“Muddy Road to Freedom”:
The Lanier Phillips Story
Connects Newfoundland
to Black History

By Neil Earle

For gentleness and love and trust
Prevail o’er angry wave and gust”
– Longfellow

February is Black History Month in the United States, a period when African-Americans in particular reflect upon their heritage and their march along what a folk song labels “the muddy road to freedom.” Yet millions on both sides of the Canadian-American border have not heard how the results of a major naval disaster off Newfoundland’s south coast during World War Two unwittingly projected people of the tenth province into the uphill American struggle with racism.

The story begins seventy years ago this February, the snowy predawn of February 18, 1942 to be exact. Mess Attendant Third Class Lanier Phillips was on board USS Truxton, one of three U.S. Navy ships zigzagging up the approaches to Placentia Bay under radar silence to guard against German U-Boats. The cruel weather, defective equipment and reduced visibility spawned one of the worst disasters of naval history. Two of three vessels – the USS Pollux and Truxton – ran aground on the jagged coast of Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula.

The Truxton’s stern was ripped clean off, her bulkhead caved in and her turbine engine and shaft were bent out of shape. One hundred and ten of her crew eventually perished in that disaster between the towns of Lawn and Saint Lawrence in a deadly spot called Chamber Cove.

One of the survivors was Lanier Phillips.

“Standing into Danger”

His name has entered into the legend of the daring and dramatic rescue launched by the people of Lawn/St. Lawrence reinforced in part by the legendary SS Kyle. Many will remember Lanier Phillips as the African-American sailor who might have had his skin rubbed off by one of many zealous ladies charged with scraping oil from the helpless survivors if his racial background had not been noticed. But that would prove to be only the beginning of Lanier Phillips’ story. The undiscriminating kindness showed him by the people of the St. Lawrence area that month in 1942 would prove to be a life-changing event and shine a beam of humanity that still endures.

The story of the Pollux and the Truxton has enough built-in drama to perhaps interest a Stephen Speilberg. Cassie Brown’s superb 1979 account Standing into Danger, mentions almost offhandedly that President Franklin D Roosevelt himself sent a personal message to the people of St. Lawrence that grim February. It went directly from the White House “on behalf of the Navy and on behalf of our citizens [in] grateful appreciation of your heroic action which is typical of the history of your proud sea-faring community.” Brown also published a memorandum for the Secretary of the U.S. Navy from the United States Atlantic Fleet dated February 26, 1942 – a scant eight days after the disaster. Rear Admiral A.L Bristow mentioned an “eternal debt of gratitude to the people of the little town of St. Lawrence…they took off their own clothes on the spot in order to clothe our men.” The upshot was that the memo called for a “small equipped hospital at St. Lawrence” which, as we all know, was duly done.

Eight days – and already planning a hospital.

Quite often American generosity touches the sublime. But Lanier Phillips had a more personal story to tell after February, 1942 and it is one that fits well into Black History Month here in “the Lower 48.”

Long Arm of Racism

Lanier Phillips was born in segregated Georgia in 1923, the great-grandson of slaves. He never forgot the Ku Klux Klan’s scary weekly parades through the streets of his hometown and their burning down the only black school in town. In 1941, before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Lanier Phillips enlisted in the United States Navy. He was assigned as steward’s mate “which essentially meant I would wash the clothes and underwear of the white officers” he related later to interviewers. On that fatal morning of 1942 off the Newfoundland coast he found himself stranded on the heaving broken deck of the Truxton with four other “colored” folks – three blacks and one Filipino.

Their main topic of discussion was whether they should try to make it to shore or wait for the U.S. Navy to come get them. Most were for staying and waiting. The reason? The rumors had gone out that on the last trip to Iceland the Truxton’s black sailors had been forbidden to come ashore. Iceland once had strict laws against such things. Now, as the waves crashed about the doomed Truxton, five men held a life-and-death discussion on the ruined hulk: Should they go ashore? Would this be like Iceland? How would they be received?

Lanier Phillips decided that even if he was threatened with a lynching (a chance he rated highly) he could make a better fight for it on shore. He boarded the last lifeboat to leave the broken vessel – the only African-American who survived the night. Huddled in a cave with other survivors, only semi-conscious, he caught a glimpse of white men on ropes clambering back and forth over the rocky cliffs lifting stranded sailors to the heights above Chamber Cove. In semi-delirium he tried to process how “a Newfoundland fellow” had roused him from a near-fatal sleep and walked him around to restore circulation. “A white person wants me to live,” he was thinking as survivors clambered up the icy cliff.

Later, in a makeshift infirmary, Phillips opened his eyes and found himself stark naked being scrubbed diligently for oil removal by a white woman named Violet Pike. “Oh boy, this is the end,” Phillips thought as he came round. Instead he was scrubbed clean, given dry clothing and bivouacked with a St. Lawrence family. But he still could not sleep.

“It wasn’t the cold that kept me awake,” he said later. Nor was it the howling storm, or even the horrific images of the shipwreck still flooding his psyche. ”It was fear. Fear that I would soon be discovered and killed.”

The long reach of racism still bedeviled the Truxton’s lone African-American survivor.

A Seed of Hope

Lanier Phillips woke the next day to a new reality: He was given a bed, fed breakfast, treated as an equal by people he never knew. Even then his mind kept drumming away with his suspicions: “This is Iceland…no blacks will be left alive, just like Georgia or Mississippi.” After breakfast with his hosts, Ena Farrell Edwards asked him to join a group picture. Lanier was doubly stunned. Ena still has the picture – “Four white faces and a black one,” she remarks casually. The curiosity cut both ways: Most in Lawn and St. Lawrence had never seen a black man in person.

“Did I die? Go to heaven?” Lanier later recounted of those days. In St. Lawrence he made a silent vow to himself: I am alive because people helped me. I am worth something as a man, as a human being. “There hasn’t been a day past I don’t think about St. Lawrence,” he said later, “They changed my entire philosophy of life.”

Lanier soon found he would need the strength of that “born again” experience to draw upon. All his trials were not yet over.

Back in “the States” on fifteen days leave, Lanier was on a bus to Chattanooga with his aunt when he found himself sitting “too far up” in the bus. A white passenger grabbed him by the neck and accosted him with the “N’ word. “Don’t you dare sit in front of me.” Tempted to fight, Lanier was talked out of it by his aunt. This was a decade before Rosa Parks took her momentous bus ride and ignited the modern civil rights movement. War veteran Lanier Phillips was back in the segregated south, back in the land he knew too well.

Two years after the near-fatal shipwreck Lanier was still in the navy and assigned to report in Jacksonville, Florida. Leaving a train and looking for lunch, he couldn’t help but notice that the diner near the train station was serving German and Italian prisoners of war. He asked someone: “Where does the colored get some food around here?” Directed to the diner he soon found himself accosted by a white M.P. and slung to the ground. A foot planted on his neck, he heard the ominous sound of a gun’s trigger being pulled back. “You black s.o.b., you know better!” the M.P. screamed. Narrowly escaping execution, Lanier Phillips was later stupefied at the awful irony that he, an American war vet still in uniform, could not eat with German and Italian prisoners of war!

An End to Inferiority

The experience might have crushed him had he not remembered his days in St. Lawrence. “I give the credit to St. Lawrence that I knew I’d been brainwashed, told I was inferior.” After sixteen years in the navy he grew weary of washing pots and pans. He determined to learn a trade. A black Congressman garnered him an application for the fleet sonar school. Twice his superior officers tried to dissuade him from this venture. Once they claimed he was a non-entity because the government kept few files on Africa-Americans. One even tried to bribe him to withdraw from this venture – he would embarrass the navy.

“We don’t think you can make it – you know you’re going to flunk out.”

“Well, give me a chance. At least let me try.”

Like many black professionals in the 1950s Lanier knew he would have to run twice as hard just to stay in place. Knowing he was up against college grads made him study harder. In 1957 he graduated as the first black sonar technician. “I wasn’t first but I wasn’t last in the class either,” he told a Navy interviewer. Lanier made high marks at anti-submarine training at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He later worked with people such as Jacques Cousteau and applied his skills to help locate a lost 1.45 megaton nuclear bomb off the Spanish coast in 1966. He ended his navy career teaching antisubmarine tactics on the USS Yosemite. No more washing officer’s socks and jocks for him.

In 2008 Memorial University awarded Lanier Phillips an honorary doctor of laws degree “for his courageous efforts toward ending racial discrimination.” After marching with Martin Luther King at Selma, Alabama in 1965, after speaking against racism at schools and naval gatherings, and raising funds for a children’s playground in St. Lawrence – to which he returned frequently – he was saluted as one of those quiet foot-soldiers in the war against prejudice. As Memorial’s public orator summarized, he was “one who advances the cause of humanity by displaying a quiet dignity.” In 2011 the provincial government granted him honorary membership in the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador for his work in civil rights.

Lanier Phillip’s life offers evidence that maybe Will Shakespeare had it wrong: perhaps it is the good that people do that lives after them. After coming to the attention of black activist Bill Cosby – who served a stint at Argentia Naval base in the late 1950s – Lanier Phillips lifelong crusade is being remembered during this Black History Month. Curtis May, who heads up an Office of Reconciliation and Mediation in Southern California, confirms the importance of Phillips’ life story as a “positive case history” in the goal of eliminating racist “hangovers” from 21st Century culture. “People in St. Lawrence saw no superiority,” Bill Cosby told CBC-St. John’s Morning Show in 2009, “it was just human beings helping other human beings.” Radio journalist Suzanne Woolridge framed the Lanier Phillips story as a “born again” experience. “It happened once, it can happen again,” summarizes Curtis May. “Sometimes good can come out of the darkest tragedies.”

(See also Maura Hanrahan, The Alphabet Fleet and the web site www.jaretmanuel.com/bill-cosby-newfoundland-and-the-lanier-phillips-story. Neil Earle is from Newfoundland and does volunteer work for the Office of Reconciliation and Mediation in Glendora, California and at atimetoreconcile.org).