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Black Wife Airs Kitty Hawk WoesSAN DIEGO, Calif. (UPI) — The wife of a black sailor who served aboard the carrier Kitty Hawk told a congressional committee Monday that the October riot was not the ship’s first and that racial fighting had flared ever since the carrier left here last February.Mrs. Kenneth Delancey was one of a dozen members of the Kitty Hawk’s -enlisted wives club who met with the three-man House armed forces subcommittee following closed hearings earlier in the day.“It should be aired in the open because a lot of things that the guys did on the ship was because they were kind of fed up,” said Mrs. Delancey, whose husband recently retired as a petty officer 1st class.“I brought up the incident of the fighting on the Kitty Hawk,and one congressman asked what did the guys think they had accomplished by pulling people out of their racks. I told him, well, they probably felt that they were fed up.”The Kitty Hawk rioting between black sailors, Marines and white crewmen occurred Oct. 12-13 while the carrier was heading for Vietnam and left 46 men injured.Mrs. Delancey, the only member of the club who would talk with^ newsmen, said she learned from her husband that there had been racial fighting ever since the ship sailed from San Diego in February for duty in Vietnam.“The big riot they had on the Kitty Hawk was the part that was brought to the news and to the public back here in the states but was not the* first one that they had,” she said.She said the subcommittee expressed little interest in the black viewpoint and criticized the Navy because “only the blacks got punished and whites didn’t get punished.”“I have six little kids, four boys out of the bunch, that one day might want to be sailors and I’d like to see them get treated like a human being and not a black,” she said.The subcommittee, meanwhile, was broadening its investigation beyond the Kitty Hawk disorders to cover training and family influence in an attempt to examine problems in the Navy as a whole.Its members scheduled a car tour Tuesday through the San Diego Naval Training Center (boot camp) and more testimony before going back to Washington Wednesday.In secret hearings Monday, the subcommittee heard from top Navy officers, including Adm. Bernard Clarey, comman-der-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, who testified for nearly five hours. He said nothing more than “we talked about the Navy” when questioned by newsmen.
Newspaper Details
Pacific Stars and Stripes
Tokyo, Tôkyô, JP
Thu, Dec 14, 1972
Page 16
Full Page
Clipped by
Marc H.
VA, USA 24 Apr 2024
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