Jordan R. Johnson was born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1885. His father was from Missouri and his mother from Tennessee, and they’d followed one of the routes that freed slaves took for decades after the Civil War. Indeed, just as Jewish families like the Cohens had fled Europe for New York City, many freed slaves from the South migrated to Illinois.



At 15 years old, Johnson stood 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. He was the oldest boy out of five children. It was 1900, two years after the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Navy was on a recruiting push in the Midwest, and Johnson, just reaching adolescence, would experience a traumatic awakening. His father handed his firstborn son over to the Navy for six years, signing a paper that rendered him “to service till he shall be twenty-one years of age.”

Though it sounds like indentured servitude, this was one of the ways the Navy built its force in the 19th century. It would sign on boys as young as 14 as “apprentices.” (In 1903 the age was boosted to 16 as a reform step.) The boys, going through puberty, would get on-the-job training aboard a crowded man o’ war, slaves to the whims of the sailors, and in theory could work themselves up to seaman first class. The money was dismal. For his work, Jordan would be paid $9 a month, though his uniform and bedding had to be deducted from that.

One can only guess how hard it was to survive for a 15-year-old black boy in a white Navy. By now, racial fights were common on U.S. Navy ships, and white sailors openly made it clear they detested black shipmates. In fact Johnson was signed over to the Navy just as the role of black men in the service was changing. African-Americans had served in the Navy for years. In the Civil War, up to a quarter of the crews aboard Navy ships were black.

By the time of the Spanish-American War and the rise of Roosevelt, things were radically shifting, and African-Americans were being deliberately dropped from the rolls. There was a tremendous irony, because just as there was a recruiting drive that would eventually double the manpower of the Navy, African-Americans were being relegated to lower positions. By 1900, “black applicants were almost as unwelcome as convicts in the modern navy,” wrote historian Frederick Harrod in Manning the Navy.

Teddy Roosevelt himself did not order all this, and it’s not really clear who did, but he certainly was there as it happened, and one can say he spurred it on, as a product of his time. He was the assistant navy secretary from 1897 to 1898, and he pushed to grow America’s vast new naval enterprise.

And Roosevelt himself would have a complicated and often dismal relationship with African-Americans, especially those in uniform. Historian Regina Akers, Ph.D., of the Naval History and Heritage Command, has pointed out that Roosevelt’s most famous military experience, his charge up San Juan Hill, was actually supported by the “Buffalo Soldiers,” a black infantry unit.

“At points during the campaign, they rescued the Rough Riders,” she said. Yet the celebrated adventurer and politician resisted embracing black soldiers. Sometimes, she said, Roosevelt gave credit to the all-black 24th infantry unit that was at San Juan Hill, and sometimes, for whatever reason, he made sure to withhold it, and imply that African-Americans were too cowardly to fight.

As president, Roosevelt was recognized for his controversial gesture of inviting Booker T. Washington into the White House for dinner. But on the other hand, his view of Anglo-Saxon Teutonic superiority was unshakable.

Roosevelt “viewed the entire breadth of the American past through a racial lens,” wrote Thomas Dyer in Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. And the president had a constant, “almost compulsive attention to underlying racial themes.” One further clue to the way Roosevelt viewed African-Americans in uniform emerged later: In 1906 Roosevelt would be the president who unfairly dismissed 167 African-American soldiers, with dishonorable discharges, after they were unfairly accused in the case of a murder of a white barkeep in Brownsville.

Roosevelt’s influence had a dramatic impact on Johnson's life. By 1900 to 1910, “African-Americans were being actively pushed into servant roles,” as the U.S. Navy’s History and Heritage Command wrote. They were disappearing from the decks, except to play instruments and attend to the officers.

Reaching manhood in the Navy, Johnson managed to keep his sailor’s job, though records indicate that Johnson’s shipmates and commanders treated him like an animal as he grew up. One time, at 17, he had been made to sleep locked up in chains on his wrists and ankles for three nights. “Three nights, double irons,” his records say. “For continued shirking.”

Later, he was held for five nights in double irons. In 1903 he went to sleep while he was supposed to be on watch, and he did 10 nights in chains. Jordan grew up hard and fast. By the time he was 20 he’d grown another six inches and put on 45 pounds of muscle, and he was feared and respected. The five years had done some things to him. Physical things.

He got a burn scar on his buttocks, though the records don’t say how. A three-inch scar on his abdomen. And scars on his knuckles, the type of scars one gets throwing a punch into another man’s teeth. His left ear was bent, the kind of thing that comes from getting hit hard, or wrapped in a headlock.