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WACO — Writing about Doris Miller, Waco’s hometown Pearl Harbor hero, I didn’t expect to be mentioning “Saturday Night Live.” But three Saturdays ago I was surprised to hear “Weekend Update” co-anchor Michael Che refer — without using his name — to the black sailor for whom an aircraft carrier was named last month. Che, who is African American, jokingly alluded to the old canard about blacks not being able to swim. Then a photo of a black sailor in front of a 70s musical group appeared and he quipped, “The ship will be called U.S.S. guy from the Village People.” Miller’s descendants were understandably distressed, with his great-nephew telling a Central Texas news station that his family watched the segment in “horror and disbelief at the level of insensitivity and racist undertones.”

Che (also SNL’s head writer) seemed more to be lightly poking fun at the idea of a carrier being named after a black sailor than anything else. But what he apparently didn’t know about Doris Miller could fill a book. Fortunately, several have been written, including the superb “Doris Miller: Pearl Harbor and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement,” co-authored by historians Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish.

“He was the first great hero of Pearl Harbor,” Parrish, a longtime Baylor professor, reminded me a few days ago. “For a time, he was more famous than Joe Louis,” he added, referring to the African-American boxing great.

Doris “Dorie” Miller was born in 1919 in a three-room cabin a few miles northwest of town. The third of four sons, he was the grandson of slaves and the son of hardworking sharecroppers. He was christened Doris, perhaps because the midwife who delivered him was convinced the baby was going to be a girl. She liked the name so much, she persuaded the parents to bestow it on their baby boy, who would eventually grow into a man who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 240 pounds. Unlike Johnny Cash’s “boy named Sue,” Miller was good-natured about his given name.

Miller came of age during the Depression. With few prospects for a young black man in Central Texas, he enlisted in the peacetime Navy in 1939 for a six-year tour of duty. All the Navy offered black recruits in those days were positions in the "lowly messman branch," write Cutrer and Parrish in the December issue of World War II, a sister magazine of Navy Times. That meant basically preparing meals, doing laundry and shining officers’ shoes. Not only were black sailors ineligible for promotion, they also were prohibited from training for any specialty, including gunnery.

"Their battle station was below decks in 'the hole' or magazine, where they passed ammunition up to the gunners," the historians write. Despite the limitations, Miller said, “it beats sitting around Waco working as a busboy, going nowhere."

Aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, moored with the entire Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row, the young man’s rank was mess attendant third class. He also happened to be the ship’s heavyweight boxing champion.

On Dec. 7, 1941, early on a Sunday morning, Miller was hard at work doing an ensign’s laundry when the first of eight Japanese torpedoes slammed into the ship. Within minutes, the West Virginia was in flames. Japanese Zeros, buzzing like angry hornets, repeatedly strafed the deck. Bombs ignited fires below decks.

Amid death, chaos and destruction, Miller managed to get to his battle station, the ship’s magazine. Finding the area already flooded, he was ordered to the signals deck where the ship’s commanding officer, Capt. Mervyn Sharp Bennion, lay mortally wounded. As Cutrer and Parrish describe in World War II magazine, he helped carry the captain "to a place of relative safety... below the port side anti-aircraft guns."

"By then the ship... was listing drastically, its port guns silenced," they write. With most of the starboard guns still functional, the magazine reported, "Lt. j.g. Frederic H. White ordered Miller to start feeding ammo... to one of a pair of .50-caliber Browning machine guns that stood idly nearby."

As White commenced firing, Miller did as he was ordered, and then, with the oil-soaked deck in flames, ran to the second gun and, without orders and despite not having been trained, began firing at the low-flying Zeros darting at the stricken ship out of billowing, black smoke.

“It wasn’t hard,” he famously said later. “I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine.”

“He had a good eye,” White told an interviewer in 1990, the historians write in their book.

When Capt. Bennion was pronounced dead, the small group of officers and men, including Miller, abandoned the ship’s bridge and descended to the boat deck, where Miller "helped pull sailors from the burning water," the historians write.

Miller was among the last three men to leave the ship, according to the magazine, which says he swam 300 yards or so through splattering machine-gun bullets and past sheets of "flaming oil from the battleship Arizona." Once ashore, he continued to pull injured sailors to safety.

It’s impossible to know whether the 22-year-old sailor brought down any of the planes he fired at that morning. When asked later how many he shot down, he gave varying answers. It’s doubtful that he knew.

His bravery, though, was undeniable, even though the Navy did its best to ignore that fact. Surviving shipmates spread the word about his exploits, but Navy brass would only acknowledge the actions of “an unnamed Negro cook.”

The black press, particularly the influential Pittsburgh Courier, took up Miller’s cause, as did the NAACP and other individuals and organizations. President Franklin Roosevelt eventually sent the young man a Letter of Commendation, but Miller’s champions insisted he was eligible for the Navy Cross, at the time the third-highest Navy award for valor in combat. On May 27, 1942, a fellow Texan, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, pinned the award to Miller’s chest. He was the first black sailor ever to receive it.

Shortly afterward, the Navy brought Miller back to the states, where he addressed the graduating class of the Navy’s Great Lakes Training School. Perhaps he appreciated the irony that, as a black man, he could swab the hallway floors at Great Lakes but could not take classes. At the urging of Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president, and New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Miller also joined a cross-country tour with other celebrities to promote war bonds. That June, he was in New York City to take part in “Negro Achievement Day.” Recognized for their “distinguished service to America” were George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Joe Louis, Adam Clayton Powell and a young sailor from Waco. He came to personify the so-called Double V campaign, a demand that Americans of color risking their lives abroad for victory over the Axis be rewarded with a victory on the home front, as well: full citizenship.

Four months to the day after Pearl Harbor, the Navy finally — some would say reluctantly — abolished its ban on African Americans holding any rank beyond steward or messman (although it took the Navy until 1944 to fully implement the policy). On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed an executive order that abolished all racial barriers between service members, signaling the beginning of an integrated U.S. military.

Miller was a symbol of the African-American fighting man, to be sure, but he was more than just a symbol, historian Parrish contends. As a result, not just of his bravery under fire but also his modesty and soft-spoken eloquence before audiences back home, he was “a galvanizing force.”

The Waco hero didn’t live to see what he had helped set in motion. He was serving aboard the carrier USS Liscome Bay in the South Pacific when, on the day before Thanksgiving 1943, a single torpedo from a Japanese sub tore into the ship. Carrying more than 200,000 pounds of bombs, thousands of gallons of bunker oil and aviation fuel and countless cannon shells, the Liscome Bay exploded. Miller was one of 645 men who perished.

That’s who Doris Miller was. That’s why the next aircraft carrier the Navy will launch won’t be named after a president, as is traditional. It will be called the USS Doris Miller.

djholley10@gmail.com

Twitter: holleynews

Editor's note: This article has been updated to attribute information about Miller's life to World War II magazine, a sister publication of Navy Times that published a 2019 article about the naval hero by historians Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish. While the column did credit Navy Times in providing an account of some of Miller’s actions and referenced the authors’ book on Miller, it also included the authors’ wording in multiple instances in three paragraphs without providing proper attribution. The column also did not cite the sources of quotations attributed to Miller, who died in 1943, and a Navy officer who was aboard the ship and gave an interview years later. The article also has been updated to include the correct date for when Miller received the Navy Cross. It was May 27, 1942.