Slight, grizzled Hugh Mulzac, ex-seaman, ex-mess boy, was catapulted front & center last week to become a Symbol of Negro participation in the war. When the Liberty freighter Booker T. Washington goes into service from California Shipbuilding's Los Angeles yard in mid-October, the Maritime Commission decided, she will be commanded by a British West Indies-born Brooklyn man, the first Negro to hold a U. S. master's certificate and the first to command a 10,500-ton ship. Captain Mulzac not only promised that he would be able to get qualified Negro officers to serve under him but said that he knew white as well as Negro crewmen willing to serve under him—for the Booker T. is not to be a Jim Crow ship.
The Booker T. (forTaliaferro) will serve not only in the war of ocean transport but in the war against race discrimination. Many an organization and more individuals jumped at the chance to make a symbol of this namesake of a great American educator. First Liberty ship to bear a Negro's name, she is the first to be christened by a member of the Negro race—Marian Anderson, contralto—and the first to heed a Negro's command, the first to flout time-encrusted taboos against "checkerboarding" among licensed personnel.
National Maritime Union's (C.I.O.) President Joe Curran chortled aloud. He alone of maritime labor leaders has welcomed Negroes into his union—a shrewd move to increase his union's strength.
Almost lost in the rush of symbolic "firsts" was studious, bespectacled, 56-year-old Hugh Mulzac. In 1907 he was an ordinary seaman in full-rigged British ships. He climbed to able seaman, boatswain, quartermaster, became a U.S. citizen and got his second mate's papers in 1918. Within two years he had the only U.S. master's certificate ever issued a Negro, a double-riveted whole-hog "any ocean, any tonnage" ticket. Still going up, he got a command: the British registry Yarmouth in the West Indies-Central America trade. Not much of a ship, perhaps, but a step in the right direction. Then the company went out of business and Mulzac returned to New York to look for another berth. That was 20 years ago. Since then his chief jobs have been as steward on U.S. passenger ships. Until last week he never again got near an officer's berth—except to make it up.