He was an 18-year-old Navy mess attendant, steeped in the segregation of the American South and the U.S. Navy. He was the lowest of the low in the segregated Navy of World War II
Shipwreck survivor recalls how town altered his idea of race
Phillips could scarcely believe what was happening: a white woman caring for a black man as if he were her son. Back home in Georgia, he thought, she could have been run out of town, and he could easily have been lynched.
But Phillips wasn't in Georgia. He was in the tiny coastal mining community of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, with its population of about 1,000. It was February 1942. He was an 18-year-old Navy mess attendant, steeped in the segregation of the American South and the U.S. Navy. Yet as he rested in the tender care of a rural housewife named Violet Pike, the course of his life, he said, was altered forever.
Scarred in the crucible of racism, he vowed to live like the people who saved him.
But Phillips, who was the lowest of the low in the segregated Navy of World War II, also has a powerful story he has made it his mission to tell. Mess attendants were essentially officers' waiters, said Phillips, a resident of Washington's Armed Forces Retirement Home. They were trained to polish silverware and shoes and to serve meals. They were forced to wear bow ties, he said, and were not permitted to wear brass buttons on their coats. Their buttons could only be black.
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Many attendants were African Americans, and as such were relegated to bunking in segregated portions of their ships. "The Navy was as racist as the state of Mississippi," he said. But even the most junior mess attendant had a battle station. His was on a large gun mounted on the ship's bow, where he used special gloves to grab hot expended shell casings and throw them overboard.
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