Charles H. King grew up in Pottsville, Pennsylvania among Schuylkill County’s small African American community.

Born in 1925, King came of age during the Great Depression and graduated from Pottsville High School in 1943. Like many young men from the Coal Region, he enlisted to serve his country in World War II.

But King’s experience in the U.S. Navy would expose him to the harsh realities of segregation, racism, and the limits of American democracy – lessons that would shape his later career as a minister and civil rights leader.

The following account from King’s memoir, Fire in My Bones, reflects on his wartime service aboard the USS General John Pope, where, instead of fighting on the front lines, he was assigned to serve white officers in a segregated Navy.

For a young man raised in Pottsville, where overt Jim Crow segregation felt distant, the experience was a brutal awakening to the realities of American racism. What he endured during World War II – humiliation, resistance, and a growing awareness of racial injustice – became the foundation for a lifetime of activism and leadership in the struggle for civil rights.

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After finishing high school in 1943, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. It was the place where all of my white buddies were going-to war, ‘to make the world safe for democracy.’ My white classmates joined the Marines, the glamour troops with the beautiful uniforms. I was turned down.

At that time I could not comprehend why I was denied the opportunity to be seen in the Marine dress uniform; those were the guys the girls swooned over. I did not realize then that the Marine Corps was the one branch of service that found it extremely difficult to accept blacks.

So I opted for the Navy with its bell-bottomed trousers. My basic training was in Bainbridge, Maryland: all blacks, no whites. The only whites at Bainbridge Naval Base were the officers and the instructors.

My hope was to be assigned to a fighting ship, to man the guns aboard a destroyer, a cruiser, or a battleship. I wanted to be able to shoot ‘the yellow dogs’ right out of the sky. God, how I hated those low-down Japs! Even after I was beaten up in Washington, D.C. in 1944 by two white U.S. Shore Patrolmen, I still considered the Japanese people as the enemy.

I became a highly trained member of the U.S. Navy: trained to serve white officers their dinners in the officers’ mess. It was my initial hope that I would be called upon to rout the Japanese from their dug-in positions on those tiny islands where our troops were dying or dead – Guadalcanal, Bataan, Corregidor, the Marshall Islands.

I desperately wanted to return home to Pottsville as a hero, even wounded. I would even sacrifice a leg or an arm; that would evoke pity. I wanted to do all that for my country. But peeling potatoes, pouring coffee, serving meals aboard the U.S.S. General John Pope, a troop transport, was my war assignment, my battle zone.

During the summer and fall of 1943 the war was waging strong in the Pacific Theater of Operations. At night, while the other steward mates (all black) slept, I would go topside, sit down in the dark night on the fantail, and wonder why my country would not send me into battle.

Pots and pans, meat and potatoes, shining the Captain’s shoes, making up his bed – disgusting and demeaning assignments. The fire started burning in my guts, and I began to contemplate how I could protest, rebel, get back at the system.

It was aboard the General John Pope that I learned how to hide my anger, to smile when I felt like crying, to laugh when I wanted to shout obscenities into the teeth of the white officers whom I served. I realized then that I was a servant, a nonperson – invisible. They would pay me no attention unless I would drop a plate or spill coffee in their laps.

Back in the kitchen, the other blacks found ways of getting back at ‘the man.’ They would drink milk from the glasses (out of sight), then place them on the tables in the wardroom. When they served steaks, they would drop them on the dirty floor (out of sight) and then cover them over with gravy.

It was a kind of black warfare, waged with a vengeance, and it was my first awakening to the salient fact that was a black man, separate and apart from white men. I had known that before, to be sure, but I had never felt it as strongly as I did on the General John Pope.

It was also during that period that I learned of the massive injustices that were heaped upon my race throughout the South. In Pottsville I had been sheltered from overt segregation and knew nothing of the denial of voting, the lynching, and the extent of black dehumanization.

The awareness of America’s denial of equality to blacks brought into sharp focus for me my selfhood, an identity, and a sharing of the frustrations and fully developed hostility echoed by my black brothers. The stories and incidents related by my fellow mess boys from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia were at first unbelievable to me.

Tucked away in Pottsville amid all of my white friends, I had my feelings of race diluted, quashed, submerged. I was not who I thought I was. Shame, guilt, denial of reality came upon me; I had lived on a cloud.

One day a white noncommissioned officer called me a black n*gger, and I struck him. I was placed on report and had to appear before the Captain. It was a trial-Captain’s Mast.

‘Why did you strike him?’ the Captain asked.

‘Because he called me a black n*gger,’ I replied.

‘What else do you think you should be called?’ the Captain asked me.

There it was. I dared not speak. I choked back the tears.

The Captain had represented to me a hope of vindication, a man who would uphold my dignity and manhood.

‘Seven days, bread and water,’ he sentenced me, ‘and while you’re serving this sentence perhaps you’ll realize who you really are.’

Deep down in the bowels of that ship was the brig. I sweated out those seven days and became actively aware that I was a black man. I swore that never again would I retreat from that awareness.

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Read more about Dr. Charles H. King and Black History in the Coal Region

A black childhood in Pottsville in the 1930s | Charles H. King, Jr.

A powerful editorial from Pottsville’s black community | 1940

Scranton residents at the March on Washington | 1963

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