The Marines of Montford Point: America's First Black Marines

Introduction

The men who reported for duty at Camp Montford Point in August 1942 were the first African Americans to serve their nation as Marines since the American Revolution. Theirs is a story of honor, duty, and patriotism, characteristic of what has come to be known as the Greatest Generation. It is also the story of achievement and ultimate triumph in the face of unrelenting racial prejudice, of an unyielding determination to prove their mettle as fighting men to a nation that endorsed a policy of segregation based upon the doctrine of white supremacy. Even the Marine Corps they joined did not welcome them. Theirs is a significant American story, a major episode in the country’s military and civil rights history, a story that reveals much about the price individual African Americans paid to gain acceptance into one of the nation’s most hallowed institutions. It is also a story that remains largely unknown, except to those who lived it.

African Americans fought to be accepted into military service throughout the history of the nation, although they have always served their country. During the American Revolution the British promised male slaves freedom in exchange for their support, a position the United States never adopted. Despite the obvious gap between America’s rhetoric of freedom and equality and its practice of legitimizing a form of chattel slavery based upon race, some African Americans, both free and slave, joined the armed forces of the United States. Many joined in the hope that their loyalty would earn them their freedom. While some states outlawed slavery during the Revolution, the new nation did not. Slavery, and the racial ideology upon which it rested, were integral to both the economic and social systems of the fledgling United States.

With independence, the racial ideology and economic realities of slavery prevented the new nation from fully redeeming its promises of equality and freedom. The Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1789, protected the institution of slavery, and prejudice against blacks was widespread even within states that had rejected slavery. This prejudice was written into federal military policy when, in 1792, Congress limited service in state militias to free able bodied white male citizens. Six years later, the secretary of war declared that no Negro, Mulatto or Indian could enlist in the United States Navy or Marines. The Army and the Marines retained their ban on black enlistments. Desperate for men who would serve under the appalling conditions of life at sea, the Navy began to accept limited numbers of free black sailors, especially after 1798, as the United States attempted to protect its shipping from both the French and the British, who were embroiled in a worldwide battle for naval supremacy.

With the outbreak of the War of 1812, once again British military might threatened the young nation’s survival, and the nation altered its racial policies to enlist the aid of black Americans to avoid defeat. Finding sailors for the young American fleet again proved a difficult task, and the Navy again responded by enlisting free blacks; more than a hundred of them served in Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s fleet of nine ships that repelled a potential invasion by defeating the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. Free black sailors also served under Lieutenant Thomas McDonough in his victory over the British on Lake Champlain on September 11, 1814.

Free blacks fought as well under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in the first week of January 1815. They did so, however, not as members of the American army, which continued to bar African Americans from enlistment. Instead, Jackson employed a Louisiana militia unit from New Orleans, the Battalion of the Free Men of Color. Louisiana had banned blacks from militia service after it became an American possession with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but the new British threat dictated a change in policy. Organized as a segregated unit, the Battalion of Free Men of Color boasted three black officers and drew many of its members from black refugees who had supported the French during the Haitian Revolution. It also contained crewmen from the fleet of the notorious pirate captain Jean Lafitte. The 500 blacks in Jackson’s 6,000-man army fought gallantly, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the British and sustaining heavy casualties. When the war ended in a virtual stalemate and a peace agreement removed the British threat, the United States returned to its policy of excluding blacks from military service. The black veterans of the New Orleans campaign soon saw their hopes for more equitable treatment dashed in a society increasingly committed to slavery and a racist ideology.

Even with the outbreak of the Civil War, the United States continued to refuse to enlist African Americans. For the entire first year of that conflict the War Department maintained its resistance to black troops, even though commanders in the field called for a reversal of the policy. Eventually, military necessity and the Emancipation Proclamation forced a nation caught up in a brutal, prolonged conflict to utilize a much-needed source of manpower. In the fall of 1862, as President Abraham Lincoln prepared to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States began enrolling black troops in an organization separate from the regular army, the United States Colored Troops. Some 186,000 African Americans served in the Union army in segregated units, such as the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Another 30,000 African Americans served in the Union navy, many as able-bodied sailors. When the Emancipation Proclamation became effective on January 1, 1863, these black soldiers and sailors understood fully that the victory for which they fought would destroy slavery, and, they hoped, bring them the liberties of citizenship.

After the Civil War, Congress retained the United States Colored Troops, composed of two infantry regiments, the 24th and 25th, and two cavalry regiments, the 9th and 10th. This decision reflected the policies of the Reconstruction Congress, which granted citizenship to African American males with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and extended the franchise to them with the Fifteenth Amendment. During the late nineteenth century the units of the U.S. Colored Troops fought in the Indian Wars on the western frontier, primarily in the Southwest, where the cavalry regiments gained fame as the Buffalo Soldiers. Black troops also fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, some with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Both the 9th and 10th Cavalry participated in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, their heroics in that battle briefly receiving press attention equaling that given to Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. All four black regiments saw combat duty in the Philippine Insurrection, a nasty and little-known war fought from 1899 to 1901 between American forces and Philippine nationalists seeking independence under the leadership of Emilio Aquinaldo. When President Woodrow Wilson sent American troops under General John J. Pershing into Mexico in 1916 to chase down the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, whose troops had conducted raids into the American Southwest, units from the U.S. Colored Troops joined the expedition.

Ironically, by their service in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, black troops helped the United States conquer territories populated by darker-skinned peoples. The nation partially justified both wars with racial theories that proclaimed it the duty of the white race to tutor darker, and thus supposedly inferior, peoples in the concepts of democracy and civilization. Conquest abroad only fanned the flames of white supremacy at home. In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, southern states and the federal government adopted increasingly harsh segregationist laws and practices. In the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson case of 1896, the Supreme Court established the separate but equal doctrine, essentially making segregation a federal policy. Emboldened by this decision and the federal government’s repeated failure to protect the civil liberties African Americans had gained during Reconstruction, state legislatures in the American South passed legislation segregating African Americans in almost every aspect of life. Southern states also simultaneously removed blacks from the political process by stripping them of the right to vote through a variety of legislative acts that civil rights organizations would spend the next half century challenging in federal courts. By the early twentieth century, the doctrine of white supremacy had become the official policy of the United States. The federal military and civil service were segregated, separate but equal had been proclaimed the law of the land, and the federal government had acquiesced in, if not encouraged, the segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans by the states of the South. Even outside the South, although blacks continued to be politically active, courts enforced restrictive covenants that created segregated neighborhoods while rampant and blatant discrimination in employment denied African Americans equal economic opportunities.

This dramatic shift in racial policy was readily apparent in the American military when the United States entered World War I in 1917. The draft established in that year to provide the millions of servicemen necessary to prosecute the war made African Americans eligible to serve, and by the war’s end, over 367,000 had done so. The manner in which the military employed African Americans during World War I, however, signaled disappointment for those who hoped their service would result in more equitable treatment when hostilities ended. Rather than employing African Americans in their traditional combat roll, the Army placed almost 90 percent of its black troops in segregated service units, such as stevedore and labor battalions, and created only two black combat units, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions. Only the 92nd fought under American command; the 93rd was assigned to the French forces. Another 10,000 African Americans served in the Navy, not as able-bodied seamen but in the mess and stewards branches.

Throughout World War I, the Marine Corps refused, as it had since the Revolution, to enlist blacks. With the war’s end, both the Army and the Navy continued their policy of racial segregation and the use of black personnel primarily in service units, not as combat troops. As America prepared to enter the Second World War, the Marine Corps remained a white enclave. Whether this policy of racial exclusion reflected the high percentage of white southerners in the Corps’s ranks, the highest of any of the services, or the ideal of a small, close-knit brotherhood of warriors, it was endorsed and defended by the Corps’s leadership.

When the war clouds gathering over Europe unleashed their fury with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, America began military and economic preparations for war. The nation inaugurated its first peacetime draft in that year and vastly expanded defense-related expenditures. The scope of the economic preparation was enormous, and African Americans were determined to employ every possible legitimate tactic to prevent their exclusion from what promised to be an economic banquet. Blacks in the South, under the repression of legal segregation and the threat of lynch mob violence, could do little to ensure that they would benefit from the nation’s preparations for war. But in the urban centers of the North, where African Americans enjoyed the franchise, millions of them who had fled the South during and after World War I had created strong civil rights organizations capable of demanding more equitable treatment from the federal government.

As it became increasingly obvious that without pressure the federal government would not ensure that African Americans be included in the war effort’s economic opportunities, northern civil rights organizations took action. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in collaboration with other leaders of the nation’s most powerful civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, threatened to send 100,000 marchers into the streets of Washington on July 1, 1941, unless the federal government guaranteed more equitable treatment for African Americans. Worried about the power of southern Democrats in Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt resisted the demands rather than risk the southerners' opposition to his foreign and domestic agendas. After a flurry of negotiations convinced Roosevelt that the march would indeed be held unless the federal government made it possible for African Americans to enjoy both the rewards and risks of the war effort, on June 25 he signed Executive Order 8802. In an effort to appease southern congressional leaders, the order allowed continued racial segregation, both by private firms contracting with the government and within government agencies. However, it expressly forbade governmental agencies or firms receiving government contracts from discriminating in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin and created the Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce the order.

Executive Order 8802 directly and immediately affected the Marine Corps, the only branch of the American military that still excluded blacks. The Corps made no secret of its unhappiness with the order. Major General Thomas Holcomb, Commandant of the Corps, observed that the Negro race has every opportunity now to satisfy its aspirations for combat in the Army and declared, If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites.

Faced with a directive from the commander in chief to accept African Americans, the Corps had no choice but to abandon its policy of racial exclusion. The Corps’s reluctant enlistment of African Americans was indicative of the manner in which World War II would transform race relations in the United States, creating the conditions that would eventually lead to the demise of legal segregation. For the moment, however, like the Army and Navy, the Corps could, and did, insist on a policy of rigid racial segregation within its ranks. Rather than send black enlistees to the East Coast training facility at Parris Island, South Carolina, the Corps elected to send them to a separate facility. In 1941 the Corps had acquired the Marine Barracks, New River, North Carolina. The sprawling new base, renamed Camp Lejeune a year later, was located in coastal southeastern North Carolina, near the tiny town of Jacksonville in Onslow County. The Corps opened its segregated training facility in August 1942, on an area of Camp Lejeune called Montford Point, ironically at the initial location of the Camp Lejeune command post.

The Corps chose Colonel Samuel A. Woods, a career officer from South Carolina, as the first commander at Montford Point. He selected an experienced staff of officers, noncommissioned officers, and especially drill instructors from men who had served in locations such as the Philippines, Nicaragua, and the Caribbean. Such service, the Corps’s leadership reasoned, indicated their experience with colored troops. While Woods expected the new enlistees to receive training equal to that received by white recruits at Parris Island, some of his all-white staff greeted the black recruits with undisguised racial prejudice and open hostility.

The Corps charged Woods and his staff with quickly identifying those African American recruits with leadership potential to replace the original white drill instructors, a task that was accomplished by late 1943. The rigor of the training only increased under the newly minted black drill instructors, who were determined to see their charges emerge from boot camp every bit the equals of the Marines trained at Parris Island. Operating until 1949, this bifurcated command structure of black drill instructors and white officers churned out more than 20,000 Marines. While African Americans gradually worked their way into the ranks of the drill instructors and non-commissioned officers, the officer corps remained all white, and the basic rule of racial etiquette at Montford Point never varied: at no time was a black man to be in a position to give orders to white Marines.

The career aspiration of camp commanders, who worked to send well-trained Marines into the Corps’s ranks, and the presence of black drill instructors tempered the racism black Marines faced at Montford Point. In the civilian world off base, deep in the segregated South, there was no such restraint on the blatant racism Montford Pointers encountered. The Marine Corps decided to construct the training camp for black enlistees at Camp Lejeune for reasons of cost and efficiency, without any consideration of the difficulties African American recruits inevitably would encounter in that location. Still the nation’s most impoverished region in the 1940s, the American South clung to its policies of rigid segregation and near-total disenfranchisement of African Americans, and to the racist ideology that under-girded them. Even as recruits came south to Montford Point, millions of blacks were fleeing the region to escape the daily humiliations of life in a segregated society. They fled northward to enjoy greater social freedom, to exercise their right to vote, and especially to embrace the economic opportunities of a nation at war that promised a better life for them and their families. Those African Americans who remained in the segregated South, the vast majority, faced the constant challenge of living in a legally segregated, staunchly racist society that ultimately depended upon the threat of violence to keep them in a subservient position.

While in the uniform of their country, the men of Montford Point endured every form of racial discrimination. On trains they were forced to occupy segregated cars, and on buses they were obliged to sit in the rear and to yield their seats to whites. Restaurants denied them service, and theaters, if they admitted them at all, required that they be seated in segregated areas. Whites insulted them on sidewalks and berated them with racial epithets. The police, both military and civilian, made sure they did not stray into the white areas of Jacksonville or other communities. Resistance was dangerous and usually futile. Black Marines stationed at Montford Point and elsewhere in the South endured this flagrant discrimination for more than two decades.

While coping with segregation and racial discrimination in the civilian world and within the Corps, the men of Montford Point served the nation in three wars and in brief periods of peace between conflicts. Almost all of their service occurred during a time in which racial segregation remained legal throughout the American South and racial discrimination permeated practically every aspect of life in the rest of the nation. Their record of service under such circumstances stands as a remarkable testament of their devotion to and faith in their country.

Of the 19,168 African Americans who served in the Corps during World War II, 12,738, or two-thirds, served overseas. Montford Point Marines who remained stateside included members of units assigned to naval supply depots at Norfolk, Philadelphia, and McAlester, Oklahoma, as well as members of the five Marine depot companies that remained in training at the war’s end. Overseas assignments, however, did not necessarily place Montford Point Marines in combat. Most young African American men who joined the Marine Corps during World War II hoping to engage the enemy saw their hopes disappointed. The majority were assigned to duty stations in the Pacific outside the combat zone. The two combat units created at Montford Point, the 51st and 52nd Defense Battalions, despite rumors of assignments in forward areas of the Pacific theater, essentially drew guard duty on islands secured by other units. To the frustration of the men in their ranks, who felt that their skin color determined their lack of combat assignments, the 51st saw duty in the Ellice and Mariana Islands and the 52nd served in the Marshall Islands and Guam only after these islands were fully under the control of American forces. Both battalions served as replacements for white units employed in the support of the American invasions.

Ironically, the Montford Point recruits who saw combat in the Pacific were those with the least combat training: they were members of ammunition and depot companies who supported amphibious landings on some of the war’s bloodiest beaches, including those on the islands of Saipan, Pelelui, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In the confusion of the battlefield, ammunition carriers and depot company personnel became riflemen who engaged the enemy, at times in hand-to-hand combat. They acted as stretcher bearers, removing both the wounded and the dead from the front lines, and served on picket lines protecting secured beachheads and airfields, in addition to fulfilling their primary mission of seeing that frontline troops received the ammunition and supplies required to support their advances. Their courage and performance under fire earned the admiration of the white combat units they supported and unequivocally demonstrated what the men of Montford Point already knew—that they possessed the ability to perform as the equals of Marines who had trained at Parris Island or Camp Pendleton, California.

The performance of African American Marines in the Pacific during World War II did not, as many had hoped, lead to their full acceptance in the Corps. Instead, faced with the necessity of retaining black Marines, the Corps continued its old segregationist policies while reducing the percentage of blacks in its ranks. Rather than the 10 percent envisioned by the Navy, the Corps planned for its postwar force of 100,000 men to contain no more that 2,800 black marines, a figure reduced to 1,500 in 1947. Rumors swept through the ranks of the black Marines who remained in service that both they and all future black recruits would be forced into the Stewards Branch, causing some to refuse to reenlist. In fact, black Marines were assigned either to the Stewards Branch or to a new Training Company created at Montford Point in June of 1946, whose graduates were to be assigned as general duty Marines organized in segregated units.

The Corps developed, and revised, several plans for stationing units composed of black Marines during the immediate postwar period. The Corps planned to station black Marine depot units at Port Chicago, California, in the San Francisco Bay area; the Marine Corps Barracks in McAlester, Oklahoma; the Marine Barracks at the Naval Ammunition Depots in Hingham, Massachusetts, and Fort Mifflin, Pennsylvania; the Marine Barracks at the Naval Supply Depot in Scotia, New York; and naval facilities in Bayonne, New Jersey. The Corps canceled these plans when they came under fire from base commanders concerned about the possibility of racial conflicts with local townspeople and laborers. After what seemed like endless agonizing over where to station the black Marines, the Corps finally adopted a solution in late 1947. The plan adopted envisioned only 1,388 African Americans in the Corps, of which almost a third, 420, would serve in the Stewards Branch. The plan retained Montford Point as a segregated training facility and called for segregated black service units to be stationed at Montford Point and the Marine Corps Barracks at Naval Ammunition Depots in Earle, New Jersey; Fort Mifflin, Pennsylvania; and Lualualei, Hawaii.

After World War II, support for segregation was crumbling in much of America, in large measure because of conditions and circumstances created by the war. Approximately a million African Americans served their country in the military during World War II, with nearly half serving overseas, where many encountered race relations superior to those in the United States. After entering into harm’s way to defend a nation that regarded them as second-class citizens, they returned home determined to defeat segregation and racism. Millions of northern white troops who had passed through bases in the American South had observed the harsh realities of segregation firsthand and were now more prepared to support African American calls for its demise. The large black populations in the major urban centers of the North and Midwest, created as blacks fled the segregated South for personal freedom and war industry employment, were strategically placed politically. Their votes could deliver victory in elections in major industrial states, and thus in national presidential elections. An American public shocked and appalled by the horrors of the Holocaust was receptive to demands by African Americans that the nation put an end to systematic discrimination and redeem its promise of liberty and equality for all.

In an uphill fight for reelection and under pressure from northern civil rights organizations, despite staunch opposition from the segregated South, in July 1948 President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which finally abandoned racial segregation as a federal policy and required the desegregation of the military. The Corps was slow to carry out President Truman’s executive order to integrate. It deactivated Montford Point as a training facility in September 1949, more than a year after Executive Order 9981 was issued, sending new black recruits to its training camps previously reserved for whites at Parris Island and Camp Pendleton. It did not seek to expand the number of blacks within its ranks, and most of the men trained at Montford Point who remained on active duty continued to serve in segregated units.

In June 1950, the Korean War began when North Korean Communist forces invaded South Korea. It was the first major armed conflict of a prolonged Cold War in which the United States and its allies sought to prevent the spread of Communism from the Soviet Union and China into countries allied with the Western democracies. The Korean War finally persuaded the Marine Corps to integrate its ranks fully. Once begun, integration occurred quickly and without major incidents, as Marines on the battlefield concentrated on staying alive, not worrying about the skin color of others in their outfit. Because so few African Americans had entered the Corps since the closure of Montford Point the previous September, it was primarily men trained at Montford Point who initially integrated the Corps at unit level. Montford Point Marines served in all the major campaigns of