Via T. White
A prominent civil rights activist who feared white people until a group of Newfoundlanders rescued him from a shipwreck and nursed him back to health in 1942 died on Sunday. He was 88.
Lanier W. Phillips, the first black sonar technician in the U.S. navy, spent his life fighting for civil rights — even marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. — after being inspired by the kindness of the people in the small Newfoundland community of St. Lawrence when he was 18.
On Feb. 18, 1942, the USS Truxton and the USS Pollux were shipwrecked off Newfoundland's south coast. While 110 sailors died in the tragedy, fishers and miners in St. Lawrence were able to save 46 people, including Phillips.
When he washed ashore, covered in oil, in the town of 1,000, he heard a man with a strange accent say: "Don't lie there. You'll surely die." The man helped him up and walked him around the fire for warmth, much to Phillips' amazement. "I had never heard a kind word from a white man in my life, and I had hatred for white men," he told the Washington Post in 2010.
Phillips had struggled with racism and oppression his whole life. The great-grandson of a slave in Georgia, he'd seen the Ku Klux Klan terrorize black families, and remembered his great-grandmother telling him to "never look a white man in the eye" or he would "get a whipping, or maybe lynched." So when a miner's wife named Violet Pike began to clean the oil off his skin, he thought for sure the kind treatment would come to an end when she realized he was black.
Instead, she took him into her home and nursed him back to health, hand-feeding him homemade broth until he regained his strength. The experience altered the sailor's concept of race and equality. Since then, Phillips repeatedly told the story of Pike, who died in 1975, and how she, along with the other Newfoundlanders who helped him, changed his life forever.
In September 2011, he was inducted into the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador. "It was my honor to meet Mr. Phillips during the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador induction ceremony last fall," Premier Kathy Dunderdale said in a statement issued Monday.
"Lanier Phillips embodied the true spirit of the Order through his eloquence in promoting Newfoundlanders and Labradorians as compassionate, generous and brave. He holds an important place in the history of this province and on behalf of all Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, I offer my deepest sympathies to his loved ones."
Phillips returned to St. Lawrence last month to mark the 70th anniversary of the disaster. He died at his retirement home in Gulfport, Miss.
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