| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy's First Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality. By Robert J. Schneller Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2005. xii, 331 pp. $34.00, ISBN 0-8147-4013-8.)

Breaking the Color Barrier examines both the persistent efforts of African Americans to desegregate the United States Naval Academy and the stifling, racist environment that black midshipmen encountered for most of this century. Beginning in 1872 with James Henry Conyers, the first black midshipman to be appointed to the academy, every African American midshipman from then until World War II would have to endure a torrent of racial abuse and incessant harassment inflicted by white midshipmen, whose actions were not only condoned but often encouraged by their white superiors. The level of harassment (which included the silent treatment, name-calling, unfair demerits, hazing, and physical assaults) was so intense that none of the early black midshipmen was able to survive past the first year. When Oscar DePriest became the first black to be elected to Congress in the twentieth century, he began a personal campaign to appoint black midshipmen to the academy until the color barrier was broken. When his efforts failed, his successor, Arthur Mitchell (the first black Democrat elected to Congress), continued to appoint willing black applicants, but his appointments fared no better. One after another, black midshipmen were disqualified from the academy because they failed to pass the entrance or the physical exam or because they were "hazed" out. When Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was elected to Congress from New York, he appointed ten African Americans to the academy in 1945, but only one, Wesley Brown, enrolled.

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