Mess attendant Doris “Dorie” Miller was making the rounds collecting laundry from shipmates aboard the USS West Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

His courageous actions that day would earn him a place in history as the first African-American awarded the Navy Cross and a pioneer in breaking down racial barriers in the Navy.

“He became a symbol that highlighted the notion that we should expect the exceptional if talented people are given an equal opportunity on an even playing field,” Rear Adm. John Fuller said Thursday at a ceremony honoring him. “He was a bighearted, big-bodied man.”

When Miller enlisted in the Navy in 1939, blacks were relegated to jobs in the mess hall or as stewards. The change he helped unleash was reflected Thursday in the Navy brass who paid tribute to him: Fuller, commander of Navy Region, Hawaii, and Capt. Stanley Keeve Jr., commander of Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, are both African-American.

More than 100 people gathered to remember Miller and rededicate a commemorative plaque installed in his honor 25 years ago by the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority at the Doris Miller Housing complex on Nimitz Road (just mauka of Nimitz Highway) near Honolulu Airport.

Miller’s assigned duties were to carry ammunition during an attack, but the battery had been blown up, Fuller recalled. So the ship’s heavyweight boxing champion rescued injured sailors amid the chaos and destruction, wading through waist-deep water and oil-slicked decks.

When the ship’s captain fell mortally wounded with a jagged piece of shrapnel in his abdomen, Miller and others lifted him from the bridge.

Miller then took over a .50-caliber machine gun, a weapon he had not been trained to use, firing hundreds of rounds at marauding Japanese planes until he ran out of ammunition. Along with the Navy Cross, which he received in 1942, the Waco, Texas, native earned the Purple Heart.

“When he could have stood back, Dorie Miller stepped forward and manned the machine gun as if he had done so all his life,” said Dorothy Buckhanan Wilson, international president of the sorority. “While others called him a black sailor, the women of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority joined the United States Navy in designating Dorie Miller a national treasure and a decorated hero.”

He died in November 1943 after a Japanese submarine torpedo struck his ship in the South Pacific. In 1973 the Navy named a frigate after him. His heroism also hit the big screen in movies such as “Tora Tora Tora” and “Pearl Harbor.”

Ginger Knowles, fundraising chairwoman for Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Lambda Chi Omega Hawaii chapter, wants his story to be more widely known.

“I think it teaches us that even if you’re not trained, even if you feel like you’re not equipped to face an obstacle, if you have that motivation and drive, you can push forward and tackle anything that comes your way in life,” Knowles said. “And it might make you a hero one day, just like Dorie Miller.”