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Editor's Note: In 1949 Wesley Brown became the first African American to earn a diploma from the U.S. Naval Academy. But he was not the first black to enroll at Annapolis. Three quarters of a century earlier, in 1872, James Conyers entered the Naval Academy. Conyers was not welcomed with open arms. Neither plebes nor academic faculty were enthusiastic about his presence in Annapolis.
AFRICAN AMERICANS HAVE long had a tradition of looking upon military service as an opportunity to strike a blow against racism and prove their value and loyalty to their country. While the Union navy had permitted a degree of integration of black and white sailors on board its ships during the Civil War, it had excluded blacks from its officer corps.
To enter the Navy's officer corps, African Americans first had to break the color barrier at the United States Naval Academy. In the "Old Navy," officer candidates had learned their trade on board warships. Berthed in the steerage between the officers and enlisted men, they were called "midshipmen." The establishment of the Naval Academy in 1845 at old Fort Severn on the west bank of the Severn River in Annapolis was a milestone in the professionalization of the Navy's officer corps and one of several events that marked the passing of the Old Navy.
Four of the five antebellum superintendents of the Naval Academy were born in southern states and harbored southern sentiments. Maryland-born Commander Franklin Buchanan, the Academy's first superintendent, owned slaves, assessed political candidates on the basis of their commitment to slavery, and served in the Confederate navy, including commanding the CSS Virginia in Hampton Roads, where he was wounded on March 8, 1862. He just missed making the next day's historic duel between the Virginia and the Union navy's ironclad, the Monitor. Commander Louis Goldsborough, another Maryland native and superintendent from 1853 to 1857, who ran a cotton plantation in Florida with his slave-owning father-in-law during the 1830s, defended fugitive slave laws, and, even though he ultimately remained loyal to the Union, in January 1861 urged his well-connected wife Elizabeth to obtain for him "the highest berth you can in the Southern Navy."
Racial attitudes of many of the naval officers and midshipmen at the Academy reflected...