(MILITARY WORLD WAR TWO) Mole Arthur; photographer Co 420 U

Sale 2534 - Lot 334

Price Realized: $ 562

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900

(MILITARY--WORLD WAR TWO.) Mole, Arthur; photographer. Co. 420, U.S. Navy, First Negro Co. Photograph, 7 x 17 3/4 inches to sight; laid down in later mat, 2 light wrinkles and a 1-inch closed tear, mat lightly warped. Great Lakes, IL, 2 July 1942

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Additional Details

The United States Navy was slower to integrate than the Army. They began enlisting African-American volunteers for general duty only on 1 June 1942, and even then only in segregated units. The training was done at Camp Robert Smalls, a segregated area within Naval Station Great Lakes on Lake Michigan. The 131 sailors in this photograph were part of the first class of 277 sailors, who had begun arriving in camp only a few days before. See McGregor, "Integration of the Armed Forces 1940-1965." The two training officers, Daniel W. Armstrong and Donald O. Van Ness, were white, but company officer R.W. Wallis was African-American.
As an added bonus, the photographer was Arthur Mole (1889-1983). A white Englishman, he was famous during the First World War for staging enormous "living photographs" with tens of thousands of American soldiers posed in the shape of the Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty, and more. By 1940, he was living in relative obscurity, listed in the census for Lake County, IL as a photographer at the naval station.