Just over a 12 months earlier than the assault on Pearl Harbor, 15 sailors assigned to the usS. Philadelphia wrote a letter to a Black newspaper detailing the abuse and indignities that they had confronted on the warship solely due to the colour of their pores and skin.

When they enlisted, the Navy had promised coaching and assignments that might result in development, however the Black sailors quickly discovered that these alternatives didn’t exist for them. They had been pressured 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 talk out, a number of of the boys had been jailed and all of them had been kicked out of the Navy with discharges that ceaselessly labeled them as unfit to serve.

The plight of the group, which turned generally known as “the Philadelphia 15,” light from public consideration as World War II erupted. But the injustice they confronted, and the stigma their discharge papers carried, lived on for greater than 80 years.

On Friday, in a ceremony on the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, 4 surviving members of the family of two of these males, brothers John and James Ponder, accepted a proper apology from the Navy for the racist therapy their family members had endured as sailors aboard their ship.

The service additionally introduced the household with newly issued honorable discharges for the Ponder brothers and introduced that the discharges for the remainder of the Philadelphia 15 had been upgraded as nicely.

“This is something — a wrong that shouldn’t have happened,” Larry Ponder, 72, son of John Ponder, stated 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.”

Mr. Ponder stated his father by no means spoke about his time within the Navy. He discovered what had occurred when he found the discharge paperwork after his father’s dying in 1997.

Years later, Mr. Ponder discovered an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer a few Black veteran granted an honorable discharge 75 years after being unjustly pressured from the Army. He contacted an legal professional, Elizabeth Kristen, who had taken on that case, and he or she agreed to help Mr. Ponder in searching for justice for his late father.

Ms. Kristen helped Larry Ponder submit a request to appropriate his father’s discharge paperwork in 2021. It stated John Ponder and the opposite Black sailors had suffered “sanctioned abuse and retaliation from peers and officers on the U.S.S. Philadelphia.”

“My father was born and raised in Alabama,” Mr. Ponder stated. “He experienced a lot of things back then. He used to mention some of the things they had to go through, discrimination, you know, so that wasn’t new to him. He grew up in that environment. He went to the Navy hoping that he could have a career to be able to build himself. He went into there to serve like everybody else.”

The Ponder brothers had been amongst simply 18 Black males within the crew of 750 on the Philadelphia, in keeping with one account.

According to a Navy history of the vessel, the cruiser was engaged in fleet operations out of Pearl Harbor on the time the 15 males signed the letter, which attested to their therapy and advisable that Black moms and dads not assist their youngsters enlisting within the navy.

Instead of with the ability to select their very own department of the service like their white friends, the Black males had been “limited to waiting on tables and making beds for the officers” on their ship as so-called mess attendants, they wrote.

In the earlier six months, the letter stated, 9 Black sailors on mess attendant obligation had acquired one of many Navy’s most arcane and brutal punishments: three days’ confinement with nothing to eat however bread and water. The motive was combating and arguing with different enlisted males, which the punished sailors stated was a results of the mistreatment they acquired.

“We sincerely hope to discourage any other colored boys who might have planned to join the Navy and make the same mistake we did,” the letter says. “All they would become is seagoing bellhops, chambermaids and dishwashers.”

“We take it upon ourselves to write this letter, regardless of any action the naval authorities may take or whatever the consequences may be. We only know that it could not possibly surpass the mental cruelty inflicted upon us on this ship.”

The penalties for the 15 Black sailors had been certainly extreme: “undesirable” discharges — a time period for what the U.S. navy now calls an “other than honorable” discharge — that ceaselessly reduce the boys off from veterans’ advantages and inked their paperwork with an indelible stigma that prompted many future employers to steer clear.

The cruiser Philadelphia was decommissioned in 1951, and the brothers did their finest to maneuver on with their lives. Both raised households and had youngsters who served within the navy.

The brothers signed the 1940 letter as John William Ponder Jr. and James Edward Ponder, together with Ernest Bosley, Arval Perry Cooper, Shannon H. Goodwin, Theodore L. Hansbrough, Byron C. Johnson, Floyd C. Owens, James Porter, George Elbert Rice, Otto Robinson, Floyd C. St. Clair, Fred Louis Tucker, Robert Turner and Jesse Willard Watford, in keeping with the Navy.

Based on their dates of beginning, the entire 15 males are believed to be deceased and the Navy is looking for their surviving members of the family in order that leaders can provide their apologies to them as nicely.

Franklin Parker, the assistant secretary of the Navy who accepted the discharge upgrades, presided over the Hall of Heroes ceremony and addressed the Ponder household with evident emotion in his voice.

“To you and the other families of the Philadelphia 15 sailors, I wish to extend my sincere regret for their treatment while wearing the uniform, and also for the decades’ delay in taking these measures,” Mr. Parker stated to members of the Ponder household seated within the entrance row.

“The standard for the decision we are acknowledging today was whether an error or injustice occurred,” he stated. “Make no mistake: Here, injustice did occur. And today, in some measure we seek to address that.”

The abuse the boys suffered was not an aberration for the Navy or the broader navy on the time.

In December 1944, U.S. Marines threw smoke grenades into an encampment of Black sailors on Guam to impress a riot, in an incident that was not widely revealed to the public until months later.

Approximately 1,000 Black sailors serving in a building battalion in Port Hueneme, Calif., went on a two-day hunger strike in March 1945 to protest their commander’s refusal to advertise any Black members of the unit to the rank of chief petty officer, despite the fact that many met all the necessities for development.

It was not till 1948 that the armed forces had been desegregated although an executive order issued by President Harry S. Truman, though racial strife within the providers continued by way of the Cold War and past.

This summer time Congress is predicted to think about the nomination of Gen. Charles Q. Brown to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would turn into solely the second Black officer to function the nation’s most senior uniformed officer.

If confirmed, the Pentagon will be led by two Black officials for the first time in history. In January 2021, Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired U.S. Army common, turned the first Black defense secretary.

“My father was proud,” Larry Ponder stated. “He was proud of his time in service. He never did say anything negative.”

“He would be proud to see other people of color to be able to have the opportunity to have careers and be promoted into those positions.”