Eighty years ago this week, my father, a lawyer, was in the middle of a complicated trial in the military court at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Throughout my childhood I’d heard that my father asked for a pause in the trial to visit my mother and newborn me in the hospital. My birth was announced in the newspaper as part of the daily coverage of the court proceedings.
When I was old enough to ask, I heard from both parents that my father defended Navy personnel for stealing from supply depots. They created a sympathetic narrative, as if the defendants were either wrongly accused or were poor and the crime was justified. When I was old enough to brag about my father to my friends I added color to the defendants’ stories—petty officers sending necessities home to their poor families.
In my fifties I searched the archives in the Naval Academy Library for the article announcing my birth. Before I started rolling through microfiche, I called my father and asked for some common names and dates to research besides my birth date.
“I can’t remember,” he said, “call me when you get home.”
Newspaper articles from 1946 report details of my father’s part in the trial. In the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), he worked not as a defender of the disadvantaged but as a prosecutor.
The day my birth interrupted the trial, June 13, 1946, my father was about to call an important witness to testify against former Chief Steward Walter W. Rollins. Rollins, “a Negro”, was accused of throwing an all-night party in his basement quarters of the Officers’ Mess with five White people. As the trial continued, the witness testified they all played penny-ante poker from 1:30 am until 9:30 am, but no money changed hands. The unsubstantiated charges against Rollins included adultery with a White woman, a morals offense, gambling, embezzlement, misconduct and theft. He reportedly took a jug of whiskey from the Officers’ Mess. Rollins was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
None of the White people involved were held accountable, though trial records indicate Rollins felt pressured into submitting to the demands of the White partiers. After twenty-seven years of service to the Navy, Rollins was demoted to First Mate and received a bad conduct discharge.
No wonder my father dodged the truth about his JAG history at Annapolis. Until late 1944, he had been in the elite Naval Air Corps, trained on the prestigious Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber. Headquartered in Key West, he patrolled the Florida Straits for German submarines. He’d been arrested for drunken brawls and jailed for extended periods leaving his New Jersey bride alone in a strange town with no friends or family. He acquired illegal Cuban rum, cigars and dry goods, flew the contraband back to Key West and sold it to his fellow sailors.
After the war, as a new law school graduate, he reported for duty to the military court at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He had just been commissioned a Lieutenant Commander, had been a scholarship student at Georgetown University and Law School. For all his college and post graduate years, he secretly funded extracurriculars with illegal money he earned at all-night high-stakes bridge games.
White privilege saved my father, a conspicuous law-breaker, from prison. I hope he and my mother were so ashamed of his part in ruining Rollins life that they lied about it for the rest of their lives. As a lawyer he never took on trial work again.
Walter W. Rollins was the father of Jazz legend Sonny Rollins. On his sixteenth birthday, Sonny, his mother and brother watched their father get hauled off to jail for two years. My father surely knew what I discovered in the Naval Academy archives. When I returned home to Chicago with my old newspaper printouts, I had questions. He refused to discuss it. I never overcame fear of my father’s wrath in his lifetime — not sure I’ve done so even now– and this was clearly an issue I had not the courage to pursue.
Sonny Rollins spent decades trying to clear his father’s name. In September, 2025, the Secretary of the Navy finally reversed the court-martialed conviction. Sonny died on May 25 at the age of ninety-five. One of the last things he saw was a draft of an article in The Nation reporting the story of justice for his wrongly-accused father. It appears in the July-August edition.
I’m deeply grateful for visits, gifts, celebrations and tributes for my eightieth birthday. However, reading about Walter R. Rollins’ overturned racially motivated conviction, prosecuted by my father eighty years ago, thrills to a depth I’ve never known.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does indeed bend towards justice.
Regan Burke 