Annapolis' First

With a minimum of whoopdedo, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis graduated it's first Negro. Conspicuous in the spread of crisp white uniforms at Dahlgren Hall, Ensign Wesley Anthony Brown, U.S.N., got his diploma, joyfully tossed his cap in the air with those of his 789 classmates. His mother, plump Mrs. Rosetta Brown, who had pressed pants to help him through high school, watched proudly from the galleries. Rear Admiral J. L. Holloway Jr., the Academy superintendent, greeted her at the June Week garden party. Brown and his Annapolis girl friend, Sylvia Hicks Johnson (see cut), an undertaker's secretary, danced together at the class farewell ball.

In the Academy's 104 years, six other Negroes had tried before, but none had made the grade.-Some foundered in scholastic squalls, but others succumbed to Coventry--the silent treatment.

With the aplomb and discretion of an admiral, Ensign Brown held his first and only press conference to describe his four year voyage. "As far as the silent treatment is concerned, I can't think of any case of anyone doing anything since I've been here. If you mean do the fellows speak to me--well, for the most part most of them do." As for the officers and civilian personnel, "they couldn't have been more impartial."

At 22, a bucktoothed, husky lad with a wide grin, Brown stood No. 372 in his class, chose civil-engineering duty. This will spare both him and the Navy the potential embarrassments of the close-packed life of seagoing wardrooms. It will also get him a postgraduate engineering course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before he goes to duty in a Navy shore establishment. He deplored the fuss about him: "I don't think the American public has matured enough to accept a person on the basis of his ability and not regard him as an oddity . . . just because of his color. I'm just an average Joe."

*West Point has graduated 13.

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