Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement by Thomas W. Cutrer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement by Thomas W. Cutrer Alex Macaulay Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement. By Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish. Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 140. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-62349-602-9.) This brief, briskly paced work tells the story of Doris Miller, an African American sailor in the U.S. Navy who garnered national attention for his heroic actions manning an antiaircraft gun and saving the lives of several fellow seamen during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Born in 1919 near Waco, Texas, Miller grew up in a place and time marked by deep and dangerous racial tensions. Joining the navy in 1939 to help his family financially and to see the world, he served as a messman, the only position available to African American sailors at the time. Stationed aboard the USS West Virginia, he trained to pass ammunition to the ship's Browning machine guns but not to operate them. Nevertheless, on December 7, 1941, Miller jumped into the seat of an unmanned gun and began firing at Japanese bombers. After spending all his ammunition, Miller helped rescue drowning and injured sailors before abandoning ship himself and swimming to safety. News of the heroic, but unnamed, black sailor spread rapidly. The editor of the Pittsburgh Courier identified Miller publicly and began a concerted effort to have him honored and rewarded for his actions. Several congressmen and black leaders pushed for Miller to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, something navy officials refused to do, eventually awarding him the Navy Cross instead. The fight continued, with the black press promoting Miller as a direct refutation of the Jim Crow mind-set that denied black soldiers and sailors equal access to the armed forces. In the process, Miller emerged as a hero within the black community, rivaling boxer Joe Louis as the most popular African American member of the U.S. military. After completing a war bond tour, Miller returned to duty as a cook on the USS Liscome Bay. On November 24, 1943, he was one of hundreds of casualties when that ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo off the coast of Butaritari Island. In about a hundred pages of text, Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish address several key historical developments, including discrimination within the U.S. Navy, the emergence of the Double V campaign, and, most notably, the influence and activism of the black press. Indeed, African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier in particular, kept Miller's story in the public eye, using it to demand recognition of the wartime contributions made by all [End Page 1049] African American service personnel and to challenge segregation in military and civil society. Their efforts resulted in successes, setbacks, and stagnation, with Miller serving more as a symbolic icon whose deeds appeared in poems and song lyrics and whose name came to adorn buildings, parks, memorials, and schools. In their concluding chapter, the authors quote Miller's father, who saw no signs of racial progress soon after the war ended, and they note that racist naval policies survived into the 1970s. The magnitude of Miller's heroism combined with the limited impact it had on the lives of African Americans, including his immediate family, mark this episode as an inspiring and frustrating tale of the modern civil rights movement. Alex Macaulay Western Carolina University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association