Manic Monday: Crisp

The Manic Monday word this week is crisp. My first thought was the baseball player, Coco Crisp. However, I am not a Red Sox fan ... so I can't do a post on one of their players. My second thought was that crisp is the word that I always use to describe what I think of the uniforms worn by naval officers. My brother, Charles, was a naval officer who used his law degree as a member of the Navy's JAG for a number of years. My uncle, Ben Hacker, retired as an admiral in the navy. Uncle Ben and Charles both looked crisp whenever they wore their navy uniforms.

I imagine that they both know about the Golden Thirteen. Truthfully, I didn't know about the Golden Thirteen until today. March 1944 was a turning point for all African American men serving the United States in a military capacity. Thirteen intelligent, proud, and able-bodied black men became the first African American commissioned officers serving the US Navy.

The Golden Thirteen, as these highly esteemed men were called, trained at Camp Robert Smalls, a recruiting center now known as the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois. These highly capable African American men earned an almost perfect 3.89 class grade point average and officer status in the US Navy, which counted a total of almost 100,000 African American enlisted men in its ranks.

The entire military wasn't desegrated until 1948. I'm sure that the success of these 13 pioneers made a difference. I'm also confident that these brothers looked crisp in their naval uniform as well!