![]() That second blaze was frequently a cause of panic among trainees. When we had extinguished the blaze deep in the compartment, they set another fire between us and the entering hatch. The men in charge made it as realistic as possible. Jeff Jackson was at the nozzle, I was behind him, and four other sailors were behind me, two white, two black. I still remember the day we had to wade into one of those infernos with a huge hose. Replicas of ship compartments in our training area were flooded with knee-high water, then oil was spread on the water and set afire. Among our tougher assignments was learning how to put out a fire on the lower decks of a warship. He added somewhat wryly that there was still a lot of prejudice around - more subtle and sometimes invisible but still there, barring blacks from good jobs and promotions. ![]() Then, when the family moved north to escape Southern prejudice, they found that even in the North, a lot of jobs were closed to blacks or were segregated by position, with blacks mostly in the lower paid ranks. Jeff described a similar problem his grandfather had encountered in Atlanta, Georgia, after the Civil War freed him and his family from slavery. ![]() Jeff was fascinated when I told him about the prejudice my Irish grandfather had encountered when he came to America in the 1880s - not many people wanted to give jobs to Irish immigrants at that time. He told me that his father, an undertaker, had kept him out of the draft for two years by pleading that his help was needed in the funeral home.īut Jeff disliked people calling him a draft dodger, and he eventually persuaded his father to let him volunteer for the Navy. Tall and thin, Jeff was a little older than the rest of us. I became particularly friendly with Jefferson Jackson, who, like the other two black men in bunks near mine, was from Detroit. 14, 1945, enlisted men on board the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga learn of Japan's surrender. ![]()
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