On February 18, 1942, Phillips was aboard while she was battered by a severe winter storm. Eventually
Truxtun and the supply ship were forced onto the rocks of the southeast coast of Newfoundland. Hundreds of men from both ships died, but Phillips was among the survivors. Initially afraid to leave his doomed ship because he thought he was off the coast of
Iceland where he had been told blacks were forbidden to go ashore, Phillips boarded a lifeboat which capsized as it reached land. Exhausted and covered in oil that had leaked from the sinking ships, Phillips collapsed on the beach. Gently prodded to his feet by a local resident who told him he'd freeze to death if he didn't get up, Phillips was confronted by an experience that was totally new to him: "I had never heard a kind word from a white man in my life." Phillips was taken to a place where the local women were washing oil from the survivors, and when they realized they could not scrub his skin white he was afraid their kind treatment would end. Instead a local woman, Violet Pike, insisted that he come home to her house where she nursed him with soup and put him to bed with blankets and rocks she had warmed on her wood stove. Profoundly touched and forever changed by the kindness of the residents of
St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, Phillips went on to become the Navy's first black sonar technician After giving speeches at schools across the U.S., Phillips was awarded an honorary degree from
Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2008 for his efforts to end discrimination. In 2011, Phillips was given honorary membership into the
Order of Newfoundland and Labrador for his work in civil rights in the U.S. In 2012
Oil and Water, a play about Lanier's experience in St. Lawrence after the shipwreck and the influence it had on him, was produced by Newfoundland's Artistic Fraud theater company. In 2016, a picture book on Phillips' life,
A Change of Heart, (, Nimbus Publishing) was released, written by Alice Walsh and Erin Bennett Banks. ==References==