Leonard Roy Harmon

The ship that carried Harmon's name was commissioned on August 31, 1943, at Quincy, Massachusetts. USS Harmon escorted convoys in the South Pacific for about eight and a half months, then joined the Seventh Fleet in November 1944 for the Luzon reinforcement convoys that reached Lingayen Gulf in January 1945. In March she screened off Iwo Jima. Harmon had trained as a mess attendant, one of the few jobs open to Black men in the Navy in 1939. The ship was decommissioned on March 25, 1947, and sold for scrapping in 1967.

What the plaque says

Leonard Roy Harmon (1917-1942) Born in Cuero, Leonard Roy Harmon enlisted in the U.S. Navy in Houston in June 1939. After training in Norfolk, Virginia, he reported for duty on the cruiser "U.S.S. San Francisco" and advanced to mess attendant first class. During the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, on November 12, 1942, a Japanese plane crashed into the radar and fire control station of the "San Francisco," causing 50 casualties. The following day, November 13, as the naval battle continued, several officers on the bridge were struck by enemy gunfire. Harmon rushed to help evacuate the wounded to a dressing station. He was killed as he shielded an injured shipmate from gunfire. For this act of extraordinary heroism, he was awarded the Navy Cross. On May 21, 1943, Frank Knox, secretary of the Navy, announced the naming of a Navy vessel in Harmon's honor. The first U.S. warship named for a Black man, the destroyer escort "U.S.S. Harmon" was christened by Mrs. Naunita Harmon Carroll, Harmon's mother, and launched on July 25, 1943. The vessel received three battle stars for service in the Pacific during World War II. In 1975, as a further memorial, the bachelor enlisted quarters at the U.S. Naval Air Station, North Island, California, was named Harmon Hall. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 1.1 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 25 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• De León Plaza — 26 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 26 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.

More markers nearby

• De Witt County Monument — steps away
• Cuero — 0.2 mi
• Charles Goodwin Breeden — 0.6 mi
• Judge Henry Clay Pleasants — 0.6 mi