USS Donald Trump or USS Doris Miller… will the Navy erase the name of an African-American hero?

On August 25, 2021, the groundbreaking ceremony for a new U.S. aircraft carrier took place at the Newport News Naval Shipyard in Virginia, officially marking the start of its construction. This event took place before the eyes of several members of the family of Doris Miller, a hero of the Second World War, after whom the warship is to be named.

Five years later, construction of the aircraft carrier has still not taken place due to budgetary constraints. Scheduled for 2032, its delivery has now been postponed to 2034. The American media CNN above all revealed, on August 20, that in addition to this delay, the aircraft carrier should also be renamed. “The US Navy is working to rename this aircraft carrier under construction which was initially intended to honor a black sailor hailed for his heroic actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor,” three sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

“It is unclear what new name the Navy wants to give the aircraft carrier, although two sources indicated that internal discussions had taken place regarding a name change in honor of Trump. Naming an aircraft carrier after a sitting president would be an unprecedented decision,” adds the American channel on its site.

As proof of these prevarications, CNN points out that the Navy has stopped calling the future aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller internally and only refers to it by its hull number, CVN-81. “A recent presidential decree relating to shipbuilding also mentions the ship under the sole name of CVN-81,” this media also specifies.

In January 2020, during a ceremony organized during Martin Luther King Jr Day at Pearl Harbor, Thomas Modly, the former acting secretary of the Navy, appointed by Donald Trump, nevertheless announced that the warship would be named in honor of Doris Miller.

“Doris Miller was the son of a sharecropper,” he insisted. “And he was an American sailor – as evidenced by the uniform he wore, the same uniform that all sailors wore, and still wear, regardless of race, ethnicity or political opinion.”

A hero of Pearl Harbor

This hero was born in 1919 in Texas. While African-Americans were still subject to segregation, he joined the navy 20 years later as a kitchen assistant, “one of the few positions then accessible to black men”, as the website of the American Department of Veterans Affairs points out. At the time, colored soldiers were in fact relegated to menial tasks and kept away from white regiments.

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On December 7, 1941, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was on the battleship USS West Virginia. “Anxious to help in any way he could, he was ordered to go to the bridge to help move his captain, Mervyn Bennion, mortally wounded by shrapnel in the abdomen,” says the veterans’ website. “Doris Miller was then ordered to the port anti-aircraft guns to reload an officer’s ammunition. After completing this task, Miller, on his own initiative, loaded and manned an unattended gun and fired at the approaching Japanese planes. Although untrained, he demonstrated great efficiency and ceased fire when he ran out of ammunition and the ship began to sink,” we can also read.

For this act of bravery, Doris Miller in 1942 became the first African-American to receive the Navy Cross, the second highest distinction of the United States Navy. He is also allowed to lecture in the United States alongside white war heroes. His portrait was even used for a Navy recruiting poster in 1943, accompanied by the slogan “Beyond the Duty.”

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Interviewed by a journalist in January 1943, he recounted, in a rare testimony, his version of the attack on Pearl Harbor: “Several men had lost their lives, including senior officers, when the order was given to the volunteers from the lower deck to go up to the upper deck to fight the Japanese. Without knowing how I did it – it must have been through the strength of God and the blessing of my mother – I rushed to the upper deck to discover that the officers who had given the order were wounded. So another man and I opened fire with the guns and I shot down four Japanese bombers. I may have shot down more, but I’m sure I shot down four.

Returning to combat, still as a cook, Doris Miller was assigned to the aircraft carrier Liscome Bay in the spring of 1943. A few months later, on November 24, 1943, the warship was hit by a Japanese torpedo off the coast of Butaritari Atoll, in the Gilbert Islands, in present-day Kiribati. The ship sank in 23 minutes and Doris Miller was one of the 644 missing.

Since then, his memory has been maintained. In 1972, a US Navy frigate was named in his honor, and a statue was unveiled in his hometown of Waco in 2017.

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A shock for his family

Despite the honors he experienced during his lifetime, “Miller did not appreciate the national attention and remained cautiously optimistic about the place of African-Americans”, specifies the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Recent revelations from CNN prove him right.

Interviewed by ABC News, his great-nephew and official family spokesperson, Thomas Bledsoe, did not hide his disappointment: “Learning about this possibility of a name change is a shock not only to me, but also to my family, and we hope that it does not come to fruition,” he explained, while welcoming reports according to which the Navy supports a new initiative to award the Medal of Honor to his great-uncle.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also expressed its dissatisfaction. Its president Derrick Johnson sharply criticized the Navy. “This is a slap in the face to all war heroes and all members of the armed forces who have worn the uniform,” he wrote in a message published Friday August 21 on his aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, deployed for more than eight months at sea.

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Mark Kelly, Democratic senator from Arizona and retired naval officer, also reacted on

Precedents for Trump

As Newsweek points out, “the possibility of naming a Navy aircraft carrier after Trump comes as the president’s name is increasingly associated with prestigious institutions and monuments, well beyond his business empire.” Last December, Donald Trump attached his name to the prestigious Kennedy Center performance hall in Washington. This name change was denounced by President Kennedy’s family and by the Democratic opposition who challenged its legality.

A judge finally ordered the board of directors on May 29 to remove, within two weeks, any reference “to President Trump or any individual other than President Kennedy” on the building itself but also on the institution’s website and on any registered trademark.

Last year, Trump also announced plans to build a fleet of new nuclear missile battleships for the Navy, dubbed the “Trump Class.”