Remains of Black sailor killed at Pearl Harbor identified after 80 years
Edna Lee Ward walked into a newspaper office in Portsmouth, Va., early in 1942 carrying a picture of her son, who was in the Navy. He had been declared missing in action after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
His name was David Walker. He was 19. He had dropped out of his African American high school to serve as a mess attendant in the segregated Navy. He had been on the battleship USS California when it was hit and then sank, and she had just learned that he was probably dead.
She asked if the newspaper might print his picture. It did.
Last month, more than 80 years later, the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced that it had identified Walker’s remains. He was among more than 50 African American mess attendants, cooks and stewards killed on U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor.
Walker is set to be buried on Sept. 5 in Arlington National Cemetery.
Walker was one of 103 men who perished on the California when Japanese planes attacked ships and installations at Pearl Harbor, and plunged the U.S. into World War II. In all, more than 2,400 sailors, Marines, soldiers and civilians were killed.
In the weeks after the attack, remains of the California’s dead were recovered and initially buried in two cemeteries in Hawaii. In 1947, they were exhumed and transferred to an identification laboratory in Hawaii, according to the DPAA.
Most of the ship’s dead were eventually identified. But some, including Walker, were not. Those not identified were reburied in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu.
In 2018, armed with modern identification technologies, the DPAA exhumed 25 USS California unknowns from the Punchbowl for analysis, and using DNA, dental and anthropological comparisons, experts identified Walker’s remains last November.
His closest surviving next of kin is a cousin outside Pittsburgh, Cheryle Stone, who said she was born long after he was killed. “He was quite young,” she said of Walker in a telephone interview. “A tragedy, a tragedy for his mother to not know.”
Edna Lee Ward died of heart problems in 1951.
The account of her visit to the newspaper office in 1942 comes from a clipping supplied by the DPAA that appears to have run in Norfolk’s Journal and Guide, a prominent African American publication.
Walker’s father died of typhoid in 1923 when David was a year old, according to government records. His mother, who was described as a “seamstress,” later remarried. David seems to have been her only child.
He attended Portsmouth’s I.C. Norcom High School, founded as an early high school for Black students in then-segregated Virginia, but dropped out to join the Navy.
Around that time, one of the few jobs in the Navy open to African Americans was mess attendant.
“Mess attendants were the lowest rank on the ship,” said Matthew F. Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth College and author of “Half American,” a study of African Americans during World War II.
“They did the cooking and cleaning, essentially at the service of White officers,” he said in a telephone interview. “It was an important role for the overall functioning of the ship. They’re the ones who managed the galleys and made sure everyone got fed.”
“It was the only role, at least initially at the start of World War II, that Black men could take … in the Navy,” he said.
Delmont said the identification of Walker’s remains is an important reminder that dozens of Black mess attendants lost their lives in the attack.
“They were mourned by their communities, in the same way that White Americans mourned those who were lost at Pearl Harbor,” he said. “But I think it also is a window … into the segregation and discrimination that those Black Americans faced in the service of their country.”
“David Walker and most of the Black men … from Southern states attended segregated high schools,” he said. “They were in segregated communities. And then they entered into a segregated military, where they encountered racism and discrimination pretty much every day of their lives.”
The Navy’s history and heritage command says on its website: “Though the Navy remained racially segregated in training and in most service units, in 1942 the enlisted rates were opened to all qualified personnel.”
Perhaps the most famous Black mess attendant was Doris (Dorie) Miller, of Waco, Tex. Stationed on the battleship USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor, Miller, 22, was gathering dirty laundry in the galley when the attack began, Delmont wrote in his book.
Miller helped move the ship’s mortally wounded skipper. He then took control of a .50-caliber machine gun he had never used before and began firing at the swarming Japanese planes. “I think I got one,” he said later.
In 1942, Miller was awarded the Navy Cross for heroism. But the next year he was killed when the aircraft carrier he was on, the USS Liscome Bay, was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine.
He was working as a ship’s cook.
At Pearl Harbor, besides Walker, seven other Black mess attendants were killed on the USS California, according to official records.
Among them were: Samuel Jackson Bush, 20, of Beaufort, S.C., whose father had been a Navy cook; Gilbert A. Henderson, 20, of Merry Point, a rural community on Virginia’s northern neck; and George E. Vining, 20, of Macon, Ga., whose father was a veteran of World War I.
More were killed on other ships, including the USS Oklahoma, where Julius Ellsberry, 20, of Birmingham, Ala., perished.
On Jan. 4, 1942, more than 300 people filled the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham for a memorial service to honor Ellsberry, Delmont wrote. Ellsberry had volunteered for the Navy when he turned 18.
His parents and six younger siblings sat in a front pew.
His mother “was devastated to lose her son,” Delmont wrote. “Nothing could bring Julius back, but she took pride in seeing his Navy picture displayed prominently in homes and businesses throughout Black Birmingham with the message ‘Remember Pearl Harbor.’”
Twenty-two years later, at the height of anti-civil rights violence, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which had celebrated the Black hero of Pearl Harbor, was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Four girls waiting inside to attend a Sunday service were killed.