Military records reveal subversion suspicions of black soldier

In the spring of 1944, a secret military probe targeted a 33-year-old black Army private named W. Robert Ming Jr.

Before his career as a civil rights lawyer ended in the early 1970s, Ming worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on some of the country’s most important civil rights cases. In 1960, he persuaded an all-white jury in Alabama to acquit Martin Luther King Jr. in a criminal trial. For years, he maintained a reputation as one of the top legal minds in the country.

But newly released records from the FBI and the U.S. Army reveal a previously undisclosed chapter in the civil rights struggle, detailing for the first time how Ming fought to change the military’s segregationist policies not as a lawyer, but as an Army private.

The records, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, shed light on a decision that subjected Ming to a military investigation that could have derailed his legal career before his most important civil rights work was accomplished.

On Oct. 13, 1943, Ming and a group of other black soldiers attending a theater at Camp Lee, Va., were told by an usher that they had to sit on the side aisles because of the color of their skin. Some in the group left. One man went to the side aisle. Ming quietly demanded his money back.

Already a practicing lawyer when he enlisted, Ming didn’t buy the explanation by one theater worker who said state law was to blame. Ming pointed out that state law didn’t apply on a military installation.

Three or four other soldiers joined Ming in asking for their money back. After they were reimbursed and returned to the barracks, they reported the incident to a commanding officer.

It wouldn’t be the first time Ming questioned the military’s segregationist policies. During Christmas leave, he and other black soldiers were waiting for a northbound train on a crowded platform. When the train pulled up, they were told they couldn’t board because the “Jim Crow” car was full. The soldiers waited for hours, and military police drove the men off the platform with clubs.

“I might add that what had caused the whole difficulty was that as the train pulled out, several of the coaches that were reserved for whites were not filled,” Ming later told an investigator, according to Army files. “As to what I did during that incident, the answer is nothing.”

But Ming’s insistence at the theater that he get his money back didn’t go unnoticed by his military superiors. They ordered an investigation to find out whether Ming was a subversive.

’Enemy agents’

Months later, Ming, by then a corporal, was called to answer charges in front of a military investigator. The accusations were serious. First, Ming was charged with knowing that demanding the return of his ticket money would “create dissatisfaction” among other soldiers. He also was suspected of “lacking loyalty or affection for the government of the United States.”

Ming didn’t apologize for asking for his money back, and he denied being disloyal to his country even as he openly discussed how he opposed separating soldiers based on the color of their skin.

“Did you realize that the action you took might be utilized as a starting point by enemy agents to stir up animosity among the soldiers stationed at Camp Lee?” the investigator asked.

“No, sir” Ming replied. “If I had been intending to create a demonstration, I could have done a much better job of arousing people’s attention than simply demanding my money back quietly.

“So far as to the use by enemy agents of any such occurrence, I am definitely of the opinion that the mere existence of the seating arrangement furnished the enemy agents with all the fuel they needed.”

’Fearless’

Investigators interviewed more than dozen other people - including major Chicago figures such as William Dawson, a longtime congressman from Illinois; William H. Hastie, a future federal appeals judge; and Truman K. Gibson Jr., a civil rights activist and later boxing promoter.

“People are prone nowadays to confuse race consciousness with subversiveness, which is unfair,” one former law professor of Ming’s told the investigators. “Take Ming, for example. He is extremely race-minded, but is just as loyal and patriotic as anyone could be.”

Taken together, the interviews paint a portrait of a man both devoted to his country and fiercely determined to change it. “He has been a fighter for his race,” Dawson told investigators, “but by no means would I term him a radical.”

Leon A. Ransom, a law professor at Howard, called Ming “bold, outspoken and fearless.”

“Ming is race conscious, it is true,” Ransom said. “But he has never advanced the theory that our government should be overthrown. When he knew he had to go into the Army, he was willing to fight for democracy on the battlefield as well as in the courts.”

Unable to turn up any evidence against Ming, investigators closed their case, concluding that Ming “is very race minded, but does not possess subversive tendencies.”

Legacy

If the military’s investigation of whether Ming was un-American in the first place reflected the state of race relations in 1944, the decision to close the case and promote Ming perhaps foreshadowed the progress that Ming helped forge decades later.

“The situation was emblematic of what people during that time faced if you didn’t conform,” Kim M. Keenan, general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in an interview. “A number of Americans who dared to think in a different way were thought to be subversive. What’s even more surprising is that in this era that the investigation came out the way it did.”

Cleared by the military, Ming was accepted into the judge advocate general program, one of the first blacks to join, and worked as a military lawyer. Promoted to the rank of captain, he left the military to work mostly on civil rights cases for the rest of his career. He worked closely with Marshall on numerous cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. In 1960, he represented King, who had been charged with perjury in Alabama relating to his taxes.

Ming never mentioned his client’s race during the trial, and the all-white jury acquitted King after about four hours of deliberations. King later recalled the verdict as a “turning point” in his life, according to a foreword he wrote in the book “Deep in My Heart” by William M. Kunstler.

“Defeat seemed certain, and we in the freedom struggle braced ourselves for the inevitable. There were two men among us who persevered with the conviction that it was possible, in this context, to marshal facts and law and thus win vindication,” he wrote, citing Ming and another attorney in the case.

Although King, Marshall and other contemporaries of Ming’s have lasting monuments to mark their contributions, Ming remains largely forgotten.

After the death of his accountant, Ming failed to file tax returns from 1963 to 1966. Although he had filed returns and paid taxes by the time authorities investigated years later, it was too late. He was sentenced to four months in federal prison for each of his four tax counts, reporting to prison in January 1973. Months later, Ming, whose poor health was a concern to friends and family, slipped in the shower and hit his head. He died June 30 of that year at age 62 in a veterans hospital in Chicago.

“He was in that Thurgood Marshall category of very brilliant lawyers who in today’s world might be the partner in some big corporate firm, but they made their choice to try civil rights cases and sacrifice,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who knew Ming, said in a telephone interview.

“All of the guys who fit into that category had a bounty on their heads and we accepted that, but the good he did was never lost.”