Undoubtedly they soon would have been glad to recruit them, even in the South.
Unfortunately for the Negro, the draft was not able to prevent their being kept out of the Navy.

It is a very desirable branch of the service vitiated and clouded, however, with many disgusting and aristocratic traditions.

When the Navy was young and the service more arduous; when its vessels were merely armed merchantmen, many of them simply tubs and death traps and not the floating castles of today, the services of Negroes were not disdained; but times and national ideals had changed, and, the shame of it, not to the credit of a Commonwealth, for whose birth a Negro had shed the first blood, and a Washington had faced the rigors of a Valley Forge, a Lincoln the bullet of an assassin.
The annual report of the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, rendered to the Secretary of the Navy and covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 1918, showed that in the United States Navy, the United States Naval Reserve Force and the National Naval Volunteers, there was a total of 435,398 men.

Of that great number only 5,328 were Negroes, a trifle over one percent.

Between June and November 1918, the Navy was recruited to a total force somewhat in excess of 500,000 men.