B-1’s Replacement Band

B-1 bandsmen didn’t find out they were being transferred to Pearl Harbor until their replacements, who had been trained at Camp Robert Smalls, arrived during the third week of April 1944. The new bandsmen came from “widely separated places,” the pre-flight school’s newspaper Cloudbuster reported. 

Another regimental band, they were welcomed to their new barracks, at the Hargraves Street Community Center where B-1 had been housed, with a banquet and dance on June 2. They stepped right into the routines and performance schedules established by B-1, playing for the PreFlight School cadets and at patriotic events throughout the area.

Locals recall that the new bandsmen were different from B-1: older, and unused to the Jim Crow system that dominated Chapel Hill. Unlike the B-1 bandsmen, who for the most part spent their leisure hours in and near their Hargraves Center barracks, many of the replacement bandsmen enjoyed visits to Durham’s Hayti community, for its nightlife.

The following narrative has on several occasions conflated the two Black bands, so that B-1 is recalled as the “troublemaker” although they were long gone when a few Black Navy bandsmen were seen walking with White girls coming home from a Sunday afternoon picnic in July 1944 at Battle Park. The picnic was organized by the “Snuffbuckets,” an integrationist group of UNC students associated with Rev. Charles Jones’ Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church, and its group also included three students from North Carolina College in Durham (the HBCU now known as North Carolina Central University): two Black women and one Black man.

Chapel Hill police reported the event, and the local community’s outrage over it, to an F.B.I. informant, which prompted the War Department to prepare its confidential memo “Commingling of Whites and Negroes at Chapel Hill, N.C.” The police reports were “inaccurate accounts” that made it clear that “police were spreading false rumors about [Rev.] Jones and his church,” and insinuated that UNC President Frank Porter Graham and Dean of Students Francis Bradshaw were part of the problem. The “Commingling” report complained that “the coeds and negroes were seen walking side by side on the streets of Chapel Hill on this particular day” and warned that “serious trouble could develop.” Rev. Jones said the complaint should be “dismissed at once.”

Because Chapel Hill police were known to wait for the bandsmen to come back from Durham, some of them invariably intoxicated and thus subject to harassment and arrest, Rev. Jones took to waiting for them at the bus station on weekend nights, so that he could escort them safely back to their barracks. His house was egged, he no doubt faced other threats, and some in the Chapel Hill community still believe his progressive attitudes towards integration cost him his pastorate. He went on to become founding minister for Chapel Hill’s Community Church.

The band was directed by Chief Musician Chancey S. Seeley, a White 20-year Navy veteran who had spent most of those years at sea, and included the these African-American musicians:
Jasper W. Allen, Sr.
“Jap” Allen led his own territorial band working out of Kansas City for about a decade, beginning in the mid-1920s. He was in Chicago, playing bass and possibly saxophone with King Kolax, prior to the war. 

Samuel L. Finley, Jr.
Samuel Floyd notes that Finley was a Juilliard School of Music graduate.

Clarens L.P. Francois
Francois was the piano accompanist on a 2-lp Life of Paul Laurence Dunbar recorded by Taffy Douglass in Dayton, Ohio. Liner notes indicate that he was a graduate of Northwestern University and had done graduate work at the University of Southern California. He taught at Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia and in Dayton Public Schools from 1933 until his retirement in 1968. 

Theodore L. Mack
James D. Bailey
Thomas S. Baylor
Shelton E. Booth
David Martin Brown
James H. Brown
Wallace E. Burrell
William K. Chapman
Paul B. Coman, Sr.
Harry J. Curtis
Sidney Dawson
Frederick W. Ellison
Carl Fields
L.C. Fitzpatrick
Ernest B. Franklin
Andrew L. Gardner
Ivan H. Glenn
George A. Goldsby
Robert L. Hopkins
Aaron C. James
McClellan J. Johnston
James C. Lightfoot
Lawrence E. Lucas
Russell McGinnis
William H. Miller

Malvin E. Moore, III.
Thomas Gavin of B-1 said that Moore was his dean at Fayetteville State University when Gavin was organizing FSU’s band. Gavin recalled that Moore was from Tennessee and had earned a PhD at the Peabody Conservancy.

The Navy announced him with the band as Malvin Moore, Jr. The photo at left is  a detail from a shot of the band’s glee club performing at a bond rally, likely in Durham. The larger photo from which it is taken (see bottom of this page) is part of a  14-slide collection that the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke acquired from Malvin Moore, III, and which became part of Duke’s Behind the Veil exhibition.

After the war, Malvin Moore, III became a dean at Fayetteville State University, where B-1’s Thomas Gavin began the school’s first band. Moore earned a PhD from Peabody.

 

John O. Paris, Jr.
Julius O. Pogue
Frank L. Poole

James M. Reeves
A Norfolk native, Reeves graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1937 and had graduated from Virginia State College [now Norfolk State University] and was teaching in public schools in Upper Marlboro, MD, and then the Norfolk post office until January 1944, when he joined the Navy. A Congressional tribute to him (House Resolution 79, Feburary 23, 2011) said that he attended the Navy’s School of Music at Anacostia, MD, which would not have happened until after the war. His 30-year career teaching at Virginia State included chairing the Department of Music. He integrated the Norfolk Symphony (later the Virginia Symphony) in 1966, playing first chair string bass he retired, until 1981.

Reeves recalled, “I had tried out under Edgar Schenkman, who said ‘You play all right, but you don’t play head and shoulders above everyone in the orchestra, so I can’t justify taking a black into the orchestra.'” At his first rehearsal: “I felt like I was ostracized by just about everyone in the orchestra. Nobody talked to me except the first bass player when he told me what to do. It took, I guess, a year or so before people seemed to have warmed up to me.” Reeves quickly worked his way up to principal, a post he held until his resignation in 1981.
         “Russell Stanger: Portrait of an American Conductor.” Old Dominion University. exhibits.lib.odu.edu. 23 Feb. 2025

George R. Roberts
Richard M. Slater
Paul N. Smith
Gerald C. Trottman
Robert Turner, Jr.
Edwin H. Williams
Willie B. Wilson
James M. Woods

Sources:

Clark, Rebecca. Personal interviews. Chapel Hill, NC. 30 Aug. & 17-18 July 2008.

“The First Party.” photo caption. Cloudbuster. 10 June 1944: 4.

Gavin, Thomas. Personal interview. Fayetteville, NC. 12 June 1986.

Giduz, Roland. Personal interview. Chapel Hill, NC. 16 July 2008.

Jones, Rev. Charles. Personal interview. Chapel Hill, NC: DATE

“Pre-Flight Band Leaves for Duty Outside Country.” Cloudbuster 29 Apr. 1944: 1, 3.

Pryor, Mark. Faith, Grace and Heresy: the Biography of Rev. Charles M. Jones, Lincoln, NB: iUniverse, 2002.

Tyson, Tim. “African American Militancy in North Carolina during World War II,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot. Tyson and David Cecelski, eds. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 1998: 253-76.

–February 23, 2025