Massive warships in the United States are not named after men like Doris Miller of Waco: men who knitted, cooked, and crocheted, who missed school days to pick cotton in the fields, and whose marksmanship abilities came from hunting squirrels with the family shotgun. These men do not often become presidents or admirals. Men like Miller, a Black mess mate who served on the USS West Virginia in World War II, have historically been predestined to scrub the decks of such vessels, and to ensure the sheets on her officers’ bunks are tucked smooth and tight.
And yet, in January 2020, the Navy announced a new Ford-class aircraft would be named the USS Doris Miller.
“[Miller] was a man who exemplified the hearts of our sailors and the spirit of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who we also recognize today,” said then-Congressman Bill Flores, as reported by the Navy in 2020. “Dr. King once said ‘the time is always right to do something right’ and that is what Petty Officer Miller did. His story of bravery is a testament to his courage and commitment to serve both his fellow Sailors and his country.”
Then, on August 20 of this year, CNN broke the news via confidential sources that the Navy may be planning to rename the vessel. CNN noted that the Navy decided in 2025 to review how ships would be named, following a wider effort of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to remove names given for reasons of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
DORIS MILLER, THE MAN
Doris Miller grew up in the Waco area in the aftermath of World War I. According to a biography on Doris penned by his niece, Vickie Gail Miller, the Millers survived the Great Depression by growing their own crops and raising their own farm animals.
Miller was described by those who knew him as quiet, well-behaved, and kind. He was artistic, expressing himself through taxidermy, fabric arts, and even styling his mother’s hair.
A timid child grew into a 6’3”, 225-pound athlete, a talented boxer and fullback for the A.J. Moore High School football team, Vickie wrote in Doris Miller: Pearl Harbor Hero. As a teenager, Miller determined that he would need to work to support his family. In 1939, at the age of 19, he enlisted in the Navy as a mess attendant, the only role a Black man could fill at the time. He would cook, clean floors, wash laundry, and wait tables.
In the book Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement, Baylor professor emeritus of history Dr. T. Michael Parrish and a coauthor note that while stationed on the USS West Virginia, Miller signed up for supplementary work in the Navy. Making an extra $5 per month, Miller would shine shoes, make the beds for junior officers, and even wake men up for their daily shifts — a task that proved difficult considering enlisted men were not allowed to even touch officers.
The minutia of rules regarding rank were shaken loose with the first blast from a Japanese missile on the morning of December 7, 1941. As the smoke billowed above the blue waters of Pearl Harbor, Lt. F.E. White ordered Miller to help carry the USS West Virginia’s captain, Capt. Mervyn Bennion, to safety. Bennion’s torso had been blown open and he was rapidly dying.
The ship was rocked by a nearby explosion on the neighboring USS Arizona as Miller and his colleagues ran to the officer. A declassified letter written in 1941 by Lt. White to the Navy Department describes how the West Virginia had been hit by three to four torpedoes and was slick with oil, which made it hard for men to run. The ship was also listing to one side, flooding. Miller and his white peers carried Bennion to cover so the officer could receive first aid. Then, an oil fire spread across the ship’s decks.
A lieutenant ordered Miller to help load two unmanned machine guns. According to Parrish and his coauthor, Miller discovered that the officers who had issued orders regarding the machine guns were injured, so he and another sailor took initiative and fired the guns, even though Miller had never used such a weapon before.
The aforementioned group of sailors were surrounded by flames and Bennion urged the men to abandon him, but they, including Miller, stuck with him, using a fire hose to fight the flames until a sailor was able to confirm that the captain had passed away. Miller and company climbed down a railing and crane to escape the flames. Miller was then ordered to pull injured men from flaming water covering the ship’s deck, which he did successfully, saving several lives.
DORIS MILLER, THE RELUCTANT HERO
Many have argued that the context of Doris Miller’s bravery shattered reality for people living in 1940s America. Black sailors, as seen through the eyes of the United States military, were mostly incapable of heroics in battle. According to the Pacific War Museum, military leaders at the time had believed that Black men were too incompetent to lead.
“As Charles Houston noted, the navy had warned for decades that racial integration would destroy its ‘battle efficiency,’ but Pearl Harbor had proved that ‘pure white battle efficiency’ was a fallacy of monumental proportions,” Parrish wrote.
Shortly after Miller was publicly identified as the widely discussed Black mess mate from the USS West Virginia, two U.S. congressmen drafted legislation to recommend Miller for the country’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor (which Capt. Bennion had received posthumously). Miller was eventually issued a letter of commendation following public demand, but then-Navy Secretary William Franklin Knox insisted that was enough recognition. Pressure continued to rise from African American organizations and leaders across the country, convincing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to award Doris Miller with the prestigious Navy Cross.
“After he received the Navy Cross, he was subject to — I don’t want to say persecution, but he was subject to prejudice, even beyond racial prejudice, from his shipmates,” Parrish told The Baylor Line. “… the white shipmates resented the fact that he had received the award.”
Miller agreed to tour the country following Pearl Harbor in order to raise war bonds and encourage African American military enlistment, but was later killed in combat while serving on the USS Liscome Bay. Since his death, several congressmen have written and co-sponsored bills which would posthumously grant Miller the Medal of Honor, but none have been successful.
MEDALS, WAR SHIPS, MUSEUMS – WHAT’S IN A NAME?
In 1973 a Knox-class frigate was named the USS Doris Miller. Then-U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan said at the time the new ship was a symbol to the country that America “is more and more a colorblind society where people from diverse backgrounds are joined in equality in a great undertaking.” According to Parrish’s book, 18 years after Jordan’s speech, the ship was decommissioned. It was transferred to the Turkish Navy to be scrapped for spare parts, and in 1991 it was used as a bombing target in a live missile firing exercise.
Black historian and WWII veteran Leroy Ramsey campaigned during the 1980s to save a fire-damaged home on Southey Street that once belonged to the Miller family in Waco, as reported by the Waco Tribune-Herald. The first home, Miller’s birthplace, is now underwater, having been flooded for the construction of Lake Waco. Ramsey wanted to preserve the second Miller home as a museum. As of 2026, no museum or memorial to the home exists.
“Just as Doris’ death site was in water, his birth site is underwater, too,” wrote Doris Miller’s niece Vickie Gail Miller, who penned a biography on her uncle in 1997. “As such, there is no official memorial site for his birth or a final resting place.”
Doris Miller is the namesake for various institutions dotted throughout Texas and the greater United States — VFW halls, schools, parks, military buildings and housing blocks, a YMCA facility, and a community center. In 2017 Miller’s hometown of Waco erected a memorial site in his honor, featuring a 9-foot-tall bronze statue of the sailor in uniform.
Perhaps more than any museum, ship, or statue, historians and advocates of Doris Miller’s legacy have campaigned for one ultimate tribute: the Medal of Honor.
In the 1970s and again in the 1980s the Navy revisited and reviewed the past awards processes for Black sailors. They ultimately determined that while Black men were discriminated against by the Navy in World War II, Miller and other heroic Black peers were not denied the Medal of Honor due to racism. The report, a memorandum drafted by Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III, confirmed that three Black sailors received the Navy Cross award instead of the Medal of Honor. It clarified that this was because these men were not allowed into combat positions where they’d have the opportunity to perform acts of heroism.
“Carefully considering both the standards of World War II and today, it was the opinion of the Awards Board that the heroic acts of Petty Officers Miller, Harmon and Pickney did not cross that thin line between the Medal of Honor and Navy Cross,” wrote an M.E. Chang for the secretary’s office. “That is, the full knowledge of certain death in carrying out their heroic acts was not present,”
Parrish and Cutrer argue in their book that Miller did risk just as much as others awarded the Medal of Honor.
“Once the Navy Department made a decision, it did not want to be put in a position where it had to back down, you know, and to have to reverse its decision and admit that they missed the opportunity to do the right thing,” Parrish told The Baylor Line. “Call it stubbornness, call it protocol, call it tradition, call it whatever you like.”
HELPING HISTORY
Should the planned naming of the U.S.S. Doris Miller be obviated, the aircraft carrier will join the assortment of tributes to the sailor which never came to fruition, or were not long for this world.
“Ironically, negative publicity has raised awareness of an important matter, and that is the matter of keeping the name Doris Miller on the aircraft carrier named for him,” Parrish said. “And so, one of my favorite expressions is ‘history needs all the help it can get.’”
Doris Miller planned a simple life for himself, founded on family, faith, and cooking a good meal. He was thrust unexpectedly into the throes of battle, and the qualities of his character emerged to affect countless lives.
“Doris, as a Black man, was considered to have aided in breaking the racial barrier in the Navy,” Vickie Miller wrote. “He gave of himself, not just for Black Americans, but all Americans.”
