there was another drive underway to diversify the academy's faculty and staff. Professor Samuel Massie, chair of the Chemistry Department and the academy's first black professor, discussed the work of the Black Studies Committee, which he cofounded. That group monitored the curriculum and worked to increase the number of African-American professors and lecturers. On the military side, Lieutenant Earl Smith returned to the academy as a minority recruiter after graduating in 1972. Noting that the Navy had a nine percent minority population in the enlisted ranks while only two percent among the officers, Smith said the service was "sorely lacking as far as black officer representation and other minority officer representation in the Navy."
Another focus during the period just prior to the documentary's publication was improving relations between white and black midshipmen. The documentary incorporated a video put together by Major Edward L. Green, the academy's first black military faculty member, on race relations. Lieutenant Commander J. C. Williams, the academy's first black command chaplain who helped found the Black Studies Club, noted some improvement in this area with more white midshipmen participating in the club's activities. "Across the board there's more cross pollination going on that ordinarily would not have gone on had we not - in a structured way through the Black Studies Committee and the Black Studies Club - [a way] to do this kind of thing," he said.
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| Professor Samuel Massie discusses the Black Studies Committee at the Naval Academy. |
As a whole, A Greater Challenge presents an interesting snapshot of the state of the academy in the late 1970s with regard to African-Americans. It's also part oral history due to the accounts of Brown and Chambers about their experiences as midshipmen. In addition to the documentary is footage that captured the raw interviews with Brown, Chambers, and Chaplain Williams, some of which didn't make the final cut. All videos are publicly available in Trireme, the academy's digital preservation system.
Sources:
A Greater Challenge (1979, Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Academy, Public Affairs Office and Educational Resource Center), MPEG video. https://trireme.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/SO_ab969b9e-5e7d-44ac-a607-859895cab2e5/
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