 I'm Marsha Joyner and we are navigating the journey and all what a journey this is or has been. Today we are going to talk about our newest, new, new hero, not a newest to us, but a new hero to all of America. On Monday, Martin Luther King Day, the U.S. Navy announced and dedicated to our hero Dory Doris Miller, the finest, the largest, the most expensive aircraft carrier in the fleet. So today, as you all know that have been with me, we have been trying to get a Medal of Honor for Dory Miller for the last 30 plus years. So today we are going to talk with the former Congressman Joe DeGuardi from New York. He has also worked with us and have been on this whole journey to get the Medal of Honor for Dory Miller. So Congressman, hello and hello. So nice to be with you again. We have so many miles between us, between New York and Honolulu, but our spirit has been together for some years now working on this and I'm so happy that I'm on your show, Marsha. This is great. I've been looking forward. Don't you just love the new technology that we can close all these thousands of miles? Yes. Yes. I mentioned that you were a former Congressman. Correct. I've been working on Dory Miller, but when I started as a Congressman in 1985, it was brought to my attention by an African American historian, Dr. Leroy Ramsey, that nobody, no African American in World War I and World War II, got our nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor. And when I approached the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, he was a friend of mine because we had done something together when I first joined Congress in 1985. It was in 1986 that I met Dr. Ramsey and I said, you know, we're going to have to do some heavy lifting here. I better get someone with some real power. And I met the chairman of the Black Caucus, Mickey Leland. So I went to him and he said, Joe, you know, it's a great idea because we've got someone in Texas, Dory Miller. I had not heard of Dory Miller before that. So if we're going to do this, he says, why don't we put in two bills? One for Harry Jackson in New York and that, Harry Johnson in New York, that's, he came from Albany, New York and one from Dory Miller, Waco, Texas. And that's what we did. And those bills were put in, he and I co-sponsored them and they were put in in 1987. So that was my entry into this. And then I got so involved in it that over these years, I've been responsible directly and indirectly for nine medals of honor. And Dory would be number 10 and he'd be the first from the Navy. We've had seven from World War II in the Army. So this has been a new mission for me that started in Congress almost by accident when this wonderful Black historian from my district, Mount Vernon, New York, the city of Mount Vernon came to visit me and told me about the story that I thought was incredible. Now I'm a certified public accountant and when he told me that a million, 550,000 American serve, World War I and World War II and not one got our nation's highest military honor, although dozens were recommended and that was the Medal of Honor. I said, you know, I'm a CPA and those numbers don't add up. What's the issue here? He said, well, did you know there was segregation in World War I and World War II? I said, no, I've got a pretty good education, but no one ever taught me that. So we're educating Marsha, a lot of people about the injustices in America that went way beyond slavery and failed reconstruction. We had starting with Woodrow Wilson, who was a prominent president in many other respects, but it turned out he was a racist. In 1913 he started it and it was ended by another Democrat president and that was Harry Truman in 1947. But you see the Navy had been segregated forever. They didn't train Black sailors like they did the others and even with Dory Miller, which is a quote, mess man, even though I know everybody else, that rank was only, only, mess man was only for minority sailors and at first they were Japanese, but when we went to war with Japan, they threw all the Japanese off overboard and then it was Chinese, Chamorro's, Filipinos and Black and they were mess men and what they were, were if you were, if this was England, you would say they were the butler or the handmaid to the officers. So that's all they did. They took care of the officers, they set the table, they took, made sure that the girlfriend and the wife were separate and they, you know, they bought gifts. They did everything only for the officers. And so, and I've written so much about this, which I'll send it to you, having, getting to know- Your work is amazing. You sent me that presentation. You did an ungrateful nation and I read that thoroughly before I went to the National Archives with six other prominent African Americans to, I guess it was about three, four years ago and I had not known that the deep history of the Navy and you laid it out so well. Oh, yes. And that, they were hired and they were enlisted for one service only and that was to serve the officers at the convenience, it's written at the convenience of the Navy. That was it. There was nothing else. I just have to add this, my husband was in the Navy for 30 years in the segregated Navy and he was one of the first in the new, what they call the new Navy. So I have had years of sea stories, all of this first hand. And we will get to a picture of Dick Fisk if we can find, I think it's way in the back somewhere. Anyway, Dick Fisk was on the West Virginia with Dory Miller. He was an eyewitness and he was my one eyewitness because they say you have to have an eyewitness. The rules of the medal, you have to have an eyewitness. He was my eyewitness and he told me these stories. I spent hours with him because he was a survivor and he was at the Arizona. We talked and talked and talked, we became best friends. In the picture, I hope our people can find it, in the picture of the West Virginia as it was bombed, Dick Fisk, there it is, Dick Fisk was up at the top in the, up there with the bugle because it was a bugle and this is eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, they were blowing the bugle and with the explosion, the bugle was blown away but he kept the mouthpiece. And he could see from where he was up in the top here, he could see everything on and in this picture, if you look way down where the red is, that is Dory Miller in the water swimming to get other people out of the fire and the oil. I know in the ceremony, they said he stayed on board when he didn't. So Dick Fisk was the person that told me the first hand account of every minute of the bombing and exactly what Dory Miller did by moving, they called, he was the biggest man on the ship, make no mistake about that. So when the commander was injured, they called down to him to get the biggest man on the ship to come move the captain. The captain said, no, I'm going down with the ship and that's when Dory Miller untrained went over to begin to shoot. Now his brother said, of course he shot down the planes because he could shoot a moving squirrel, you know, so, you know, these, I'm telling you of all the time I spent with real people telling stories, you know, it's not something, yes, they, they, the picture that I sent you with Daniel Martinez from the national parks. He is the historian at the Arizona. So when I started this project, that was before everything was digitized. So you could read the captain's log, you could read the ship's logs. And he allowed me to just go through page after page, ship after ship, as long as I wanted to. Now that everything is on the computer, you have to know what you're looking for. In those days, I was stumbling into things. Oh, it was fabulous, you know. And well, I read the Arizona state. I did read the action report. The first captain passed away. We know that. Ben, I think his name was and then second guy then to write the after action report and what's interesting about this, you know, racism was prevalent all over in World War Two. And what was interesting is that he was not named in that after action report. It was only later when people remembered that there was this incredible African American doing so much, not only moving the captain, but he was excited for going back down as the ship was listening to go. You know, there was a lot of gas and oil and people were being affixiated swimming in that ocean bring up, you know, many of them, even from the ship. And then as you said, he probably went off to then gather some that went over, but he even gave a personal deposition because people wanted to know from him. And that still has not been found. You see, the secretary of defense, Knox, was he was a racist and he didn't want it advertised so early in the year in the war that it was an African American that had done such brave things as to earn the Navy's highest award. In fact, he was given just a citation. And as you know, Marsha, it was Admiral Nimitz that heard a hue and cry about the fact that he was really overlooked, that then invited Dory Miller before he died a year later on the ship that the Admiral was on to get the Navy cross. And now we've been working all this time to get a medal of honor, but the Navy is very tough and they want additional information, which we think now we have, because we do have an historian that's been working on this since he was 23. He's now 61, Ron Tarburton. And I told him to write it up because we're going to have to go and present it to the Navy that there are other things he did that were not recognized in the citation that he got and not even in the Navy cross. And we think we should be able to do that. We did this with Henry Johnson in New York. And I'm sure we'll be able to do it, especially now. I mean, when you have an aircraft carrier named after you and I think there are 10 in service, eight of them have the names of presidents. One is president. This is the first one. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not a president. Yes. People will now know who he is. You know, we've been laboring on this for a long time, but a lot of people didn't know the story of Dory Miller, like I didn't. As a congressman, I didn't, yeah, I didn't know until I was at a meeting and one young man said to me, there's a picture of a sailor because everybody at the meeting were former military. He said, there's a picture of a sailor at the Arizona. Really good looking young man. But it doesn't say anything about him. What do you know? Because I'm the busy body, right? So he says, what do you know? So I went over to the Arizona and I saw the picture of Dory Miller and it had his name, a really big picture. Well, you know, good looking picture. And I talked to Daniel Martinez because I knew the historian. And I said, who is that? What is that story? And so he started telling me the story. And then then he allowed me to spend the next I don't know how many years reading, looking, discovering all of this. But there was very little, if anything, written about it. Yeah. Well, it's just wonderful that this came as such a big surprise that the Navy would announce it just before Martin was there. I think it was on Saturday that I read it. On Martin was the King Day of China. Yeah, but the ceremony was on that day, yeah. Yeah, that was a beautiful ceremony. Yeah, I can imagine. And we should be able to now make a very good case to the Navy and kind of tease out what their feelings are about this. Now, we have two new Congresswomen. One is, and they're both when Navy commanders, believe it or not, they now are new in Congress. One is Elaine Lauria. She is from Virginia. Yeah, Virginia. And then the other one is Mickey Sherrill. She's from New Jersey. I've spoken now to the Chiefs of Staff. And they sent us information. They didn't know much about him. And I'm sure I haven't spoken to them since the announcement of the aircraft carrier. So I'm sure they're really interested now in meeting. Because I want to set up a meeting in Washington with Ron Tarburton and start to think about the strategy we're going to use to present this to the highest levels of the Navy so we can get on with it and get this medal issued in the White House. Now, we don't know when it's going to be issued. And obviously, we don't want this to be political. It's not political. It shouldn't be political. And we never know who's going to be in the White House when these medals are issued. The first one was issued in 1991. And I was responsible for it with Mickey Leland who had passed away before. And I was invited by President George H.W. Bush. And I have it on YouTube. It's a wonderful ceremony. The next ceremony that I attended was in the Obama White House because of Henry Johnson in New York. Now, we don't know how fast this is going to happen. And so no one's pushing for it to happen because someone's a president or someone's not a president. It has to take its natural course. So we'll have to work with the Navy. And as soon as they decide the time is ready, there will be a White House ceremony. And we don't know who that president is going to be at that time. No, we don't. And what I discovered in these last few days, reading all of the things that you sent about all of these people that finally got medals, there were some young boys at and on those ships, the same time as Dorian Miller and they got medals at the same time. So that was pure racism, that they got them and he didn't. So we can prove that. They were not African Americans. Yes, you're right. And one had light as way in. And one of them was even 14. And he lied his way in and then by the time he got the medal, he was 17. Yes. So they got them, but he didn't. So, I'm sure he's going to get it now. I know you, Marsha, and you're very, like I am, very persistent and consistent and you've been working many years on this. And I feel that our spirits are joined together now. The first year, well, not the first, early, our early attempts, we thought we'll put out our big guns in Hawaii, which was Senator Inouye. They even turned him down. Nope. I thought surely just the letter from him was, what else could we do? And they turned him down. And this last letter I got, the very last one, was they said that they had gotten more requests for a medal for Dory Miller than anyone in history. And they keep turning it down. So there's, I mean, no, we can't quit now. We can't give up. No, I thought we had this thing in hand when you and I talked, I think it was three or four years ago, the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And we found out that President Obama was going there for the ceremony at Pearl Harbor. But then he had to change his schedule and he only had a few weeks left in that year. That was December 7th, so I think it was by the middle. He got there, I think, just after the middle of December. Now he left the presidency in January. January 21, I think it was. And you and I, I prepared a letter, sent it to you. We thought we had convinced him that this would be a wonderful thing for him to do just prior to leaving his presidency to have a medal for Dory Miller. And it didn't happen because the Navy apparently was not ready to do it. See, it's the president's, it's not the president's barrogative. The Navy has to agree to it or the Army, depending on what it is. And we thought we had made a wonderful case for Dory Miller. Apparently it wasn't enough. And by the time we got Obama interested in being more active on it, he was leaving the presidency. And that was the problem. Well, you see, the way it works, the Navy had to send him a recommendation and they didn't do it. Yes. They did not send the president a recommendation. They responded to me saying, no, we're not, you still haven't given us new evidence. Okay, well, that's what we have to work on. They keep sending me new evidence. I have a memo being written right now by Ron Tarbur and that I will send you. He said it'll be done within two weeks. So you'll know what he is saying is the new evidence that we should be able to present and convince the Navy that it was completely overlooked. But it's also a fact that there was racism during World War II and both should count because you could clear Mr. Knox. Secretary Knox did not want this to happen by his actions. Well, he said as much. You know, Eric, can we see from the beginning, the first pictures of the ship and whatever just run through this, I'll tell what they are. This is the ward room where you can see by the way the messman is dressed, that their job and their job alone was to take care of the officers. So this is what a ward room would look like and this is what was going on at the time of the bombing, the breakfast surf. Oh, I love this picture. This was from one of the Waco newspapers at the time that it happened. And of course, this was the stamp that was issued regular 44-cent stamp, beautiful picture. Now, after the bombing, they did not give a Dory Miller leave. They sent on a mission to speak and he went to all of the black churches and newspapers and Waco. And of course, this was at Great Lakes and he was raising war bonds. But again, he did not, not all the white salt sailors got leave, but he didn't. So he went on this tour and then off to the Lipscomb Bay. And he became a celebrity, much like Joe Lewis and Lena Horne at that time because they were being used to promote the Navy and they did a great job. And, you know, when you think about it, he was in Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 41 and he then went on another, it was I think the Lipscomb Bay, another aircraft area and then he was killed in 1943. So I think it was less than two years. And he got, in the meantime, he did the Navy. He went right back to active duty. Yeah, yeah. And the ugliness, the really, I think it's heartless, but most of this is heartless that he's killed, I think it was in December, but they did not tell his parents until months later and then it was on December 7th that they finally told his parents that he had been killed. It was just heartless. A lot of this story was buried and made into classified information and was not released until much later than the Pearl Harbor incident. And we still don't have access to his personal deposition that he was invited in to talk about how he saw his actions. And that has not been found. And we're still looking for that. We have some, I have some of that, yeah. I have some. Well, we're gonna have to pull all the sources. As he talked about it, yeah. You see what happened, and as I was telling you early, that when I started this journey was before everything was digitized. So all I had to do was just sit there and keep reading the files that the archives had. So that's, now of course everything is digitized and you have to know what you're looking for. So I kept stumbling. For instance, I found another unnamed black sailor who went totally unnamed and he shot down planes. And no one, except me, no one even knows who he is. Well, you know, we have this new museum in Washington, the African American Museum. After the sit down that we did for the heritage, the national archives, I was invited when they opened it to go there. And I obviously wanted to go right up to the floor where they had the African American soldiers honored. And sure enough, they had the ones that were given medals of honor in Vietnam and other places. And Dori Miller had a bigger exhibit than those who got the Medal of Honor. He was already being hailed as a hero above heroes, but he doesn't have the Medal of Honor. So that's an injustice that we have to correct. And I think you and I are gonna do it, Marsha. Well, we can't give up, we can't quit now. I know you and I would both jump in for joy when we heard about the aircraft carrier because that will last for another 50 years. However, I was told that it won't be ready until 2032, which I won't get to see, you know. You don't think you'll get to see it? You look. I'm 82. Well, you know, I'm right behind you. I'm 82, am I gonna make it to the 72? I'm 79. You'll be there, Marsha. You've got the spirit, the spirit overcomes the flesh. Yes, so, but like I said, in learning, in being able to read all of the stuff from ships and ships and ships, other and other messmen that I know told me their stories of what they did, how they did it, what their jobs worked. Now, of course, in the official statement, it says that Dory Muller was a cook, chips cook. That rate only came later. Messmen, when they put them into combat, then they changed the rate to chips cook. But a messman did not take care of the rest of the ship. That was a very special class. So in finding all of these messmen, and I did, all I had to do was look for the rate and that died on that day, the deaths on that day. And all I had to do was look for the insignia and I found all of them. Chinese, Filipino, Chamorro, huh? You did a great job. You did a great job. And I remembered your article, Rethinking the Medal of Honor for Dory Muller, and it was done extremely well. It's in the booklet that I put together on the history of the African Americans who were denied the medal. And a lot of people were very happy to get that article and to hear your perspective on the racism that existed in the Navy. Yes, it was, it is, I shouldn't say was, it is quite a journey. I have enjoyed, it's been more than 30 years of every minute of the day. Now, I have to add this caveat. As close as Daniel Martinez and I are, and I should send you the picture. We fell out right on the dock, right at the pier, when they were filming the movie, about, and they used Cooper Gooding, Jr. to play Dory Muller. I had a bit, I said, nobody will believe the story when they see him. Yeah. You know, the actor that played in the Green Mile, you know how big he was, that was the one that you should have used. Then the story's believable, because it's optics, you can look at this man and see. Oh, there's no stretch of the imagination. Cooper Gooding, Jr. was not the right person. And so we fell out, I just walked away from the shooting of the film, I just walked away, I said, I'm out, I'm through. Needless to say. I think it's about a movie, so I think story and optics, there's no question about it. You get that first impression. It's all about optics. So that's why people don't believe the story, because they looked at, most history is what we get from the movies anyway. And I had people ask me, is that, that's not the person you're talking about, is it? That's what they did. But there's so many good photos now of Dory Muller, and they're gonna be publicized wide as this aircraft carrier is built. So people are gonna come to know him for who he really is, in spirit and the way he looked. And it's a marvelous combination for a hero, especially for an African-American hero, because you want these young African-American children to understand they have heroes like that. That's the best part of getting these medals for African-Americans that have been denied. So to inspire other young people as to who is part of their heritage. It is a great story. And not just Dory Muller, but all of those sailors at that time, and what they went through, and the Navy is volunteer, they don't draft you into the Navy. You have to choose to go into the Navy. And he said, and I quote, when said, well, you know the Navy segregated, he said, yes, but it's better than some corner in Waco, Texas. Unquote. Right. And so he knew. Yeah. Well, oh, we are run out of time. My goodness, this has been quite a pleasure to spend this time with you. We'll have to do this again. I'm so sorry to what we've run out of time. I'm so busy talking, I was not watching. I really appreciate it. We will do this again. We will as we move forward. Thank you, Mark. And I thank you. And thank you, and we'll see you next time.