By Lee A. Daniels

Last week, during a ceremony saturated with pomp and circumstance and profound historical resonance, Carl E. Clark, a Navy veteran, was awarded a medal by the Secretary of the Navy for the kind of wartime devotion to duty – saving the lives of hundreds of his fellow sailors – Hollywood makes movies about.

What makes the recognition the 95-year-old Clark, who is African-American, received so unusual and so poignant is that he received the medal more than 66 years after his extraordinary act of heroism occurred during a World War II attack on the Navy destroyer he was serving on in the Pacific. In the military report of the attack written up then, Clark’s action s – during battle he spent hours singlehandedly preventing a fire from reaching one of the ships ammunition storerooms – were deliberately omitted.

Carl E. Clark

“This has been a very, very long day coming – 66 years plus,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, D-CA, who is Clark’s Congresswoman. “Racism robbed Carl of recognition.”

It was a moment, Clark himself recognized with his own words that once again brought into sharp relief the complexity of African Americans’ historical relationship with the American military.

It underscores, on the one hand, the story of black Americans’ eagerness to join a military which through most of the twentieth century treated them with relentless contempt and refused to acknowledge the ordinary service as well as the acts of heroism that proved their “fitness” for military service – and for citizenship. For example, when Carl Clark left the Navy in 1958, having risen after 22 years of service to the rank of chief petty officer with a command of 175 men, he was handed his discharge papers by a white clerk with the words, “Here you go, boy.”

But Clark’s award also again brings into sharp relief, the tales of service and heroism of black military men and women during World War II that have come flooding into the public arena through special ceremonies, books and documentaries, and film since the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen began to become widely known two decades ago and since, after an exhaustive military investigation, President Clinton awarded Medals of Honor to seven black World War II servicemen in 1997.

“Mr. Clark’s service was honorable,” said Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, during the ceremony at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, “but his DD-214 was missing one entry. Today we add that final official entry that has been missing from his record for almost exactly two-thirds of a century. That entry will record that Carl E. Clark has been awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with the Combat V.”

“Simply put,” Mabus added moments later, “Carl Clark was and is a hero.”

“I’m so overwhelmed,” Clark said to an audience of 600 that included his family. But he added that he was accepting it in honor of all the black stewards – the Navy’s term for servant, the highest position the segregated service reserved for blacks – and other black members of the World War II military who died in service to their country. “I want to share this honor with all of those men,” he said.

Even the driest statement of the facts of what Carl Clark did on May 3, 1945 when his destroyer minelayer, the USS Aaron Ward, came under attack by twenty-five Japanese bombers and jets is heart-pounding .

The ship’s gunners blasted some of the planes out of the sky, but at least six struck the ship, setting it ablaze. The impact of the first threw Clark, working in the officer’s kitchen, against a ceiling, breaking his collarbone. It also killed all seven other members of one of the ship’s damage control teams he belonged to. Despite his injuries, Clark made his way to the damage control station, grabbed a fire hose whose heft normally required several men to maneuver and throughout the night beat back fires that continually threatened one of the ship’s major ammunition depots.

At last week’s ceremony, Clark, who said he had once been deeply bitter about the prejudice he found in the Navy, commented that “I feel very proud that things have changed enough in this country, and the Navy has changed enough, for them to do this.”

Fifteen years ago this month, when President Clinton presided over the White House ceremony for the seven African-American Medal of Honor winners, he said of the wrong done them, “History has been made whole today, and our nation is bestowing honor on those who have long deserved it.”

Carl Clark’s story offers further evidence that, regarding the service of blacks in the military in World War II, there is far more to do.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.