MATT2c Tommy Lee Moss

Tommy Lee Moss was born in April 1916 in Christian County in western Kentucky near  Tennessee. His mother, Lucy Carr Moss, was a homemaker and his father, Buck Moss, was identified in various Census records as a farmer, farm hand, or sharecropper.

Tuberculosis had killed their oldest son, Buck Jr., at age two in 1911. A second son, Raymond, was born about 1914. 

In early 1920 the family lived in the tiny settlement of Newstead. Tommy attended school nearby at Peedee for six years until 1928. By 1930 the family lived at Cadiz, population 1,114. The mother died there in October 1934 of chronic nephritis, a kidney disease.

Young Mr. Moss served 23 months with the Civilian Conservation Corps at a camp in Wadesville, Indiana. The CCC was a Depression-era jobs program for young men.

He enlisted in the Navy at Indianapolis on Nov. 22, 1939. Mr. Moss was a mess attendant second class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Mr. Moss was African-American, which meant that messmen positions were the only ones  open to him in the Navy segregated since the Wilson Administration. Mess attendants cooked, cleaned, and performed other services. They could advance up to petty officer first class as a steward or cook for officers, but that was their limit.

Sources: Kentucky birth index; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster roll; Kentucky death records. His handwritten enlistment application says he was born April 16, 1916. His typewritten enlistment record says he was born April 17, 1916. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.