OPINION —
Dear Editor,
CNN reported on Aug. 20, and NBC News and ABC News confirmed, that the Navy is weighing whether to strip the name of Doris “Dorie” Miller from the aircraft carrier CVN-81 and name the ship instead for the sitting president. The Navy says only that it “has no announcement to share at this time.” As a former sailor, I hope the answer is no.
Miller was a sharecroppers’ son from Waco, Texas, and a mess attendant aboard the battleship USS West Virginia – one of the few jobs the Navy of 1941 allowed a Black man to hold. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he helped carry his mortally wounded captain off the bridge, then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to fire, because sailors in the steward’s branch were not given gunnery training.
Admiral Nimitz awarded him the Navy Cross, the first to a Black sailor. Two years later, on Nov. 24, 1943, he went down with the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay in the Gilberts. He was 24.
The Navy named CVN-81 for him on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2020, during this president’s first termw — the first carrier named for a Black American and the first for an enlisted sailor.
Yes, carriers are usually named for presidents. But they have been named for former presidents. This Navy has honored living Americans before; it has never named a vessel for a president still in office, and that restraint is worth keeping. A warship serves for 50 years.
Its name ought to be the country’s considered judgment, not a compliment paid to whoever currently holds the office.
Give Miller the Medal of Honor he has long deserved. But leave his name where the Navy put it.
Jerry Katz
Opelika, Alabama
U.S. Navy, 1969-1976 (OS2, USS Bowen)
