Aircraft carrier could receive new name

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — As a Mississippi senator, John C. Stennis signed the infamous “Southern Manifesto” decrying integration. He fought black equality in the Navy and, as a prosecutor, sought execution for three black men who’d been tortured into confessing.

For several decades, his name has graced an aircraft carrier currently based in Norfolk — the only senator to have that honor.

Now, amid a national reckoning over America’s racist roots, some are pushing for that to change.

“Today’s sailors, Marines, and officers should not have to make the psychologically damaging choice of speaking up or serving in silence in a vessel named for an ardent segregationist and white supremacist, who condoned beating the skin off black people until they either confessed or died,” retired Lt. Cmdr. Reuben Keith Green wrote in a recent piece for the U.S. Naval Institute. “It is incompatible with American values and the recent directives from the Navy to expect for them to have to do so.”

In the piece, titled “The Case for Renaming the USS John C. Stennis,” Green outlines the former Democratic senator’s history as a white supremacist and urges the Navy to rename the ship. He suggested former sailor William S. Norman, a minority affairs assistant to the naval operations chief in the early 1970s who pushed for improvements to racial equality, as one possible replacement. Norman grew up in Norfolk and attended Booker T. Washington High School.

A similar effort launched last week aims to get Stennis’ name off of a NASA space center in Mississippi.

Pentagon officials have said they would look into changing the monikers of military installations named for Confederate leaders — including North Carolina’s Fort Bragg — though President Donald Trump has said he won’t allow that to happen. A Navy spokesman declined to comment about the Stennis this week.

Michael Clemons, a political science and African American studies professor at Old Dominion University, said he thinks renaming the ship “makes a whole lot of sense.”

“The Navy is too diverse at this point in time, too inclusionary to be honoring certain individuals,” said Clemons, who’s also the founding editor of The Journal of

Race and Policy. “To keep his name on an aircraft carrier of that magnitude, I think it potentially undermines the safety and cohesiveness of those men and women who put their life on the line for this country.”

Stennis was born in Mississippi in 1901, to a farmer “in one of the poorest counties in the poorest state,” according to the carrier’s website. He went to law school at the University of Virginia.

Stennis served as a prosecutor, circuit court judge and state senator in his home state before representing it in the U.S. Senate for 41 years.