“For weeks, unrest between white and Black crew members had been simmering below the busy flight deck and through the labyrinth of cramped passageways, mess halls and crew quarters. On Oct. 12, these tensions finally boiled over into bloody violence.”

By Marv Truhe

IT WAS THE fall of 1972. The American aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk was in the South China Sea just 75 miles off Haiphong Harbor launching bombing runs against North Vietnamese targets.

Displacing 82,000 tons fully loaded with aircraft and armaments, and almost a quarter mile long, Kitty Hawk was one of the largest warships ever built. With an onboard air wing consisting of 107 warplanes the vessel carried a complement of 4,483 officers and enlisted men. Kitty Hawk was quite literally a floating city.

For weeks, unrest between white and Black crew members had been simmering below the busy flight deck and through the labyrinth of cramped passageways, mess halls and crew quarters. On Oct. 12, these tensions finally boiled over into bloody violence.

That night, as Kitty Hawk’s warplanes were bombing North Vietnam, the carrier’s white and Black crew members traded blows and attacked each other with makeshift weapons, including wrenches and broken-off broom handles. The chaos engulfed the ship and left dozens wounded. Worse, it precipitated one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the history of the U.S. Navy.

The unrest was predictable, given the racial tensions that had been building aboard. In the weeks prior to that incident, Kitty Hawk’s new commanding officer had carried out a series of non-judicial punishments (known as “captain’s masts”) against Black sailors involved in assaults on the ship, while ignoring assaults committed by white sailors against Black crew members. The captain’s rulings appalled the Black sailors aboard; the atmosphere grew ever more toxic. The Oct. 12 eruption came just after a brawl between white and Black sailors at an enlisted club on the Subic Bay Naval Base the day before the ship sailed.

On that day, the tensions finally boiled over. That evening, Black and white crew members in the ship’s aft mess began trading insults. As the verbal confrontation intensified, a squad of Marines from the onboard MARDET detachment, operating without orders, stormed the mess and began swinging their night sticks at the Black sailors, while totally ignoring the white crewmen involved in the altercation. The situation rapidly escalated when a Marine attempted to draw his pistol but was stopped before he could discharge the weapon.

Marines were soon directed to the hangar deck and ordered to disperse groups of three or more crew members, even those just peaceably passing through. They aggressively confronted only the Black sailors, forcing those present to the deck and handcuffing them. Although the Kitty Hawk’s captain ordered the Marines to stand down, several continued confronting Black sailors.

Soon violence between white and Black crewmen was breaking out elsewhere in the ship: the lower passageways and berthing compartments, even the ship’s sick bay where the wounded from the earlier confrontations were being treated.

When the tumult finally ended six hours later, 51 crew members had suffered documented injuries. Many of the wounded were serious, and three crew members had to be flown off the carrier for shore-based surgery.

By the time Kitty Hawk was withdrawn and headed back to port in the Philippines, 25 Black sailors had been charged with rioting and assault. Not a single white crew member faced charges.

The special courts-martial trials of those Black crew members were held at the San Diego Naval Station Law Center over several months in early 1973. The trials garnered national media attention. In addition to daily television reports, articles flowed from newspapers and news magazines throughout the country. Headlines trumpeted references to the “USS Kitty Hawk Race Riot.” Some even characterized it, erroneously, as the first mutiny in the history of the modern U.S. Navy.

The court-martialing of only Black crew members fit a pattern of injustice aboard the Kitty Hawk. The onboard investigation of the events of Oct. 12 concentrated almost exclusively on interviews with white sailors. Black sailors, even those seriously injured, were not allowed to give statements. During the trials, senior Navy officials withheld critical evidence from the Kitty Hawk defense lawyers leading to unjust convictions. One defendant was convicted on perjured testimony by a government witness. This was revealed by way of an undercover agent who secretly taped that government witness admitting he lied under oath to convict an innocent Black sailor.

Among the more egregious injustices was the months-long incarceration of defendants in pretrial confinement, despite their presumption of innocence. Some of the sailors spent all that time in maximum confinement, including solitary, during which one defendant attempted suicide. A JAG defense lawyer was even threatened with removal and a court-martial for what a senior officer considered his overzealous defense of his clients.

A Congressional subcommittee charged with investigating the incident relied on testimony almost exclusively from white crew members and senior Navy officers. These were carried out by way of closed-door hearings. Its findings, which were released to the press, were one-sided.

“The subcommittee is of the position that the riot on Kitty Hawk consisted of unprovoked assaults by a very few men, most of whom were below-average mental capacity, most of whom had been aboard for less than one year, and all of whom were black,” read the report. “This group, as a whole, acted as ‘thugs,’ which raises doubt as to whether they should ever have been accepted into military service in the first place.”

The overall result was that the official and unofficial record of the Kitty Hawk incident, as well as virtually all media accounts, reported that the sole perpetrators of the disturbance were Black sailors. In fact, a large number of vicious, unprovoked assaults were committed by white crew members against Black sailors resulting in severe injuries that were never investigated. In response to the numerous injustices, the JAG and civilian defense lawyers filed aggressive legal motions and federal court actions against senior Naval officers. As a result of those efforts, many of the sailors were acquitted or had their charges dropped, and the remainder received relatively lenient sentences. Most importantly, all the defendants left the Navy with honorable discharges.

Perhaps the most positive outcome of the Kitty Hawk incident and subsequent trials was the Navy’s institution of programs against racial discrimination and injustice. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, issued an unprecedented order directing all senior Navy officers that their careers may depend on how quickly they moved to improve conditions for the growing numbers of Black sailors serving in the fleet. He added that he “invites Navy officers who do not view improved race relations as their critical duty right now to retire from the service.”

Marv Truhe is the author of Against All Tides: The Untold Story of the USS Kitty Hawk Race Riot. Truhe defended several of the defendants at their special courts-martial trials and, 50 years later, decided it was time to set the record straight. Against All Tides chronicles the events aboard the Kitty Hawk and presents a first-person account of the trials that followed. The book is meticulously researched, using thousands of pages of Truhe’s own case files and tape recordings, Navy investigation reports, Congressional hearings, sworn statements and testimony, medical reports, and trial and hearing transcripts. The book’s website, marvtruhe.com, contains photos and excerpts from the book.