ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The remains of one of the last victims of the Pearl Harbor attack returned home. A 20-year-old Black sailor was buried with military honors this week. WUNC's Jay Price has the story of Neil Frye.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: In later wars, there would have been a uniformed notification team to cushion the blow, but it was 1941, so word that the 20-year-old mess attendant was missing and presumed dead simply came by telegram.
MARY RUTH FRYE MCCRIMMON: The postmaster brought it out and read it to my mom and dad.
PRICE: The Navy department deeply regrets to inform you, he began.
FRYE MCCRIMMON: That's how they found out.
PRICE: That's the last of his nine siblings still alive, Mary Ruth Frye McCrimmon, age 87. All the siblings worked on the family farm in North Carolina as children. The fact that Neil Frye's body hadn't been identified became an undercurrent in family history, a stubborn hope that somehow he hadn't died.
FRYE MCCRIMMON: My mom used to say she loved to people watch. She would go anywhere she could get a chance to go, just watched all the men go by to see if she could see Neil.
PRICE: McCrimmon was only 3 years old when Neil Frye joined the Navy, following another brother into service.
FRYE MCCRIMMON: That time, they couldn't get no jobs. They had - well, I'm just going to say racial thing. You - they didn't get no job. So they went where they could get paid, but that was such a little amount that they got.
PRICE: At this point, Black sailors were only allowed to be mess attendants, essentially doing whatever officers wanted, from cooking their meals to doing their laundry. Historian Glenn Knoblock has written books on the experiences of Black sailors in the U.S. Navy.
GLENN KNOBLOCK: You could almost think of them as personal servants.
PRICE: But during battle, the mess attendants had far more important duties. Knoblock said the most typical for Black sailors it would have been passing ammunition up from deep in the bowels of the ship, which is where Frye's remains were found later when the ship was raised.
KNOBLOCK: There is still this perception that Black men only served as waiters and servants to officers. And while that was their primary duty, they also served as fighting men.
PRICE: Perhaps even as Frye was dying, one of his fellow mess attendants, a burly Texan named Dorie Miller, had helped move the ship's dying captain before jumping behind a machine gun and, despite not being allowed to train with the weapon because of his race, blazed away at the attacking aircraft. Miller was awarded the Navy Cross, and his story helped force the Navy to open other jobs to Black sailors.
LAUREL FREAS: What we've learned, for example, from the case of Dorie Miller, is that everybody did what they needed to do and what was asked of them.
PRICE: Forensic anthropologist Laurel Freas leads the Defense Department project identifying remains of troops lost in the attack. Freas' colleagues work on MIA cases from all over the world. But her job feels particularly immediate and personal. The building they work in is on the base, little more than a mile from where the West Virginia sank.
FREAS: So we are surrounded and immersed in this history and reminders of it every day, and we want to make these identifications absolutely as quickly as we can to get these answers back to families who have been waiting now, in the case of our Pearl Harbor losses, for, you know, the better part of a century.
PRICE: Frye's story has a particular resonance at this moment. Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon has been scrubbing some mentions of Black troops from its websites. DOD officials said some images have been removed in error, but the fear remains that the contributions of Black service members are being erased. And for Neil Frye's last living sibling, the facts about how he lived and died do matter.
FRYE MCCRIMMON: I know my mom and dad, if there's kind of way they know about this, I know they are some kind of happy.
PRICE: Some kind of happy - and the Pentagon is one step closer to identifying all the sailors from the USS West Virginia. Just five remain. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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