James Graham was hiking down a Navy pier in Boston almost 60 years ago when he struck up a conversation with another sailor. The second man, a white man and as friendly as could be, asked him the name of his ship.
"The Mason, DE-529," said Graham, who is black.
"Oh, that's the ... ship," his new companion replied, using a racial slur.
In a blink, Graham was on the man, and when the two had finished duking it out, their identical Navy uniforms were smeared bright with blood.
Once disparaged and often doubted, the men of the Mason, which carried the first predominantly black crew in the Navy, are to receive a high honor Saturday. A new Mason, a 505-foot guided missile destroyer, is scheduled to be launched in Bath, Maine.
More than anything else, the honor is the result of efforts by Graham, 79, a retired television repairman from Roosevelt, N.Y. In 1998, he wrote to former Navy Secretary John Dalton with the suggestion.
"There were 150 black men on that ship, and they have children, and grandchildren, and I thought they should know about the Mason," Graham said. "My concern was that in another 50 years, people might never have heard about the Mason, except as a footnote."
Black sailors served with distinction during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and in the Civil War, but increasing segregation in the Navy eventually consigned them to non-combat roles as stewards or cooks. A few became officers, only to command shore units.
By World War II, many black sailors were being trained to operate radios or fire big guns. But when it came time to ship out, they found themselves pushing mops or serving meals.
As the war dragged on and the need grew for more fighting men, however, the armed forces came under more and more pressure to make good on the January 1942 order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that blacks be admitted to all regular military units. Roosevelt had been hearing not only from civil rights leaders, such as A. Philip Randolph, but from his activist wife, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Despite Graham's high scores at the Navy's radio school, he was tying up ships in 1944 at Cape May, N.J., when he was selected for the Mason. As a destroyer escort, it was one of more than 500 heavily armed ships that led troop carriers and supply vessels from the United States to Europe.
The 289-foot Mason had frequent sonar contact with enemy submarines, and its crew sprang dozens of depth charges overboard, but it never engaged in combat.
It won its considerable reputation in a fierce Atlantic storm in 1944, when it braved 90 m.p.h. winds and 60-foot waves to escort a convoy to England. Some of the welds on the ship's hull gave way in the storm, and the crew made hasty repairs at Plymouth, England, before taking the Mason back into the weather to guide the straggling oilers, barges and tugs into port.
For the first time, black sailors were at the helm and on the guns, even if their officers were all white. The Navy had offered these 40 officers, led by Capt. William Blackford, the chance to transfer off the ship before it was even launched. None chose to do so, and Blackford set a tone of mutual respect.
The unusual command was a heartfelt experience for Blackford, said his son, Mansel Blackford, a professor of history at Ohio State University.
"He never saw himself as a civil rights reformer," Mansel Blackford said of his father, who died in 1988. "He always told me he just wanted to run a good ship, and to run a good ship, you treat people like people."
According to Mary Pat Kelly's "Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason," the definitive account of the ship's history, Blackford was also the great-grandson of a prominent 19th Century abolitionist. It's a tantalizing fact, even if Blackford himself never portrayed himself as a crusader. He was a seaman.
And so was Jim Graham. He was no activist then, but someone from a map dot in the Deep South who looked for adventure in the Navy.
Searching for the crew
It was only decades after the war, when Graham retired, that he began to wonder about the whereabouts of the old crew. He sought out destroyer escort alumni publications but found the faces in the photographs almost uniformly white. So he tracked the men down on his own.
About the same time, Kelly came upon the Mason story while researching the World War II homefront in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the Mason crew had been fondly recalled by residents.
Her book drew attention to the story and, Graham believes, was instrumental in Dalton's decision to award the crew letters of commendation in 1995. The honors had been recommended by Blackford in 1945, but the Navy had not acted on his suggestion.
The Mason was given to the Greek navy after the war and eventually scrapped. Its insignia will hang in the new Mason.