Watson was more than a little afraid when he started out at Annapolis. Competing against the best at Lane Tech was one thing; competing against the best at the naval academy was another, particularly when there were only 12 blacks in the entire school of 4,800 midshipmen.
”I think people thought that being black and from a poor, inner-city housing project, I wouldn`t have the sort of cultural background to succeed at Annapolis,” Watson says. ”I know that I worried about it. I suppose I thought most of these guys came from well-to-do families and were refined and knowledgeable about the ways of the world that I had never been exposed to.” He was assigned to a room with a white plebe from Texas who, apparently in all innocence, kept telling stories about ”niggers” he knew back home. Watson is uneasy when it comes to talking about racism and glosses over such incidents as noncommittally as possible.
”I don`t think he even realized that it hurt me,” he says of that roommate. ”But after a day of it, I decided to straighten him out, to let him know that `nigger` was not an acceptable word in my vocabulary.”
Whatever means of persuasion he used, it worked, he says, and he and his roommate became friends. The Texan, however, soon dropped out of the academy, while quiet, affable Tony Watson from Cabrini-Green stayed on and was elected president of the freshman class.
The academy`s superintendent was Adm. Draper Kauffman, and early in Watson`s first year, the admiral and his wife invited some of the student leaders for an informal gathering at their home. Tony, as president of his class, was one of those invited. The tall, then-gangly youth was already beside himself with nervousness at the reception when disaster struck. In an awkward moment, he spilled his cup of deep-red punch down the front of his dress-white uniform.
Mrs. Kauffman saw the accident, Tony says, and immediately came over to put him at ease. The admiral, too, came over and began to talk with him, and before the reception was over, Tony had a new mentor in his life-one, Watson would later say, who was ”surely committed to racial equality.”
Draper Kauffman was a rarity in the Navy of 1966. An officer who made his mark as a demolition expert and founder of the Navy`s elite frogman program that was the forerunner of the Seals, he was one of the most decorated American warriors in World War II. But he was also a man ahead of his time, a man whose conscience was stricken by the Navy`s overt racism. Until then, only a few from America`s minority groups had ever risen above such traditionally lowly Navy slots as stewards and mess attendants.
Throughout his career, Kauffman had always tried to use his influence to break down racial barriers whenever and however he could. During his tenure as Annapolis superintendent, he took special care to counsel and encourage the few black midshipmen who made it there, among them Tony Watson.
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”Annapolis is a very demanding place scholastically, a place where you don`t get much beyond a C average unless you apply some enthusiasm,” Watson says. ”Adm. Kauffman was always inspiring me to work harder, to achieve something. I was really afraid I couldn`t hack it there, and I worked my hind end off to keep up to flank with the other guys. I ended up getting a 3.7
(out of a possible 4) grade-point average at the end of my first year.”
The Navy apparently expected Watson to put his football skills to use at the academy, and he did turn up for freshman football. ”I was tall enough, but I wasn`t all that big then,” he says. ”I took one look at most of the guys out for football and realized they could just as well have been turning out for Notre Dame. They were really big guys, much bigger than (the guys) in high school, and I figured I didn`t want to keep running into that kind of wall.”
Instead, Watson turned his interest to the mandatory physical-education course in boxing under the academy`s legendary coach, Emerson Smith. Watson wasn`t particularly good at it at first, he says, but the individual nature of boxing appealed to him, and he quickly made it his sport at the academy. Oliver North and James Webb, who later became Secretary of the Navy, were Annapolis upperclassmen then and outstanding boxers who helped train Watson as he began learning the pugilistic arts.
”North was an outstanding boxer, and he taught me a considerable amount,” Watson says. ”Webb was smaller than me, but we once fought against each other in a match. I never thought I would beat up on the future secretary of the Navy, but I did.”
”I knew nothing about Tony`s background when he was in his first class under me,” says coach Smith. ”I had a responsibility to put all midshipmen through the program, and he was just another face. He wasn`t highly visible as far as ability goes. He certainly wasn`t a natural. What made me notice him eventually was that he was able to work very, very hard, with great determination. That made a great difference in him. He became well-known eventually at the academy and highly respected for his boxing prowess.”
In 1968 Adm. Kauffman left the academy for a new assignment. At the change-of-command ceremony, he presented his ceremonial sword, which had been worn before him by his father, also a U.S. Navy admiral, to Watson. In doing so, he told the midshipman to give it to the first officer to become Annapolis superintendent from the classes Kauffman had presided over at the academy.
”I`m giving it to you,” the prescient Kauffman told Watson, ”because I believe you will be the one.”
Watson`s fear of failing in head-on competition with whites disappeared at Annapolis. By the time he graduated in 1970, ranking 153d scholastically in a class of 838, he had compiled an enviable record. He was a battalion boxing champion four years running and was class president in his freshman and sophomore years. He won the top leadership award in his class as a junior, when he also was made brigade commander. As a senior, he was made regimental commander, the highest military rank attainable by an Annapolis student.
Tony`s success was the source of unimaginable joy and pride to the Watson rowhouse back at Cabrini-Green.
”Tony was the poorest boy at the academy, but I bet he got one thing more than any of the other midshipmen,” says his mother, who still glows with the memories. ”He got MAIL! I was sending him letters and packages of food all week long. That first time he came home in his uniform, I can`t tell you how proud we were. Yeah, those were some good days. He was succeeding. Tony would never tell us what he was doing until it was an accomplished fact, like, `Oh, yeah, by the way, Mama, I was made class president.` ”
Watson upon graduation decided to become a submariner, which meant beginning rigorous schooling in October, 1970. Ever mindful of where he came from, he convinced the Navy to let him spend the summer between his graduation and submarine school at home. He wanted to do what he could to convince kids in Cabrini-Green that they, too, could compete successfully in the world outside the project.
Two days after Ens. Watson arrived home, on Friday, July 17, 1970, Sgt. James Severin and Patrolman Anthony Rizzato of the Chicago police were shot to death by snipers as they walked across Seward Park in Cabrini-Green. Overnight whatever shreds of civility had remained at the project were ripped apart. Helicopters hovered above as squads of police went from apartment to apartment in search of the killers. Dozens of innocent people were caught in the fury of emotions. Johnny Watson was arrested and thrown into jail two days later during a Sunday-morning police sweep as he walked his dog on the way to pick up the Sunday newspapers.
Although the killers, two street-gang members, soon were arrested and later convicted, it was a watershed event for Cabrini-Green, a turn for the worse that stigmatized the place as never before, a stigma that has never been erased.
For Tony Watson that summer, the gloss of his achievements didn`t seem so shiny. He was a man of some acclaim at the United States Naval Academy, but back home he was just another black deemed suspicious by whites. The experience didn`t embitter him, but it sobered him and perhaps hardened him to some of the realities of the Navy he was about to join as an active-duty officer.
The Navy, in 1970, was hardly a citadel of racial harmony. There were, in fact, so few black officers that the uniforms and insignias worn by Watson and other black officers might as well have been invisible. Whites, both officers and enlisted men, usually responded reflexively to Watson`s color, not his rank, seldom proffering the standard salute or other gestures of protocol reserved for officers. Noting his color, they simply assumed he was an enlisted man, not an officer.
But 1970 was a watershed year for the Navy, just as it was for Cabrini-Green. Fortunately, however, it was a turn for the better, not for the worse, in the Navy.
In July of that year Adm. Elmo Zumwalt became Chief of Naval Operations. The Navy he inherited was two decades behind the Army and the Air Force in terms of racial desegregation and equality. President Truman had issued an executive order on July 26, 1948, demanding equality of treatment and opportunity for all members of the armed services, but the Navy never really complied with it. On Dec. 17, 1970, Zumwalt issued new policy guidelines on
”Equal Opportunity in the Navy” that ordered an end to discriminatory practices and set up a system of minority-affairs officers on every ship and naval installation around the world.
Watson soon found himself attending ”Zumwalt Roundtables,” which amounted to race-sensitivity-training sessions attended by naval personnel regardless of rank and race. Such sessions were ridiculed by many old hands, but the message began slowly to seep through the ranks.
Indeed, the message seeped through every Navy unit, including the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago, where in 1970 Adm. Kauffman became the commanding officer, his last billet before his retirement in 1973. Great Lakes then was a tinderbox ready to explode with racial conflict. Some of the problems arose from overt racism on the base and in the surrounding communities. The most serious came from landlords who refused to rent off-base housing to black personnel. Less serious but just as aggravating to blacks was the refusal of base commissaries to carry merchandise that catered to black lifestyles.
Kauffman met the problems head-on, ordering mess halls and base clubs to setraditional black foods, getting commissaries to stock black cosmetics and periodicals and allowing bushy Afros for blacks along with longer hairstyles for whites and beards for everyone. Above all, he put all private housing that had refused to accept black renters in the past off-limits to all Navy personel, whether black or white. The order caused some inconvenience to white Navy families that were forced to move to approved housing, but by giving black personnel equal access to off-base housing, it eased a great deal of the racial tension at the base.
Through it all, Kauffman worked closely with black enlisted men and officers and sought the advice of black community leaders in the area. Among them was Rev. Fowler of Chicago`s Third Baptist Church, who soon became a lifelong friend of the Kauffmans`.
In contrast to his early years in the service, it isn`t often nowadays that Watson is mistaken for an enlisted man because he is black. Black officers now are relatively commonplace. Six percent of all naval officers are black, and the Navy is running an aggressive campaign to eventually at least match the Army officer corps, which is 10 percent black.
Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist whose special interest is the military, points out that the armed forces today are probably better integrated racially than any other segment of U.S. life. In 1985, for instance, blacks accounted for 30 percent of all Army personnel, 20 percent of the Marine Corps, 17 percent of the Air Force and 13 percent of the Navy. Since officers are executives, no other segment of American society can come close to the record of the military in granting blacks authority and responsibility over white subordinates.
The military, in fact, has become a platform for black veterans from which to enter better-paying civilian jobs. Thousands of black officers and NCOs now retire from the military each year. They carry with them skills and leadership experience eagerly sought by private companies trying, as the military did much earlier, to desegregate its middle- and upper-level management ranks.
Watson himself couldn`t ignore the lure of higher pay in private industry. In 1983 he left the Navy for a high-level executive position with a private power company in Washington, D.C. It was interesting and challenging, he says, but about a year after leaving the Navy, he took some friends to a submarine base to show them what he used to do.
”I took them down the hatch, and I was just about overcome when I smelled the old smells,” he says with a sheepish laugh. ”I realized what a mistake I had made. As corny as it sounds, the Navy is an adventure, and I decided I was still too young to give it up. I`ve never liked an office yet that wasn`t on a submarine.”
If there is such a thing, you could call Watson a yuppie warrior. When he isn`t at sea playing cat-and-mouse with the Soviet navy for six months at a stretch, he is at home in Norfolk, lovingly restoring a Victorian townhouse in one of the city`s most historic areas. He and his wife, Sharon, director of the labor-law division of the Virginia Department of Labor, moved into the integrated, gentrified neighborhood with their daughters, Erica and Lindsay, when he re-entered active duty in 1984.
It has been nearly two decades since the summer that Tony Watson spent at home in Cabrini-Green after graduating from Annapolis. For Cabrini-Green and for the Navy, they have been critical decades. The Navy confronted and to a large degree surmounted the racial problems that had bedeviled it in 1970. But Cabrini-Green has not fared so well, its problems ignored to the point that they have festered and compounded into something worse. There are children in the project with intelligence and talents that would match those of the Watson kids two decades ago, but the barriers facing them may be higher than ever.
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”That is something I-and a lot more people-have to do in the future-to get out and reach as many of these kids while they still have a chance, in high school and even before high school,” Watson says. ”Many of these kids have no hope. You can`t dream if you can`t see that anybody from here has done anything.
”We need to tell kids there is something on the other side of the mountain. If they could see it, they just might try to climb it. But they don`t know what they don`t know. A lot of them just don`t know there is another side to the mountain.”
Blessed all along with good mentors, Watson now feels a responsibility to do some mentoring himself. Within a year of taking command of the Jacksonville, he improved the re-enlistment rate of his crew from 39 to 74 percent. Throughout his career he has pushed his best enlisted men, whatever their race, to consider officer training. Seven who followed his advice were blacks.
Outside the Navy, he often speaks to high school audiences, pitching both for the Navy and for engineering careers, a field in which blacks are relatively underrepresented.
Last May he shared top billing as the main speaker with Mayor Richard M. Daley at the Lane Tech`s Memorial Day observance. Within minutes of meeting the mayor, Watson had elicited a promise from him to attend an athletic tournament he is helping to stage at Cabrini-Green July 15. Though sometimes uncomfortable with talking about himself and his own accomplishments, he proved once again, at Lane Tech, to be a public speaker of astonishing power. In a performance that few orators can match, he quickly silenced several thousand fidgety high school students into rapt attention. In a patriotic speech that included an account of the death in Vietnam of a Lane Tech classmate of his, he moved many of the students to tears in a consideration of the meaning of wartime sacrifice.
When he visits Chicago, as he tries to do several times a year, Watson always stays with his mother in her rowhouse. He is one of a number of Cabrini-Green alumni who keep coming back, attempting to reach as many kids as they can before the gangs get to them. Watson is a supporter of the Alvin Carter Youth Foundation, an after-school tutoring and sports organization in the project that has succeeded in getting dozens of dropout-prone kids through high school and sending a few of them each year to college.
But what is most important is talking to the kids themselves, he says. During the dedication service for the Peggy Kauffman Friendship House at the Third Baptist Church, Watson says, ”This little boy from Cabrini-Green was more afraid than I had ever been in his life the day he arrived at the naval academy.” Then, referring to the sword Adm. Kauffman gave him, he says:
”Twenty-one years later, I still have that sword, and I`m running as fast as I can to get back to the academy before any of my classmates so that I can keep it. I still believe I can be whatever I want to be, just as you can be. You just have to kick down that door of fear first, the one that you think is blocking the path to your dreams. Just kick it and open it a crack, then keep it open.”
After the service, back at Cabrini-Green, Watson, just as he always does when he`s home, wanders around in his uniform, just talking to the kids. He tries to dazzle them with his experiences, with stories of what his job is, the places he has been, the people he has met.
On a recent visit home, he stops to talk with two boys who live near his mother, 13-year-old twins whom he has gotten to know over the years. They complain to him of the nightly noise made by the ”cappers,” or snipers, who shoot at one another from the upper stories of high-rises across the street from their home.
”You can go to places like South America, Europe, Japan, the North Pole just like I have,” he tells the boys, whose studied nonchalance never quite masks their awe of him. ”You can be in charge of other men, just like I am. All you have to do is decide that you want to do it and work for it. If either of you manages to get on the honor roll by the time I get back here again, I`ll get you out to Norfolk myself and show you what I mean.
”I don`t want no football stars, basketball stars or track stars,” he continues, dropping into the argot of the projects. ”That stuff is okay, but as you get older, it doesn`t mean nothing. I want brain stars. Mind stars. What you want to work for is the academic thing, something you can use all of your life.
”You don`t have to be no cappers. You can be captains, like me.”