First in class.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Lieutenant Commander Wesley A. Brown - Brief article

You may have read about the recent death of Lieutenant Commander Wesley A. Brown, who in 1949 became the first black midshipman to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy. Other blacks had tried--my wife's grandfather, who was at Annapolis in the 1880s, received a letter in which his mother urged him to be nice to the one black midshipman in his class--but all had fallen victim to the bigotry that was so powerful in those days. Brown himself endured "racial epithets and ostracism from his classmates," according to the Washington Post's obituary. "A group of upperclassmen gave him so many demerits during his first term, mostly for fabricated actions or petty offenses, that he was threatened with...