The aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk is on its way to a scrapyard in Texas. Too large to slip through the Panama Canal, the ship must sail around South America, a 16,000-mile trip from Washington state, where it has been docked since its retirement in 2009. According to the Navy Times, Kitty Hawk was the first carrier of its class, launched in 1961 with a heap of improvements over its WWII-era predecessors. It completed six tours in Vietnam and was the first carrier to be awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for heroism. The ship saw action all over the Pacific, including the Iraq War, where its planes expended nearly a million pounds of ordnance, per a detailed history posted by Kitty Hawk Vets.
Many histories do not mention the race riot that occurred below decks in 1972. Nobody is quite sure how it started, but things got bad fast, per CNN, citing a scholar’s account. "The fighting spread rapidly throughout the ship, with bands of Blacks and Whites marauding through the decks and attacking each other with fists, chains, wrenches, and pipes," per that account by David Cortwright, now with the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. CNN notes that the incident was “reflective of stark racial inequality in US society at the time.”
When news broke of the ship’s scrapyard fate, many of the 280,000 sailors who served on the Kitty Hawk over the years lobbied to save it. Veteran David Cook of North Carolina told tells ABC13 he would be “devastated if they turned it into razor blades.” He and other vets say the ship would make a fine museum, especially docked alongside the battleship USS North Carolina in Wilmington, not far from town where the Wright brothers made their names. Unless the Navy changes its mind, however, the ship will be cut up and sold for scrap once it reaches its Texas destination. (More USS Kitty Hawk stories.)
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