Racial Unrest Aboard Kitty Hawk

At approximately 1830 on 12 October 1972, Seaman Apprentice Terry Avinger waited in line to receive his evening meal while serving in the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk (CVA-63). When he approached the white cook serving food, Avinger, a black man, requested two sandwiches, but the cook sharply refused, offering only one. Frustrated by the rebuff, Avinger reached across the food line and grabbed a second sandwich. Incensed, the cook rebuked Avinger and a shouting match ensued between the two Sailors. A second argument erupted later that evening, when another white cook accidently stepped on the foot of black Seaman Apprentice John L. Rowe. These two altercations had the deleterious effect of elevating implicit racial tensions on the ship and precipitated the outbreak of significant violence aboard Kitty Hawk.[1]
 
Within a few hours, approximately fifteen black sailors had gathered in the mess decks to discuss grievances stemming from their experiences with racial discrimination in Kitty Hawk and a frustrating lack of recourse.[2] Many of their complaints revolved around a circulating rumor that a white sailor had hired a group of Filipinos to assault a black sailor. The alleged attack was prevented when a few black sailors stumbled upon the assault and intervened. An investigation into the incident stalled after the Filipino men involved refused to cooperate, leaving the matter unresolved and thus further eroding race relations among the ship’s crew.[3] According to historian John Sherwood, many of Kitty Hawk’s black sailors believed that they were tried for offenses more frequently than their white shipmates and received harsher sentences. The rumored incident validated their distrust of the ship’s justice system and stoked resentment.[4]

Soon after the meeting in the mess deck, black sailors began moving about the ship, harassing white sailors. A group led by Avinger roamed the ship’s passageways, trashing compartments, pulling items off bulkheads, and physically assaulting the white sailors they encountered. Armed with a variety of makeshift weapons including broom handles, wrenches, pieces of pipe, and a foam nozzle taken from a firefighting station, the group accosted a white mess cook, beat him bloody, and threw him down a ladder well.[5]

Additional groups of agitated black sailors began to form, forcing the ship’s Marine detachment to quell the unrest. This resulted in a hostile standoff in the mess area. Kitty Hawk’s white Commanding Officer, Capt. Marland Townsend and black executive officer, Cmdr. Ben Cloud, were both summoned to the scene. The latter arrived first, called off the Marines, and decided to engage in a dialogue with the black sailors and listen to their complaints. Several of the aggrieved men saluted Cloud by raising their fists in a signal of black solidarity and Cloud responded in kind, attempting to deescalate the conflict. A short time later, Townsend arrived unnoticed by Cloud and witnessed the dialogue. Townsend was unhappy with Cloud’s decision to commiserate with the black sailors rather than assert his control as the Executive Officer of the ship, but he chose not to intervene, fearing that doing so carried the risk of undermining Cloud’s authority, and he left the scene. About half an hour later, Townsend returned without making his presence known and continued to observe the situation. After noticing that Townsend had arrived, Cloud discreetly asked the Commanding Officer to leave and give him more time to bring an end to the disturbance. Townsend complied and as he walked away, a number of black sailors approached and asked him questions, which he answered. According to Cloud, Townsend remained on the scene to answer further questions and then ordered everyone present to disperse peacefully.[6] 

The violence, however, did not end with the meeting in the mess area. Black sailors continued to attack white sailors. One group found the mess cook who refused Avinger a second sandwich and subjected him to a mock trial before beating him.[7] As injured sailors received treatment in Kitty Hawk’s sick bay, black sailors harassed the ship’s medical officers. Cloud, in a second attempt to restore the peace, approached a group of black sailors and spoke to them for nearly two hours, appealing to the men “as one black to another.”[8] After easing tensions, Cloud ordered the group to return to their compartments around 0230, and they did so, leaving their weapons behind. Forty white and six black sailors had sustained injuries during the unrest. Three suffered from injuries too serious to be treated on the ship and had to be evacuated to medical facilities on shore.[9]

The events of 12-13 October 1972 on board the Kitty Hawk took place at a time of civil unrest across the United States and in the Navy, which, according to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was “marching in the rear rank of the military service” with regards to eliminating racial barriers.[10] Indeed, the sea service had a long history of erecting racial barriers. Beginning in 1798, the Navy banned “negroes and mulattoes” outright: a ban that would endure until the War of 1812. As Sherwood explains, the arduous shipboard conditions during the age of sail—“harsh discipline, dangerous work aloft, long periods at sea, low pay, and bad food”—made recruitment so difficult that the Navy “had to accept any stable, sober volunteer, whatever his skin color.”[11] Yet in spite of these inherent recruitment challenges, the Navy continued to impose quotas on black recruits during much of the early nineteenth century. By 1850, the service limited the proportion of black sailors to no more than 5% of the crew of any vessel.[12] During the Civil War, some ship crews were nearly twenty-five percent black, but those higher proportions, Sherwood concludes, were due solely to the exigencies of war. A decade after the conflict, the number dropped to 13.1 percent.[13]

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, black sailors were typically restricted to positions considered lowly, like cooks, stewards, and landsmen.[14] The 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson legalized segregation in the United States and by 1905, the service had mandated separate messes for black sailors. As a result of such measures, black enlistment decreased to the point that, by the First World War, less than three percent of enlisted sailors were black, almost all of whom served in positions considered undesirable. Soon after the war ended, the Navy stopped enlisting black men altogether because many officers believed that Filipinos made better messmen.[15]

Conditions for black sailors did not improve during the interwar period. By the beginning of World War II, the Navy had developed a reputation for being “a place where blacks were excluded from all occupations except that of domestic servants.”[16] Despite the wartime need for manpower, the Navy obstinately refused to recruit more black sailors until President Roosevelt forced the hand of the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox in 1942. Knox complied with Roosevelt’s directive by enlisting black men into segregated units composed largely of cooks, stewards, stevedores, and unrated seamen.[17]

By the end of the Second World War, the Navy had rejected segregation and the first few decades of the Cold War era saw the passage of initiatives designed to address racial discrimination in the military. In 1948, for example, President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9981 established a policy of “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Despite such efforts, however, opportunities for black sailors actually diminished during this period.[18] In fact, the Navy trailed all the armed services in both the recruitment of black personnel and the quality of assignments given to black enlistees.[19] In the 1950s and 1960s, the Navy rejected large numbers of black men and women for achieving low scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) – a multiple choice test later determined to be culturally biased against African Americans in a study conducted by the Center for Naval Analysis.[20] Moreover, AFQT performance determined the assignments given to those sailors who successfully enlisted and because black sailors tended to score lower on the test than their white counterparts, they received fewer highly-skilled positions.[21]

The nature of military conscription and recruitment during the Vietnam War contributed to racial unrest on the Kitty Hawk. Because draft-aged men often perceived the Navy and Air Force to be less dangerous than the ground services, these branches saw an increase in recruits as young men voluntarily joined to avoid being drafted into the Army and Marine Corps and sent to combat zones in the jungles of Southeast Asia. As a result, the Navy had the luxury of selecting from a surplus of recruits and was able to emphasize qualitative recruitment to enlist applicants with the highest AFQT scores. Such applicants were overwhelmingly white and middle-class because they enjoyed greater access to education than most black applicants.[22] Navy recruitment and personnel policy began to change after the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. During his election campaign, Nixon had promised to end military conscription. For Nixon, eliminating the draft would be a politically popular way to weaken the antiwar movement and lift a burden from a key element of his conservative coalition: white working-class families hit hard by conscription. After entering office, Nixon kept his campaign promise and directed the Department of Defense to end the draft by 1973. Over the next three years, the Navy’s surplus of recruits dwindled, leaving the sea service with no choice but to accept applicants with lower test scores.[23] This policy change marked the shift to an all-volunteer Navy and paved the way for the enlistment of black recruits who had performed poorly on the AFQT.[24]

In an attempt to meet the recruitment challenges of an all-volunteer Navy, in 1970, Nixon nominated Admiral Zumwalt to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. Secretary of the Navy John Chafee promoted the forty-nine-year-old Zumwalt to the position over several more senior admirals because of his advocacy for transforming the Navy’s personnel administration.[25] Zumwalt, with the aim of improving sailor retention and quality of life, and reducing simmering social tensions, instituted a series of policy directives that addressed long standing issues of both racism and sexism in the Navy. He implemented a series of messages sent directly to the fleet, which have come to be known as "Z-grams." Zumwalt disseminated 121 Z-grams throughout his tenure, 87 of which have been incorporated into the regular Navy directives system.[26]

Although Zumwalt’s reforms of the early 1970s introduced necessary changes, his efforts could not resolve the complexity of the Navy’s institutional racism and prevent the eruption of future episodes of racial unrest. By October 1972, the Vietnam War was in its seventh year, and, although conditions for black sailors had improved incrementally as a result of the civil rights movement, the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, Sherwood argues, still “very much resembled the ‘great white fleet’ of times past: white sailors worked higher status jobs such as intelligence and aircraft maintenance while black sailors were assigned menial tasks.[27] There were 297 black sailors on Kitty Hawk, representing just 7.2 percent of the entire crew. The majority of African Americans worked in the mess decks or laundry room performing the most menial and unskilled labor on the ship.[28] 

By October 1972, several factors, in addition to racial tensions, contributed to unrest on the Kitty Hawk. The sailors had not been home since Kitty Hawk departed from San Diego eight months earlier. Crewmembers had been informed several times that they would be returning to San Diego only to have the ship turn around and participate in airstrikes in Vietnam or Laos. In the fall of 1972, while on liberty call at the Subic Bay Naval Base in Olongapo, Philippines, tensions boiled over and several racially charged incidents—precursors to the “race riot” on Kitty Hawk—took place, leading to a series of brawls between black and white servicemen on the streets of Olongapo. After several nights of unrest, injured and resentful sailors returned to the Kitty Hawk before leaving Subic Bay on 11 October to participate in an air interdiction campaign off the coast of North Vietnam. [29] The next day, what would become known as the Kitty Hawk “race riot” occurred.[30]
           
A mere four days after the Kitty Hawk incident, eleven black sailors on board the fleet oiler Hassayampa (AO-145), moored to the pier at the Subic Bay Naval Base, injured five white sailors in a smaller-scale “race riot.”[31] Weeks later, on 3-4 November, 60 black sailors on the aircraft carrier Constellation (CVA-64) refused to leave the mess deck and threatened to destroy the ship during an all-night sit-in. Some episodes of the Constellation demonstration took place on a San Diego pier in front of media camera crews, which ultimately drew negative attention to the Navy.[32]

In response to these three instances of racial unrest in Navy ships, the 92^nd Congress called for hearings that centered on “increasing concern in the House Armed Services Committee over the developing of more relaxed discipline in the military services.[33]” According to Sherwood, these hearings, chaired by Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hébert, constituted an attempt to “pin the blame for the current unrest on an erosion of good order and discipline caused by Zumwalt’s permissiveness and not on institutional racism endemic in the Navy.”[34] Hébert’s call to end equal opportunity in the Navy placed Zumwalt’s programs in jeopardy. Before long, however, the Watergate scandal “eclipse[d] nearly all other issues before Congress,” putting an end to Hébert’s mission.[35] In fact, the hearings lent an additional sense of urgency to Zumwalt’s equal opportunity program and Human Goals Program. These were made even more urgent by the fact that the Kitty Hawk and other incidents were not isolated events, rather racial unrest was a fleet-wide problem.[36]

In the aftermath of Kitty Hawk’s 12-13 October 1972 racial uprising, the aircraft carrier continued around-the-clock combat flight operations for 28 more days. After a total of 284 days at sea, 177 of which saw combat, the ship returned to San Diego. Six weeks later, 27 black sailors were arrested and charged, ending in 27 court martial trials. Four black sailors were convicted of rioting, two of whom pleaded guilty in exchange for reduced sentences. Fourteen black sailors were convicted of assault, while four were found not guilty of all charges. Charges against five black sailors were dropped, and seven were sentenced to the brig. Almost all received a rank demotion. No white soldiers were arrested or charged. In February the following year, a 40-page Federal complaint confirmed that the white seaman who served as the Government’s main witness in one of the trials, “exaggerated a little bit.” The 27 investigations were later determined to have been tainted by prejudice and perjury.[37]

The Kitty Hawk incident, and its aftermath, reflect a snapshot in time during a period of intense racial, social, and political crisis in the United States. The Z-grams, begun as a way to address these unresolved questions in the Navy, also reflected the many ways in which American society itself slowly tried to grapple with those questions.