Retired Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Brown, a Baltimore native and the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, died May 22 of cancer in Silver Spring. He was 85.
Appointed to the Naval Academy in 1945, Brown was the sixth Black admitted to Annapolis but the first to graduate.
He spent his four years in Annapolis without a roommate, graduating in 1949. Brown was characterized as “a pioneer like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson,” by Navy historian Robert J. Schneller Jr., who wrote about Brown’s years at the Naval Academy in his book “Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy’s First Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality.”
Brown’s experiences in Annapolis included harsh treatment by upperclassmen who would give him excessive demerits for allegedly not maintaining his uniform properly and shunning by some classmates who would not sit next to him in the cafeteria, Schneller told the Baltimore Sun in a 2005 interview.
“He fought a war his whole life for all of us to improve who we are as individuals, who we are both as a Navy and a nation,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of him at the 2008 dedication of the Naval Academy’s Wesley Brown Field House, a 140,000-square foot athletic facility. An accomplished athlete, he was a cross-country teammate of future President Jimmy Carter.
After his death, Vice Adm. Michael H. Miller, the Naval Academy’s superintendent, issued a statement saying that Brown “embodied the highest ideals of the academy’s mission and dedicated himself to decades of selfless and distinguished service to our nation.”
Following his 1949 graduation he had a 20-year career that included tours of duty in the Korean and Vietnam wars, was a specialist in the Navy’s Civil Engineering Corps, overseeing construction all over the world for the Navy including military housing in Hawaii, roads in Liberia, a nuclear power plant in Antarctica, wharves in the Phillipines and a desalination plant in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He was born in Baltimore but spent his childhood in Washington, D.C., graduating from Dunbar High School where he earned appointments to both the Naval Academy and U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He attended Howard University before entering the Naval Academy.
After his military career, he worked at the New York State University Construction Fund, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, and Howard University where he retired in 1988.
He is survived by Crystal Brown, his wife of 50 years, two daughters, two sons, seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Link to 1946 AFRO Archive article on Midshipman Wesley Brown
