On September 29, 1942, a large vessel set sail to support wartime logistics for the United States military. It was one of many such ships — but this occasion was filled with powerful symbolic and political importance. Singer Marian Anderson christened the ship, and Mary McLeod Bethune, famed member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” gave a welcoming address. The SS Booker T. Washington was about to set sail for the first time.
The vessel was captained by Hugh Mulzac, the first black person ever to do so in the United States and the only one to hold a master’s license at the time. The government had suggested an all-black crew, but he resisted, preferring an integrated one. Having been instrumental in the formation of the National Maritime Union (NMU), Mulzac made sure the Booker T. was assigned to an NMU-contracted company. He was as pro-union a captain as one could find.
Throughout the rest of the war, this vessel acted as a mobile beacon of racial integration, internationalism, and working-class democracy. On the ship, classes were taught on every subject under the sun, political murals were painted on the walls, fundraisers were held for social causes, and crew members organized letter-writing nights for elected officials. Mulzac called it “a floating bastion representing America’s finest traditions of democracy, integrity, and working class ingenuity.”
Mulzac’s journey through the first half of the twentieth century reflected the evolution and maturation of black politics. His life serves as a powerful demonstration that black nationalism could only truly become a mass movement in the context of a racially exclusionary labor movement and thoroughly reactionary federal government. Like so many other talented and educated black men of his time, he drifted to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as all other pathways for advancement were strangled by the Jim Crow system. Frustrated by the failures of…
Auteur: Paul Prescod
