The Hidden History of the First Black Women to Serve in the U.S. Navy (Cross post from Lounge.)

[marble falls]

The Hidden History of the First Black Women to Serve in the U.S. Navy

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hidden-history-black-women-navy

The Golden Fourteen were largely forgotten—but a few veterans and descendants could change that.

by Giulia Heyward December 15, 2020

The Hidden History of the First Black Women to Serve in the U.S. Navy



(note: all these women are petty officers!)

Researchers and descendants are working to dust off the stories of the Golden Fourteen. All illustrations: Delphine Lee for Atlas Obscura

-snip-

The Golden Fourteen worked as yeomen and were tasked with handling administrative and clerical work. They had access to official military records, including the work assignments and locations of sailors. At the time, Black men who enlisted in the Navy could only work as messmen, stewards, or in the engine room, shoveling coal into the furnace. They performed menial labor and weren’t given opportunities to rise in rank.

Bell wasn’t surprised to learn about the barriers faced by service members of color. She knew that Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, was a documented white supremacist with ties to the Wilmington Massacre, in which a white mob overthrew a local Reconstruction-era government and murdered Black residents. During the First World War, the U.S. Navy maintained the status quo of racism that continued long after. Many Black service members were also targeted by white mobs after the war.

What was surprising was that a legal technicality had paved the way for Black women to work for the Navy more than a century ago. A shortage of clerical workers led then-president Woodrow Wilson to pass the Naval Reserve Act of 1916, which asked for “all persons who may be capable of performing special useful services for coastal defense.” The Golden Fourteen were part of a larger group of over 11,000 women, almost all of them white, who were able to join the navy as yeomanettes, the title given to female yeomen.

-snip-

“This is quite a novel experiment,” wrote the sociologist Kelly Miller in The History of the World War for Human Rights, published in 1919. “As it is the first time in the history of the navy of the United States that colored women have been employed in any clerical capacity … It was reserved to young colored women to invade successfully the yeoman branch, hereby establishing a precedent.”



In the 1940's the Navy introduced "the Golden thirteen", black men who became Naval officers.

[niyad]

1. Thank you so much for this amazing, hidden history. What a brave group of women.