The Untold Story of the Black Marines Charged With Mutiny at Sea

Racial strife aboard a Navy ship left three men facing the threat of the death penalty. They became little more than statistics in the military’s dismal record of race relations in the Vietnam era.

One evening in late August 1972, as the American tank-landing ship U.S.S. Sumter was steaming off the coast of Vietnam, a Marine onboard dropped the needle on the turntable in front of him, sending music to the loudspeakers bolted to the bulkheads in the cavernous spaces where hundreds of sailors and Marines slept and hung out. Some members of the crew were not ready for what they heard. “Sun, up down. On the corner, uptown. I turn around and hear the sound. A voice is talking about who’s gonna die next. Cause the white man’s got a God complex.”

Though nobody knew it at the moment, that song was about to set off a series of events that would leave three Black Marines facing charges of mutiny and the possibility of execution or lengthy imprisonment. Others were at risk of being thrown out of the Marine Corps with discharges that would maim their job prospects in civilian America for the rest of their lives. They were caught up in events that were not only about race but also about structural racism; not just a matter of individuals and personalities but of a U.S. military establishment that treated people of color differently from white service members — starting with recruitment and induction, through combat deployments, right on through the charges and punishments that arose when conflicts boiled over.

The Marine spinning records that day was Pfc. Alexander Jenkins Jr., a 19-year-old from Newport News, Va., whose outgoing personality had earned him a turn as the ship’s D.J. During tedious weeks at sea, music was one way to pass the time, but while Black Marines listened to songs by white artists with no complaints, some white service members were not so open in their tastes. Jenkins quickly found himself under verbal attack from white sergeants and officers — part of a campaign of harassment and poor treatment that included mess cooks intentionally handing him and his friends cold and inedible food, surprise uniform inspections and capricious punishments from noncommissioned officers. Eventually, it escalated to Black and white Marines physically fighting each other on a ship at sea.

Jenkins kept playing the newest records and tapes he could find by Black artists, many of which reflected the antiwar and Black-liberation movements happening at home, alongside country and western albums and hits by the Beatles. “I was playing ‘What’s Going On’ by Marvin Gaye, and I was playing ‘Bring the Boys Home’ by Freda Payne,” Jenkins recalls. “But playing ‘White Man’s Got a God Complex’ by the Last Poets really set the white guys off.”

Jenkins remembers being pulled into a small room on the ship and questioned by a group of higher-ranking white Marines about the Harlem-based hip-hop pioneers’ spoken-word song, which touched on poverty, prostitution, drugs, the military-industrial complex, white supremacy and the killings of Native Americans and Blacks. They accused Jenkins of playing music that would incite a riot. “If you don’t have a God complex, then this doesn’t apply to you, now does it?” Jenkins told them. “But if you do have a God complex, then you’ve got to listen,” he added. A white Marine captain jumped out of his chair so forcefully that it flipped over. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” the Marine screamed in Jenkins’s face. “I’m sorry, sir. I really don’t understand,” Jenkins countered. “It’s a damn record, OK? It’s got a nice beat.” Jenkins was incensed, but he decided against pushing things much further. “I didn’t want to get shot without a trial,” he recalled. Despite Jenkins’s attempt to keep tensions from escalating, relations between white and Black Marines aboard the Sumter were about to get much worse.

Put into service just two years earlier, the Sumter steamed off the coast of Vietnam with more than 150 Marines from a hodgepodge of different units from the American bases on Okinawa, Japan. Among them were Black servicemen who had been pushed to become truck drivers or infantry troops because of racial bias in assessment tests. They were part of a quick-reaction force that could be put ashore anywhere along the coast to fight the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army should the need arise. Until that time, though, they waited.

Even as the Marine Corps publicly announced efforts to reduce racist attacks within the ranks, harassment, mistreatment and violence against Blacks was commonplace and accepted, both in the United States (on bases like Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where the Ku Klux Klan posted a billboard reading “This Is Klan Country” on a nearby highway) and on its outposts in Okinawa and elsewhere. The more besieged the Black Marines on the Sumter felt, the tighter they drew together for mutual support and protection. But such security was ephemeral. Jenkins and two of his close friends were about to have their young lives upended by an incident that was hardly reported and remained almost invisible to the public. The three Marines became little more than statistics in the Corps’s dismal record of race relations in the Vietnam era.

Trouble had already flared up in July outside the gates of the U.S. Navy’s base in Subic Bay, Philippines, during a port call. There, in the town of Olongapo, sailors and Marines availed themselves of every kind of vice in the de facto racially segregated entertainment district. Black Marines and sailors tended to hang out in a neighborhood called the Jungle, while their white counterparts had the run of the bars and brothels elsewhere. An investigation by the director of naval intelligence mentioned “racial incidents” between whites and Blacks during Sumter’s port visit there, where fistfights in the streets and bars were not unusual. Sailors and Marines used the port visit to bring a fresh supply of marijuana and heroin onto the ship for some diversion during long days at sea.

Back on the ship, white officers harassed Black Marines for minor infractions involving their hair and uniforms. Tight quarters left little room for the men to blow off steam, and small routine squabbles soon escalated. The ship’s radio station — the loudspeaker system Jenkins played music on in the evenings — was one of the few sources of entertainment, and now even that became a point of contention.

Days after Jenkins was reprimanded, larger and more intense fights among the Marines broke out. There are varying accounts of what happened and why. Black and white Marines alike recall that a series of fistfights throughout the deployment increased in frequency in the early days of September on Sumter. In interviews with The Times, a half-dozen sailors and Marines who were on the Sumter recalled these fights — some started by whites, others by Blacks. The Marines’ leadership, however, zeroed in on Jenkins, along with Pfc. Roy L. Barnwell and Lance Cpl. James S. Blackwell, as the “ringleaders” who were instigating general unrest and resistance to their orders.

After Jenkins was told he couldn’t play the Last Poets, 64 of the 65 Black Marines on the ship submitted an informal complaint to the highest-ranking Marine officer on board, Capt. John B. Krueger, according to an account written a few months afterward by the defense team that Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell soon needed. In their note, the Black Marines told Krueger that they were being denied the right to play their own music. “Being that races are different in certain aspects, and music being one,” it read, “then the proper officials must make way as to the satisfaction of each and every race regardless of minority.” The Marines then submitted a request for a formal meeting with their battalion commander, who was located on another ship nearby. It was denied, further inflaming interactions between the men on board.

Tense conditions and simmering violence are detailed in the 1973 account written by the legal team. White noncommissioned officers prowled the berthing areas, harassing Black Marines. And when they talked back, they were formally punished. One white lieutenant is said to have had a Black Marine thrown into the ship’s brig — a jail with barred cells — and fed only bread and water for three days for nothing more than not having his uniform completely in order. The same officer returned to the brig to further harass and physically beat the man, according to the legal team’s account. In three separate incidents, one Black Marine had a wrench thrown at him, another was cut with a sharp object and a third was attacked with a knife, though those incidents were never investigated by Marine leadership.

Joe Mueller, a white Marine officer who was then a second lieutenant on his first deployment, remembers differently. In an interview, he recalled Black Marines testing the limits of discipline in a number of ways, including humming the tune of “White Man’s Got a God Complex” as a form of protest. On duty as the officer of the day on Sept. 7, he heard a verbal disagreement outside the mess decks that quickly escalated into the smacking sounds of fists. Somebody hit the switch that flipped the overhead lights from nighttime red to bright white, and everyone froze. Among the dozen or more men involved in the fight, Mueller says, he saw three Black Marines — Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell — standing over a white Marine. Forty-eight years later, Jenkins has no recollection of this particular incident.

Another fight between Black and white Marines broke out the next day on the ship’s tank deck at lunchtime. First Lt. Al Vargas, the commander of the embarked infantry company, remembers being struck in his side as he dove in to help break up the melee. He then ordered all of the men under his command back to their bunks. That’s when Krueger, two first lieutenants, a gunnery sergeant and a staff sergeant came to arrest Jenkins. Jenkins doesn’t deny that he was involved in this fight, but his memory isn’t clear on the details. “I don’t think I hit him, but I’m the one they arrested for it,” Jenkins says.

A twin-rotor CH-46 helicopter landed on the Sumter, loaded at least six Marines — Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell among them — and flew off. A Marine officer assured the ship’s leaders that the “troublemakers,” the oldest of whom was 22 years old, would face discipline elsewhere. For Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell, the days and weeks that followed would have lasting repercussions on the rest of their lives.

The helicopter put the men ashore in Vietnam. In Danang, Jenkins recalled, a colonel sat him down in a room and accused him of either being a communist or a part of the Black power movement. Jenkins was mystified, pointing out that he had volunteered for the Marine Corps, and being on a ship in the middle of the Pacific, he had no telephone and no possible communication with either group. “I said, ‘Sir, this is what’s going on: We’re being treated unfairly. Black men are getting written up for the length of our hair, and harassed about our uniforms.’”

Jenkins says that all the Marines on the ship wanted to go ashore and fight the Viet Cong, but now, without any other outlets, they were fighting each other. “I got to love and trust that guy next to me,” Jenkins told the colonel. “And I’m not going to fight the enemy with him if he doesn’t like Black people.”

The incidents on the Sumter led the Marine Corps to charge Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell with mutiny, for which they could have faced the death penalty if found guilty. It was the first time since the Civil War that American sailors or Marines had been charged with mutiny at sea, according to two people who worked on the case in 1973. They were also charged with various counts of assault, riot and resisting arrest. Although two white Marines initially were charged with assault and one with inciting to riot, all three were acquitted. Only one white Marine, Sgt. Gary L. Wright, was convicted of any crime: dereliction of duty for having “refereed” a fight between Barnwell and a white Marine rather than breaking it up, but he received no punishment. The case did not attract wide public attention, though it was one of many that revealed the institutional racial biases that held strong across the American military decades after the armed forces were desegregated.

Incidents like what happened on the Sumter were common on military bases and warships around the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s — a reflection of what was happening more broadly as the civil rights movement gained traction across the United States. Pervasive mistreatment of Black inmates in base stockades — essentially military jails — sparked riots in 1968 and 1969 at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Carson in Colorado, Fort Dix in New Jersey, Fort Riley in Kansas, Camp Pendleton in California and at Long Binh and Danang in Vietnam. In May 1971, a fight between hundreds of Black and white airmen at Travis Air Force Base in California resulted in the officers’ club being burned to the ground.

Camp Lejeune in North Carolina saw some of the most vicious and persistent fighting between Black and white Marines in 1969. On Jul. 20, three white Marines were hospitalized — one with stab wounds to the back — after 44 Marines fought it out on base; one white Marine later died from his injuries. The commanding officer of the Second Marine Division there called it an isolated incident, but his Army counterpart at the 82nd Airborne at nearby Fort Bragg recognized the seriousness of the problem, saying “my men will not sink to the level of the Marines at Camp Lejeune.” A 1971 report by the Congressional Black Caucus laid out the issues in stark relief, saying “subtle racism” had “crippled and impaired the effectiveness of American troops” and observed that “the explosiveness which prevails is made more serious by the amazing fact that many of those in command positions on all levels refuse to realize that even in a relatively controlled society as the military racism can and does exist.”

Just a month after the Sumter fights, a riot aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, a tense sit-down strike on the carrier U.S.S. Constellation, and a beating on the supply ship U.S.N.S. Hassayampa made national headlines and moved the military to investigate the broader source of the unrest. Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, the Navy’s top admiral, ordered an investigation into racial strife. The resulting report found that from July 10 to Nov. 5, 1972, a total of 318 race-related incidents were documented at major Marine Corps installations and that nearly half of those took place on two of the service’s bases in Okinawa, where Jenkins, Blackwell, Barnwell and the rest of the Marines aboard the Sumter had come from. Despite these findings, there would be little accountability among leaders for the racial injustices that were festering within the ranks.

The House Armed Services Committee, led by the staunch segregationist F. Edward Hébert of Louisiana, immediately ordered an investigation of the events aboard the two carriers. The Sumter incident was not included. On Jan. 2, 1973, the subcommittee issued its report, placing all of the blame on Black sailors it called “thugs” and deemed to be mostly of “below-average mental capacity.” It further blamed the programs Zumwalt had instituted to eradicate systemic racism within the Navy for creating a culture of “permissiveness” instead of taking a strict law-and-order approach with Black sailors and Marines.

“The idea of this committee was to show that these equal-opportunity programs were fomenting racial unrest,” said the Navy historian John Sherwood. “The congressmen felt the reforms were the problem, and hopefully Zumwalt would be fired, his programs abolished and the Navy would go back to the way it was in the 1950s.”

Sherwood notes that Hébert was part of a broad coalition of Southern segregationists in Congress — two of whom, Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia and Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, the Navy later named aircraft carriers for — that had a great deal of influence on the Navy, and by extension, the Marine Corps, in the pre-Zumwalt era. For members of Congress like Hébert, Vinson and Stennis, the civil rights movement was an existential threat to the established order.

Zumwalt held onto his job, retiring in 1974. In the years that followed, his successor continued his efforts on racial equity, but over time the attention to reform petered out. The services have made progress in adding Black and female officers, but have largely failed to place people of color into leadership roles at the very top, which in 2020 are still almost entirely filled by white men. Recently the service chiefs announced a new round of task forces devoted to stamping out structural racism. “We must work to identify and eliminate individual and systemic racism within our force,” the Navy’s top uniformed officer, Adm. Mike Gilday, said in June, adding that the new program would “work to identify and remove racial barriers and improve inclusion within our Navy.” But even as these top-down initiatives are being put into place, experts are repeatedly warning of white supremacy in the ranks.

Back on the ship, 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Alexander Holmes of Brooklyn realized that Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell were in real trouble. He felt that if things on the Sumter quieted down completely, the Marine leadership would think that those three were the only problem. “I wanted to keep the tension up,” Holmes recalls.

Holmes was joined by Pfc. Harry R. Wilson and Pfc. Charles S. Ross in trying to keep the heat off their friends who had just been flown off the ship. Holmes passed out butter knives to other Black Marines while on the mess deck at mealtime, just so the white Marines would know that things had not smoothed over. “I knew from listening to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. that the oppressor always feels like when they cut the head off the snake that things will go back to normal,” Holmes says. “But we wanted them to know that, no, the tension is still here.”

It was only when Holmes disembarked the ship in Okinawa in October that he learned that he too was in trouble. He was shown 20 to 25 witness statements from white Marines recounting the incident with the butter knives. Holmes readily admitted what happened and expressed regret. “This white Marine lawyer sits me down and says if I just blame everything on Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell, I’d be home for Christmas,” Holmes said. “He knew I was supposed to be out of the Marine Corps in November anyway, so he was just trying to get me to flip on my friends.” Holmes refused. The Marines eventually dropped their charges of incitement against Holmes, and he flew to Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco in February 1973, collected his honorable-discharge paperwork and returned to Brooklyn to begin college.

Back in their jail cells on Okinawa, Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell awaited the arrival of a lawyer from the States. One of Blackwell’s cousins in Chicago got the attention of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, who promised to send a defense attorney. They tapped Ed Bell, a young Oakland-based lawyer who planned to catch a military cargo flight to meet his clients in Okinawa. After informing a Marine officer in nearby Alameda that he intended to spread word of the Black liberation movement among the troops in Okinawa upon his arrival, Bell was told by Marine officials that all charges against Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell had been dropped. Bell took them at their word, turned around and went home. But it was a lie.

The three Marines in Okinawa were never told why the lawyer promised to them never arrived, and they came to rely on a free legal clinic in Koza, outside of Kadena Air Base, where Bart Lubow, a 25-year-old civilian from Long Island, N.Y., worked as a legal assistant. Along with the lawyers Bill Schaap and Doug Sorensen, the legal assistants Ellen Ray and Lubow helped Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell mount a defense during the military’s equivalent of a grand jury hearing. It was Lubow who wrote the near-contemporaneous account of the clashes on the ship. That record, which he shared with The Times, details a military justice system on Okinawa rife with racial animus that disproportionately punished Black Marines, even for noncrimes like dapping, or for showing a closed-fist gesture among other Black service members.

Jenkins denies that he, Barnwell and Blackwell were ringleaders, saying instead that they were perhaps three of the most visible Black Marines who challenged senior leaders for mistreating them on the Sumter. “I think I was singled out not just for the music, but because I was the most boisterous,” Jenkins recalls. “We held classes on Black history on the ship, and I would talk to the other Black Marines about nonviolent resistance.” That didn’t matter. The response the Black Marines received to their organizing, Jenkins said, was violence.

Jenkins, Barnwell and Blackwell, who spent months in the brig in Okinawa, became known as the “Sumter Three” in the Black and underground G.I. newspapers that covered their case. The former Marine lawyer David Nelson recalls that the matter consumed the entire legal office on Okinawa for months. With Schaap and Sorensen pushing for exoneration and the Marine Corps not eager for more bad publicity, the prosecutor eventually felt pressured to resolve the case. The mutiny charges were dropped and eventually the other charges were too, in exchange for the three Marines accepting unfavorable administrative separations in lieu of courts-martial. The outcome could have been much worse. The prosecutor had been pushing for 65 years of prison for each man, with Blackwell facing an additional charge of slander for calling his commanding officer a racist. Jenkins received a general discharge under honorable conditions — a discharge status that is not considered fully honorable and denies veterans certain government benefits — and Lubow recalls that Barnwell and Blackwell each received an “undesirable discharge,” which is another step worse than the one Jenkins received.

Between 1950 and 1980, 1.5 million service members received less than fully honorable discharges, often referred to as “bad paper” discharges, through administrative separations — with racial bias often playing a role in those decisions. In 1972, a Department of Defense task force found that Black service members “received a higher proportion of general and undesirable discharges than whites of similar aptitude and education.” That same year, the rate of service members being discharged with general or other-than-honorable discharges from the Marine Corps was 13 percent — the highest percentage of all of the services. (While the military has taken some steps to rectify racial disparities within its ranks, people of color continue to suffer disproportionately under the military justice system. As recently as 2015, Black service members were “substantially more likely than white service members to face military justice or disciplinary action,” according to the legal justice group Protect Our Defenders.)

The consequences of less than fully honorable discharges are lifelong. Numerous studies have found higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, substance abuse and suicide among veterans with bad paper. The 1972 task force, which even then called for greater protections of service members’ “fundamental rights,” argued that the issuance of bad paper to a veteran “will haunt him forever: affecting the respect of his family, his standing in the community, impeding his effort to regain a productive and meaningful role in society. The bad discharge is a constant reinforcement of a negative self-image, a reminder that the individual is ‘unsuitable, unfit or undesirable’ in the eyes of his country.” With that stigma, the Sumter Three were all but guaranteed a life of hardship without reprieve.

Upon being released from Okinawa, Jenkins briefly returned to live with his mother and father in Virginia, but feeling that he had outgrown his hometown, he moved to Detroit, where he stayed with his sister and enrolled in college. Using the G.I. Bill to fund his education, he started in the pre-med program at Wayne State University but soon found himself interested in the new up-and-coming technology of computer programming. He married, and when he had a family to support, he left school in favor of getting a full-time job as a truck driver. But Jenkins had trouble sleeping and suffered from depression, paranoia and frequent anxiety attacks that developed after he returned home from Japan. For self-defense, he bought an AR-15 for $500, similar to the M16 he carried in the Marines. One night he fired it at a thief who tried to steal a barbecue from his yard. The experience so shook Jenkins that he sold the rifle for almost half of what he paid, just to get it out of his house. “I felt besieged by the system,” Jenkins says, “because the system was always trying to get me, on something.”

In Detroit’s withering economy, jobs came and went — but sometimes the layoffs were unexplained, in ways that suggested that employers were acting out of racial bias or had found out about his discharge from the Marines. In one case, after excelling as a computer programmer for a bank and earning promotions, Jenkins was called in one day and terminated, with no explanation other than an ominous hint that they had found out something about his past. The stress and frustration grew over decades, leading to an emotional collapse at age 38 that left him briefly hospitalized.

James Blackwell also struggled when he got home. His sister Linda Page puts it bluntly: “When he got out he was a total mess.” In one of Page’s spare bedrooms, he kicked the heroin habit he brought back with him, but he continued to drink heavily. In 1994, at 43 years old, he died suddenly of an aneurysm right outside the Cook County Circuit Courthouse in Chicago. Page says Blackwell worked for the Yellow Pages delivering telephone books and made money as an alley mechanic on the side. She recalls him talking about his time on Okinawa awaiting his court-martial. “They kept him in a shed, and he could only see from peeking out through the cracks,” she says. “He had real bad PTSD.”

Barnwell seems to have fared even worse. His sister Patricia Gorman says Barnwell lived in San Diego after leaving the Marine Corps, frequently moving from one apartment to another. But she only learned that from him much later: When he returned from Okinawa, he didn’t contact his family for more than 25 years. He got in touch in 1998, and she bought him a round-trip train ticket to visit her in Choctaw County, Ala., where they grew up. It was the first time she saw him since he went away to boot camp in 1970. It was soon apparent that he wasn’t about to make himself at home there. Encountering slow service at a restaurant run by white people, he suspected racism and wasn’t quiet about it. On a different day, he was pulled over by the police while driving. After that visit, he never went back to Alabama. In 2001, Barnwell called Gorman to say the cancer he had once beaten was back and he might have H.I.V. Public records indicate Barnwell died April 9, 2001, in Los Angeles of complications from AIDS. His family was never notified of his death, and after 90 days, his remains were cremated and his ashes interred in a mass grave for unclaimed bodies in Los Angeles County.

Jenkins still lives in Detroit, where he has quietly spent the last four decades distancing himself from what happened on the Sumter, while still maintaining a fierce pride in having been a Marine. Jenkins had wanted to join the Corps since he was very young, and studied its history before joining at age 17. He initially hoped to make the military a career, but quickly chafed against systemic racism in the service. “I was full of piss and vinegar back then,” Jenkins says. “I look back to my 19-year-old self and think, What the hell was I thinking?”

He says the only thing that saved him was some advice he got from his uncle, John A. Jenkins, a Korean War combat vet, when he first got home from Okinawa. “I was mad as hell, angry at the world then,” Jenkins says. “He drove it into me that if the cops stop you, that’s their chance to mess you up. It’s almost like coming to America as a foreigner: You have to learn the rules as a Black man to survive. You have to know what to do and what not to do.” Jenkins set out on the straight and narrow, opting out of joints passed around at parties and being meticulous about observing traffic laws. He says he has been pulled over by the police only once or twice since 1973.

After his brief hospitalization in 1991, Jenkins stopped working outside his home and devoted himself to helping his wife, Jerry, advance in her career, and shepherding his daughter, Tanzania, through school to a successful life as a systems engineer. Being charged with mutiny at sea in a time of war shattered Jenkins emotionally — and readily brought tears 48 years later as he discussed it. “I’ve been a recluse all these years, because I didn’t want these questions asked, and didn’t want to talk about it,” Jenkins says. About 15 years ago, he joined a local V.F.W. post to try to meet people. “Most of the guys were Korea and World War II guys who carried these same issues,” Jenkins says. It became difficult for him to keep going back, because so many appeared to be drinking themselves to death.

As Jenkins slowly rebuilt his life, he lost track of the only two people who truly understood what happened to him: Barnwell and Blackwell. Jenkins only just learned of their deaths. “I was hoping that at least one of the two of them would be in a stable situation and be able to be here now,” Jenkins says. “That’s why I feel so alone, you know. I feel very — almost guilty about this situation that neither of those two are here.”

While most days are better, Jenkins struggled with thoughts of suicide as recently as 10 years ago. On days when his mind goes back to the Sumter, his wife can tell, because he falls quiet for hours at a time. “That situation on the Sumter screwed up my whole life,” Jenkins says. “I had to put on a different face to the world just to survive.”