After enduring death threats from white shipmates and efforts by Navy officers to sabotage his final exam in diving school, Carl Maxie Brashear emerged as the Navy’s first black deep sea diver.
So he had no intention of giving up that hard-won position in 1966, after injuries suffered while recovering a bomb from the ocean left him an amputee.
In the months after the accident, Brashear put himself through grueling physical training, and held fast to an attitude, learned from his father, that worked in the face of racism as well as disability.
“It’s not a sin to be knocked down,” Brashear said in 2002. “It’s a sin to stay down.”
Brashear went on to become the first black master diver in the U.S. Navy, and the first amputee to be restored to full active duty as a diver. Brashear, whose story was told in the 2000 film “Men of Honor,” died of respiratory and heart failure Tuesday at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Va. He was 75.
“The movie could well have been called ‘Man of Courage,’ ” said Paul Stillwell, former director of the history division of the U.S. Naval Institute at Annapolis, Md. “The amount of determination and persistence he had and the pain that he put up with was amazing.”
Actor Cuba Gooding Jr., who played Brashear in the movie, called him, “the strongest man I have ever met.”
“He is a symbol of inspiration … a true example of greatness not only to the African-American community but to any race today that aims to achieve in the military,” Gooding said.
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