Justice Long Delayed

[David Lockmiller]

New York Times
June 16, 2023

Just over a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, 15 sailors assigned to the U.S.S. Philadelphia wrote a letter to a Black newspaper detailing the abuse and indignities they had faced on the warship solely because of the color of their skin.

When they enlisted, the Navy had promised training and assignments that would lead to advancement, but the Black sailors soon found that those opportunities did not exist for them. They were forced to be servants for the ship’s officers, “limited to waiting on tables and making beds” as so-called mess attendants, they wrote.

For daring to speak out, a few of the men were jailed and all of them were kicked out of the Navy with discharges that forever labeled them as unfit to serve.

The plight of the group, which became known as “the Philadelphia 15,” faded from public attention as World War II erupted. But the injustice they faced, and the stigma their discharge papers carried, lived on for more than 80 years.

On Friday, in a ceremony at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, four surviving family members of two of those men, brothers John and James Ponder, accepted a formal apology from the Navy for the racist treatment their loved ones had endured as sailors aboard their ship.

The service also presented the family with newly issued honorable discharges for the Ponder brothers and announced that the discharges for the rest of the Philadelphia 15 had been upgraded as well.

“This is something — a wrong that shouldn’t have happened,” Larry Ponder, 72, son of John Ponder, said in an interview. “My dad and the Philadelphia 15, they were just whistle-blowers. All they did was inform the general public about them being mistreated.”

“They tried to do what was right through the chain of command but it didn’t go anywhere — so they wrote that letter.”

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These following President Lincoln remarks were recorded in the diary of Judge Joseph T. Mills and were based on a conversation he and others had with the President four days prior to the issuance of President Lincoln’s “blind memorandum” on August 23, 1864.

“There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will."