Race Riot at Sea

 Via Reborn

Why did they join the Navy? Maybe they were drafted and thought the Navy would be easier.  I do know when I enlisted some of the Army  men were sent to the Marines as they were short manpower. 

On the night of October 12, 1972, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk was steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines to its combat station in the Tonkin Gulf. The ship’s complement consisted of 4,483 sailors, aircrew, and Marines, 302 of whom were black.

By the early morning of October 13, the ship had endured a sustained race riot that some consider to be the first and only mutiny in the history of the United States Navy.

As Gregory A. Freeman and the crewmen he interviewed tell the story, the Kitty Hawk riot had been brewing for some time. Many of the crew, black and white, were showing the stress of repeated deployments and long combat duty shifts on a hot, crowded warship. Black crewmembers had been allowed to live together in areas that became squalid, where white sailors feared to go and that NCOs did not inspect.

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