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Home Town Detroit, Michigan
Last Address Detroit, Michigan
Date of Passing Jul 28, 1959
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Detroit-native Joseph Charles Jenkins has the distinction of being recognized as the Coast Guard’s first commissioned African-American officer when he was commissioned as an ensign in the Coast Guard Reserve and the first to graduate from Officer Candidate School at the Coast Guard Academy.
Born in 1914, Jenkins attended the University of Michigan, where he was the only African-American in the engineering department at the time. While there, Jenkins was also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s first African-American Greek-letter fraternity.
After graduation, Jenkins became a highway design engineer for the state of Michigan, overseeing the construction of many Michigan highways. While working, Jenkins earned a graduate business administration degree from Wayne State University.
In the late 1930s, with the U.S. facing another world war, Jenkins helped organize what would become the 1279th Combat Engineer Battalion of the Michigan National Guard, which as the law stated at the time was a racially segregated unit.
In 1942, at 28 years old, Jenkins joined the Coast Guard as a boatswain’s mate 1st class but was quickly advanced to chief petty officer. His first assignment was to recruit other African-Americans in Michigan for the armed forces. By April 1943, Jenkins completed Reserve Officer’s Training Course at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and received an officer’s commission.
Jenkins was one of three African-American officers to serve aboard the USS Sea Cloud, a weather patrol ship homeported in Boston and also the first racially integrated naval ship.
He served as the ship’s navigation officer and soon earned a promotion to lieutenant junior grade. The crew of the Sea Cloud not only conducted scientific missions but also patrolled the North Atlantic on convoy duty and encountered and losing a German submarine.
“As an African-American in today’s Coast Guard, I have no personal knowledge of the things Jenkins had to endure because of the sacrifices he made paving the way for us,” said Lt. Cmdr. Byron Hayes, the chief of the 9th Coast Guard District planning and contingency preparedness branch.
“Jenkins is a hero — not only for African-Americans in the military, but for anyone who fits into a minority role.”
After the success of integration aboard the Sea Cloud, several other ships integrated and many land units were close to follow.
In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which integrated the military and mandated equality of treatment and opportunity.
“The way African-Americans were treated in the military before the 1940s changed due to the success Jenkins had in the Coast Guard,” said Hayes.
In 1945, Jenkins left active duty in the Coast Guard and returned home to Michigan. There, he served in the African-American Engineering Unit of the Michigan National Guard until 1947, earning the rank of captain. Jenkins continued his career for the Michigan State Highway Department and was the assistant director of the Metropolitan Detroit area when he died in 1959. Jenkins was survived by his wife, Hertha, and three children. Jenkins is celebrated for not only leading the way for minorities in the military as the first African-American naval officer but as person who did not yield in the face of adversity.
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served
in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians,
10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia,
and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as
victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences
were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of
the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
The War at Home & Abroad
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway
to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded
Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German
counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945.
The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted
Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped
from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945
after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequences:
1. The war ended Depression unemployment and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life. It led the federal government to create a
War Production Board to oversee conversion to a wartime economy and the Office of Price Administration to set prices on many items and to supervise a
rationing system.
2. During the war, African Americans, women, and Mexican Americans founded new opportunities in industry. But Japanese Americans living on the Pacific
coast were relocated from their homes and placed in internment camps.
The Dawn of the Atomic Age
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Nazis might be able to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942,
Enrico Fermi, an Italian refugee, produced the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
To ensure that the United States developed a bomb before Nazi Germany did, the federal government started the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project.
On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, the Manhattan Project's scientists exploded the first atomic bomb.
It was during the Potsdam negotiations that President Harry Truman learned that American scientists had tested the first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945,
the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Between 80,000 and 140,000 people were killed or fatally wounded.
Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. About 35,000 people were killed. The following day Japan sued for peace.
President Truman's defenders argued that the bombs ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity of a costly invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands
of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. His critics argued that the war might have ended even without the atomic bombings. They maintained
that the Japanese economy would have been strangled by a continued naval blockade, and that Japan could have been forced to surrender by conventional firebombing
or by a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power.
The unleashing of nuclear power during World War II generated hope of a cheap and abundant source of energy, but it also produced anxiety among large numbers of
people in the United States and around the world.
