Benjamin O. Davis Jr. defied racism and embodied unwavering dignity in his career

“The colored man in uniform is expected by the War Department to develop a high morale in a community that offers him nothing but humiliation and mistreatment,”

- Benjamin O. Davis Sr. in a 1943 letter.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. began in the Army and retired from the Air Force with two stars as a lieutenant general. His 37-year military career was exemplary. The military provided him a path toward accomplishment and success, but it was his dignity, honor, courage and tenacity that got him there. In this Black History Month, it is fitting to remember the racism Davis Jr. faced and overcame.

Military history in the Davis family

When Davis Jr. died in 2002, his New York Times obituary stated: “When he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1936, the Army had a grand total of two black line officers – Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Benjamin O. Davis Jr.”

Davis Jr.’s grandfather was a servant in the home of a man who became a United States Senator from Illinois, John A. Logan. Logan was formerly a general who served in the Mexican War as well as in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Davis Sr. was born in 1877. He received a commission as a second lieutenant in 1901. In 1920, he began teaching military science at the Tuskegee Institute when Davis Jr. was a child. The Tuskegee Institute had been founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 with a mission to improve the lives of African Americans after the Civil War. All of Davis Sr.’s Army assignments were designed to avoid a situation that might have placed him in command of white troops or officers. Davis Sr. became the first black colonel in the Army in 1930. In 1940, he was promoted to brigadier general by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1932, Davis Jr. was accepted into the Army’s military academy at West Point.

Racial issues when Davis was a child

Davis Jr. was born in Washington, D.C. in 1912. Before the family moved to Alabama for his father to teach at the Tuskegee Institute, Davis Jr. remembered the fear in the voices of family members when they talked about race riots on U St., just a block from the Davis home when Davis Jr. was about seven years old. Davis Jr.’s autobiography states he didn’t remember why there were riots, but thought it had something to do with no jobs for the men returning from serving in World War I. In fact, on July 19, 1919, white mobs attacked an African American community in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of white sailors, soldiers and Marines formed a “mob in uniform.” Metropolitan police did not try to stop the mob. After four days, President Woodrow Wilson ordered two thousand soldiers into Washington to suppress the violence.

After the family moved to Alabama, and not far from the Tuskegee Institute, a new Veterans Administration hospital was built for black veterans. The plan was for the hospital to be staffed with black doctors and nurses. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized local black people by conducting a march around the Institute because it wanted the jobs to go to whites. The Tuskegee Institute instructed everyone to stay inside with the lights out, but Davis Sr. refused to cower behind closed doors. The whole family sat on the front porch with the porch light on while the Klansmen marched by wearing white robes and hoods and carrying lit torches. The jobs went to black doctors and nurses.

Silencing at West Point

Silencing at West Point was nothing new. During the nineteenth century, virtually all African American cadets experienced this form of social isolation, known as being “cut” or “silenced” as soon as they arrived at West Point. According to a law review article, the idea was that a cadet would be cut if considered to be ungentlemanly or cowardly or a believer in an idea that the cadets found repugnant. A cut or silenced cadet was treated as if he did not exist. He lived in a separate room, ate alone at a table in the cadet mess, was not spoken to by any other cadet except for official purposes, and was otherwise completely ignored. By the twentieth century, the practice was called “silencing.”

For his first few days at West Point, all went well for Davis Jr. But one evening he was in his room shining his shoes when someone knocked on the door and called out that there was a meeting in the basement in ten minutes. As he approached the meeting, he heard someone ask, “What are we going to do about the [N-word]?” That’s when Davis Jr. realized the meeting was about him. From that moment on, no cadet spoke with him except in the line of duty for his entire four years at West Point.

Not everything at West Point was racist. At his 1936 graduation, it was General John J. Pershing who presented Davis Jr. with his commission and degree. Davis Jr. was too nervous to realize it, but he was later told there was prolonged applause at that moment. The last previous black graduate from West Point had been in 1889.

Racial issues in Tuskegee

After graduation from West Point, Davis Jr. did a short stint in the infantry. Then, doing the same thing to Davis Jr. that it did to Davis Sr., the Army assigned Davis Jr. to be a professor of military science at the Tuskegee Institute, and thereby avoided having Davis Jr. in a position of command over whites.

Davis Jr.’s wife, Agatha, and a group of her friends decided to challenge some of Alabama’s segregation practices. One of the things they did was to discourage blacks from patronizing Tuskegee’s movie theater. After two years, it was forced to close for low attendance. Davis Jr. wrote in his book that whites learned they could not afford to lose black patronage, and that racial relations improved somewhat as a result.

World War II

Once it was obvious the U.S. would become involved in World War II, the Roosevelt administration directed the War Department to create a black flying unit, and Davis Jr. was selected for pilot training.

The doctor who performed his flight physical at Fort Riley, Kansas didn’t realize there had been a change in policy and regarded the examination as a mere formality. He failed Davis Jr. by falsely stating he had a history of epilepsy. When someone explained to the doctor, the Army really wanted Davis Jr. to be a pilot, the epilepsy diagnosis disappeared.

The first black pilot training began at Tuskegee Army Air Field [TAAF] in the spring of 1941. The commander of the squadron was Colonel Frederick von Kimble. Kimble placed three white officers from the South in charge, and they bore down on the Negro officers. Rigorous segregation was enforced with separate messes and quarters for officers. There was pervasive unfairness, demeaning insults and raw discrimination.

The separation of officers by race was despite Army regulation 210-10 that went into effect in December 1940: “No officer clubs, messes, or similar organization of officers will be permitted to occupy any part of any public building … unless such club, mess, or other organization extends to all officers on the post the right to full membership.”

In 1943, Davis Jr.’s 99th Fighter Squadron, which he commanded, was shipped to North Africa. Combat fighting required pilots to work as a team. They had to keep turning their heads and eyes because they depended on one another. Regardless of race, a strong bond grew among all the pilots. From North Africa, his squadron was sent to Sicily. A few months later, Davis Jr. was called back to the U.S. to train an all-black fighter group for combat.

Not long afterward, fighter group commander Colonel William Momyer wrote a report recommending that the all-black 99th be removed from combat operations. Momyer stated that blacks “are not of the fighting caliber of any squadron in this Group. They have failed to display the aggressiveness and desire for combat that are necessary to a first-class fighting organization.”

Davis Jr. was at the Pentagon when Momyer’s report came out. Furious, he held a press conference where he told of the successes of the 99th. He did not exaggerate. By the end of World War II, the Tuskegee airmen flew 1,578 missions and shot down 112 enemy aircraft. They received three Presidential Unit Citations. Davis Jr. was awarded the Legion of Merit and Silver Star. Other individuals in the unit received 138 medals. The group received over 1,000 Air Medals.

After World War II

After the war in Europe ended, Davis Jr. was assigned to command the 477th Bombardment Group at Godman Field, Kentucky in June 1945. Once again, there was segregation in the officers’ club. To try to bypass the Army directive, Godman officials had white officers join a newly formed all-white club and left the existing club for black officers. When black officers protested the segregation, they were arrested.

Racial unrest throughout the military resulted in passage of War Department Pamphlet 20-6, passed on Feb. 29, 1944, entitled: “Command of Negro Troops.” The pamphlet states: “It is important to understand that separate organization is a matter of practical military expediency, and not an endorsement of beliefs in racial distinction.”

Commanders used the language in the pamphlet to justify separate clubs and other segregation. But on May 18, 1945, the War Department’s McCloy Committee published a report finding the order for separate officers’ clubs for the 477th Bombardment Group and other base personnel conflicted with U.S. Army regulations such as 210-10.

Nonetheless, Davis Jr. and his group were denied quarters granted to white personnel at Fort Knox. As a result, officers and their families were crowded into barracks where they were required to share only a few bathrooms. Adding to their humiliation, families of black officers were discriminated against while traveling to their assignment and the children were refused education at local schools. The commander of TAAF proposed the way to deal with the racial situation, where members of the military were ill-treated when they went off-base, was to assign only Southern blacks to TAAF. The commander said those men would understand Southern customs and would be less likely to challenge them as would blacks who grew up in the North.

While Davis Jr. was stationed at Lockbourne Air Base near Columbus, Ohio in 1947, Nancy Zimmerman, the wife of a white officer, invited Agatha to a luncheon at the Fort Hayes Wives’ Club. The FBI investigated the Zimmermans for suspected Communist activities.

It was in this post-war period that the Air Force split from the Army and became a separate branch of the armed forces on Sept. 18, 1947.

Executive Order 9981

On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981. It began: “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

Despite efforts by the military to integrate the armed forces pursuant to EO 9981, Davis Jr. and his family were not protected when they left military installations. In 1949, they were required to move from Washington D.C. to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. There were no restroom accommodations available to them and no place to spend the night, except their car. But even at Maxwell, when they attended events at the previously segregated officers’ club, Davis Jr. wrote in his autobiography, they were stared at “like monkeys in a cage.”

Nonetheless, the language in Davis Jr.’s appraisal reports began to change. They no longer contained some of the statements in his previous progress reports such as “capable for a Negro officer” and “well suited for duty with black troop units.”

Big promotions

In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower promoted Davis Jr. to brigadier general.

In the years that followed, Davis Jr. served in Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Germany. He was well received everywhere he went. At the same time, the son of a close friend at home was murdered in 1963 for the “crime” of using the wrong bathroom in Alabama.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson promoted Davis Jr. to lieutenant general. He became Chief of Staff, United Nations Command. In 1967, Davis Jr. was appointed commander of the 13th Air Force at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. He was greeted with newspaper articles referring to him as the “brown brother” of the Filipino people who, as a victim of racism, would understand the plight of the Filipino people.

Some changes

Changes for American blacks were evident when Davis Jr. was assigned to MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida in 1968. Some of the black wives asked Agatha’s help in getting the base exchange to carry cosmetics and hair preparations used by black women. Agatha spoke with the wife of the base commander, a good friend, and solved the problem.

Then in 1969, Davis Jr. received notice that the West Point Society of the District of Columbia had nominated him for a prestigious award. The letter was written by one of Davis Jr.’s West Point classmates. Davis Jr.’s gracious letter in response is with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. In his autobiography, Davis Jr. wrote: “I had no mixed feelings about accepting the award – to refuse it would have been ungracious. Through the years several of my classmates had expressed regret about the way I had been treated at West Point, and I held no grudges.” Also in 1969, Davis Jr. spoke at the dedication of the Lt. General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. Junior High School in Compton, California.

Conclusion

In 1987, 50 years after his graduation, Davis Jr. and Agatha went to West Point for a visit. On their drive home, Agatha asked him how he enjoyed his return to the Point. He said, “It was the best week I ever spent at West Point.”

Davis Jr.’s life is a history lesson about the racial situation in our country. This man managed to maneuver his way to success amidst overwhelming odds against him.