Wesley Brown, first black Naval Graduate, & how Jimmy Carter encouraged him

[WI_DEM]

Wesley A. Brown, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who endured intense racial hazing to become the first black graduate of the United States Naval Academy, died Tuesday in Silver Spring, Md. He was 85.

White midshipmen refused to sit next to Mr. Brown, racial epithets were whispered behind his back, and fellow plebes barred him from joining the choir — all of it mixed with and hidden behind a torrent of regular hazing that underclassmen were expected to bear. He told interviewers that not a day passed when he did not consider quitting.

But unlike his predecessors, he said, Mr. Brown had the support of a handful of fellow midshipmen, who were friendly to him despite receiving threats from hostile classmates, and from the academy commandant, who intervened to protect him from excessive harassment.

“If not for that, I’m not sure I would have made it,” Mr. Brown told an interviewer.

One midshipman who visited his dorm room to talk and encouraged him to “hang in there,” Mr. Brown said, was Jimmy Carter, the future president, who was then an upperclassman and fellow member of the academy’s cross-country team.

In a speech last year at a Naval Academy event, Mr. Carter recalled Midshipman Brown as part of “my first personal experience with total integration.”

“A few members of my senior class attempted to find ways to give him demerits so that he would be discharged,” Mr. Carter said, “but Brown’s good performance prevailed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/us/wesley-brown-first-black-naval-graduate-dies-at-85.html

Mr. Romney, before you attack Jimmy Carter again think about his service to his country and compare it to yours.