Why do American warship names honor racists?

The world’s most important ships are U.S. nuclear supercarriers. Two are named for diehard segregationists.

Monuments to the Confederacy have come down across the county, while names of Confederate officers are being removed from military bases. But white supremacy still is honored in a place beyond public eyes – on the seas.

CVN 70, the Carl Vinson. USN photo.

Two of the most important ships in the world, the U.S. Navy nuclear supercarriers John C. Stennis and Carl Vinson, are named for strident racists. Stennis and Vinson spent their long political careers fighting integration and opposing civil rights legislation. Both endorsed the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which demanded segregation of public schools, and was so extreme Lyndon Johnson, then a Texas senator who appealed to the right, refused to add his name.

Carl Vinson represented Georgia in the House of Representatives for 50 years, John Stennis represented Mississippi in the Senate for 41 years: both championed the Southern Manifesto. Now their names are on U.S. supercarriers, the world’s most important ships.

“We have the supercarriers Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman, names that make you feel proud,” says John Cordle, a recently retired U.S. Navy captain who commanded a guided-missile destroyer and an air-defense cruiser. “Ships named after Stennis and Vinson make you feel sick.”

It gets worse. Stennis and Vinson may never have nominated a black candidate for the United States Naval Academy, gatekeeper of top Navy leadership.

Stennis had 205 service academy selection slots to fill. Cordle has been examining  archives and not found any black candidate Stennis put forward. Digital records don’t go back to the 1947 beginning of Stennis’s Senate term, and manual searching is slow. But if Stennis did not nominate any African American candidates in the 1980s, his final decade in office, it seems unlikely he did in years before.

Stennis and Vinson both voted nay on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and nay on the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Stennis wanted blacks kept out of the command structure. Yet both are memorialized on supercarriers that represent the United States to the world.