Here's a little thread on Black history and the @NavalAcademy for your Saturday. As background: No African Americans were admitted to USNA between Henry E. Baker of MS (1874) & James Lee Johnson of IL (1936). Wesley Anthony Brown '49 would be the 1st Black graduate. 1/
Henry Baker deserves his own thread, but he's not the young man I want to write about today. Today I'd like to tell you about James A. Parsons, Jr., of Dayton, OH (1900-1989). 2/
James A. Parsons, Jr., born May 30, 1990, was the son of James A. Parsons, Sr., the butler to metallurgist and entrepreneur Pierce Davies Schenck. (In 1917, Schenck became one of 3 founders of Duriron Co. in Dayton.) 3/
James graduated from Steele High School, Class of 1917, and was said to be "exceptionally brilliant." He completed the 4-year high school course in just 3 years. Here's his yearbook photo. 4/
In January 1918, Congressman Warren Gard (D) of Ohio's Third District had three USNA appointments available. Here's Congressman Gard. He and Dayton school superintendent Frank Miller arranged to hold a competitive exam for the appointments on 1/5/1918. 5/
James took the exam, and his score was in the top three. Congressman Gard's office announced that a young white man, Harold V. Pollock, had the top score. Gard announced that he would be appointing Pollock, Parsons, and a third young white man, James Osness of Dayton, to USNA. 6/
But we know that James Parsons was not admitted to USNA. What happened? The "rest of the story" is in a letter in the Josephus Daniels Papers at the Library of Congress. (Remember Daniels? White supremacist Secretary of the Navy? Wilmington Massacre of 1898?) 7/
The letter is from Admiral Leigh Palmer of Missouri, who was at the time the head of the Bureau of Navigation. In 1918, the Bureau of Navigation included the Personnel Department. Here's Admiral Palmer, nice image from Navy History & Heritage Command. 8/
I'm just going to leave his letter to Secretary Daniels here. You have to read it. 9/
I haven't found any documents that explain exactly what happened next. Daniels, like President Woodrow Wilson, worked pretty hard not to get his hands dirty w/any ink from signing documents that prove he had anything to do w/racial discrimination in the Navy. 10/
But it's pretty obvious that James Parsons, Jr. was never admitted to USNA. I THINK that what happened was, Daniels got Congressman Gard to agree to pull the nomination. And, probably in order not to piss off Mr. Schenck rather than from any innate sense of fairness— 11/
Congressman Gard and Mr. Schenck probably encouraged James to apply to @RPI, which seems not to have had the same...reluctance to admit qualified Black students that @NavalAcademy had. He went off to Troy in the fall of 1918. 12/
In October 1918, he enrolled in the Students' Army Training Corps. He was discharged at the rank of private in December 1918. Don't know for sure, but I would guess that the program may have been cut after the Armistice. 13/
James A. Parsons Jr. graduated from RPI and went on to work as a chemist at Duriron Co., founded by his father's employer, Mr. Schenck. He became director of the Duriron Research Laboratory, & held 9 patents in the heat treatment of metals. 14/
In 1953 he left Duriron after a 31-year career and went to @TSUedu (then Tennessee A & I), where he founded the 1st metallurgy curriculum at a HBCU. He retired in 1966, but served 4 years as an adjunct in the Department of Metallurgical Engineering at @OhioState. 15/
The @USNavy lost some major talent to racial prejudice when Admiral Palmer & Secretary Daniels convinced Congressman Gard to pull that nomination. 16/
James Albert Parsons, Jr., died in Dayton, Ohio, on 5 March 1989 at the age of 88. He was survived by his wife, two daughters, and eight grandchildren. BZ for a life well-lived, sir. 17/end
Thank you for that encyclopedia entry, @cgberube! James A. Parsons, Jr. basically invented stainless steel. Wonder if we'd be seeing all those photos of rusty USN ships these days if he'd commissioned?

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More from @JABell27

3 Nov
A little follow-on story about my Cousin Mike, whom we lost in a pedestrian/vehicle accident on Halloween. I mentioned that he was probably on the autism spectrum, & that he liked to sneak into a theater near the last group home he lived in to watch movies. The local police 1/
had responded to several calls about him, & finally told the theater manager just to let him watch b/c he wasn't hurting anything. His niece went by the theater to let them know about Mike, & she learned the rest of the story today. 2/
The manager told him that if he was going to watch movies there without paying, he needed to at least do a little work around the place sweeping up. They gave him a broom and set him to work between films, & when he wasn't watching or sweeping 3/
Read 7 tweets
13 Oct
Spent a part of the day at @librarycongress reading letters from the secretary of the DC branch of the NAACP in the 1910s, a graduate of @fisk1866, to various (white) editors/publishers. In dignified, beautiful prose, he explained why certain words were racial slurs— 1/
and why publishers who'd printed books & articles w/those words in them should elevate their minds & their language. He was particularly troubled by the potential effect of using one of those words in a counting rhyme ("Ten Little [Deleted]s") in a children's book would have 2/
on Black children who might be given a copy. He mentioned that it had recently become official policy of the @boyscouts to prohibit boys from using racial slurs to describe African Americans, Jews, Italians, and Poles. 3/
Read 10 tweets
20 Sep
And let's take a look, @SMH_Historians, at a little example of how this works, right from military history. Yeoman 3rd Class Inez Beatrice McIntosh (Jackson), USNR(F), was one of the 1st 14 Black women to serve officially, & openly as Black women, in the US armed forces. 1/
She was the youngest child of formerly enslaved parents Philip and Bettie Royster McIntosh of Okolona, Mississippi. After her wartime service in Washington, DC, she married her colleague Pocahontas Jackson's younger brother DeForest. DeForest Jackson became a dentist. 2/
Here's Inez, probably in 1918. She was about 24 years old. Isn't she cute? I can't swear that the sailor making sheep's eyes at her is DeForest Jackson, but Inez was from a very nice family & I don't think she'd let just any boy hold her hand & look at her that way. 3/
Read 21 tweets
19 Sep
So many issues w/the way this is presented here. First: Learning difficulties do not equal "low intelligence." One of the smartest officers I served with was functionally illiterate. Couldn't read nursery rhymes. He had a MS in electrical engineering.
Asked how he'd managed it: he could read equations like I read text—better, maybe. He'd developed a photographic memory. He asked classmates who were doing well to tell him what had been in assigned readings in classes that weren't math/physics/engineering.
A lot of the smartest, most capable enlisted people I worked with had some small learning difference that resulted in mediocre high school grades or an inability to sit through lecture classes in college. They enlisted when they fell through the cracks. Still amazing sailors.
Read 5 tweets
19 Sep
Between the SMH letter & this stupid article, I spent entirely too much time today reading about the longing of white men for a time when they didn't have to sit w/the discomfort of acknowledging that some lives & all of history are inherently political.
nytimes.com/2021/09/17/boo…
Wanting to "purify" art & history of the political is, in itself, a political stance: one that dismisses, excludes, & belittles the lives, experiences, & histories of women, people of color, the disabled, the LGBTQ community.
It's also an attempt at elitist gatekeeping. I'm so sick of that shit. Taking a political or moral stance does not exclude the possibility of contradiction & ambiguity. Excluding the political limits & circumscribes the possibility for contradiction & ambiguity, in art & history.
Read 5 tweets
4 Sep
Good morning to everyone except Jim Golby. I'd like to say a few things about emotionally abusive relationships this morning. First, emotional abuse is abuse. Full stop. 1/
Emotional abuse happens when a predator manipulates the emotional needs & desires of the victim to compel behavior that, all other things being equal, the victim would not normally choose to engage in. 2/
That’s why consensual sex, as we typically understand it, can be a component of an emotionally abusive relationship. It makes things particularly insidious. 3/
Read 11 tweets

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