On June 19, 1865 — two and a half years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation — Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the enslaved people there that the war was over and they were free. That day became Juneteenth, the oldest celebration of emancipation in the United States, and it has been a federal holiday since 2021. The Union forces who delivered that news to Texas were part of a military establishment that included, by 1865, tens of thousands of Black sailors who had served in the U.S. Navy — men who had fought for a country that had not yet decided to fully include them. Their story is long, complicated, and essential to understanding what American naval service has meant across generations.
From the Beginning
Black Americans served in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War, and in the young republic's Navy from its earliest years. During the War of 1812, African American sailors were a significant part of the naval forces that fought on the Great Lakes and along the Atlantic coast. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, after his victory at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, wrote to report that a quarter of his crew — sailors he praised for their courage — were Black men.
By the Civil War, African Americans had been serving in the U.S. Navy for decades — in an institution that was, compared to the Army, relatively integrated in practice if not in policy. The Union Navy was officially open to Black enlistment throughout the war, and by 1865 approximately one in five Union Navy sailors was Black. They served as gunners, cooks, pilots, and quartermasters. They served on gunboats on the Mississippi and ironclads on the James River. They served in the blockade squadrons that strangled Confederate commerce and cut off supply lines from Europe. Their labor and their courage were not incidental to the Union Navy's success — they were part of its backbone.
Dorie Miller
Doris "Dorie" Miller was a Messman Third Class aboard USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. When Japanese aircraft attacked, Miller's ship was one of the first hit — struck by torpedoes, with her captain mortally wounded. Miller dragged the captain to safety, then manned an anti-aircraft machine gun he had never been trained to operate, and kept firing at Japanese aircraft until ordered to abandon ship. He was awarded the Navy Cross — the first Black American to receive it — for his actions that morning. The citation noted his "distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety."
Dorie Miller's story is sometimes told as a story about an exception. It wasn't. It was a story about a system that placed Black sailors in the lowest-status jobs aboard ships and then discovered, under fire, that the men they had underestimated were exactly as capable as every other sailor on deck. Miller was a messman because that was where Black enlisted men were largely confined in the pre-war Navy. He manned the gun because no one else was doing it. He received the Navy Cross because of what he did with the gun. The contradiction between those facts defined the next decade of the Navy's history.
Miller was killed in action on November 24, 1943, when USS Liscome Bay was sunk by a Japanese submarine. He was twenty-four years old.
Port Chicago and the Push for Equality
On July 17, 1944, an explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California killed 320 men — 202 of them Black enlisted sailors who had been loading ammunition onto ships bound for the Pacific. Port Chicago was among the deadliest home-front disasters of the war, and the sailors who died there were doing some of the most dangerous work in the Navy under conditions that reflected the segregated structure of the service: Black enlisted men did the physical labor of loading ordnance; white officers supervised and retained the authority. After the explosion, 258 Black sailors refused to continue loading ammunition, citing unsafe conditions. Fifty of them were court-martialed and convicted of mutiny. They served prison sentences.
The Port Chicago case became a landmark in the civil rights history of the military. Thurgood Marshall, then counsel for the NAACP, attended the court-martial and argued publicly that the convictions were unjust. The case added pressure to a growing movement for military desegregation. Three years later, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, mandating equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces regardless of race. The Navy began integrating in earnest.
The Trailblazers
Wesley Brown graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1949, the first Black graduate in the Academy's history. He served for twenty years and retired as a lieutenant commander. The path he walked to that graduation was not made easy by the institution; it was cleared by his own persistence and the support of a few fellow midshipmen who chose to stand with him against those who didn't want him there.
Samuel L. Gravely Jr. became the first Black officer to command a U.S. Navy warship when he took command of USS Falgout in 1961-62. He went on to become the first Black officer to command a major Navy warship (USS Jouett), the first to achieve the rank of rear admiral (1971), and the first to achieve vice admiral rank. His career spanned the transformation of the Navy from a segregated institution to — at least in policy — an equal one. He made that transformation visible from the bridge of every ship he commanded.
Service Continues
Today, Black Americans serve at every rank and in every community of the United States Navy — as aviators, submariners, surface warfare officers, SEALs, and chiefs. The history of their service didn't begin with integration, and it didn't end with it. It is a continuous thread running from the Revolutionary War to the present, through every conflict and every peacetime deployment the Navy has conducted.
Juneteenth marks the day the last enslaved people in America learned they were free — told by soldiers and sailors of a Union military that included Black men who had been fighting for that freedom for years. That history belongs to all of us. It belongs especially to the Navy, and to everyone who has served in it.
The Ship's Store is built for everyone who has served — in every era, every rate, every ship. Browse the store for cruise shirts and gear that honor Navy service across the full history of the fleet.