According to Morris Soublet, Lieutenant White was one of the few officers who treated the black seamen like men and made a practice of never belittling them or calling them “boys”—at least to their faces. Nothing angered Soublet more than being called “boy.” He confronted one white officer who consistently used racial slurs and made it clear that he was not going to tolerate it anymore. Whether or not he threatened physical violence, Soublet’s reputation was such that the officer took him seriously.
The July 12, 1943, War Diary does not mention the officer’s suicide.
CHAPTER 11: LIKE A DOG ON A BONE
Details regarding Montford Point are from Blacks in the Marine Corps by Henry Shaw and Ralph Donnelly, and The Right to Fight: African-American Marines in World War II by Bernard Nalty.
Details of Edgar Huff’s life are from my interviews with his son, Edgar Huff Jr.; from an unfinished manuscript about Huff’s life called “Sweat and Tears”; from Perry Fisher’s and Brooks Gray’s Blacks and Whites: Together Through Hell (from the U.S. Marines in World War II series); from an oral-history transcript from the History and Museums Division of the U.S. Marine Corps; from a “Profiles in Courage” book by Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Johnson, titled Roots of Two Black Marine Sergeants Major; and from a collection of magazine and newspaper articles.
Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars was set aside to expand existing facilities and build new ones for the black camp at Montford Point.
Outnumbered members of the 1st Defense Battalion defended Wake Island when the Japanese invaded. The new battalion would be called the 51st Composite Defense Battalion.
Montford Point was separated from New River by the coffee-colored New River and twelve miles of scrub pine. Montford Point had once been used for combat training of Fleet Marine Force units.
Seventy-five percent of Montford Point’s black Marines had been to college or were in college.
The code used by Edgar Huff Sr. was a code the Germans were never able to break.
At the Abraham Lincoln Monument in Springfield, Illinois, President Teddy Roosevelt addressed the service record of black Americans in Cuba. Roosevelt said, “Any man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward.” Many southerners expressed outrage over the implications of Roosevelt’s speech. Senator James Vardaman, a Mississippi politician and unabashed racist, called Roosevelt a “little, mean, coon-flavored miscegenationist.” After a dinner reported by the press in which Roosevelt dined with Booker T. Washington, Vardaman again attacked the president, saying that the White House was “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.”
Senator Vardaman worried that “[u]niversal military service means that millions of Negroes … will be armed. I know of no greater menace to the South than this.” Vardaman had little to worry about. Of the 400,000 African Americans who served in World War I, only 42,000 would serve as combat soldiers. The Marines refused all black recruits and the Navy enlisted only 1 percent of its manpower from African Americans. Ironically, during the Civil War, the Navy had been 25 percent black. But on March 16, 1878, the secretary of war prescribed a set of rules governing the enrollment of Marines: “No Negro, Mulatto or Indian to be enlisted.…”
After the Civil War, blacks placed their hopes in a spate of ambitious legislation, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 1875, which sought to grant them the rights of full-fledged citizens of the United States. In 1877, however, when the contested election between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden ended in a compromise whereby Hayes was awarded the election in return for the Republican Party’s promise to remove federal troops from the South, Reconstruction came to a screeching halt, and much of the South retreated behind a wall of xenophobia. The backlash against newly empowered blacks was considerable. Able, now, to operate without the threat of federally imposed cooperation, the Democratic Party wasted little time in reasserting white dominion over the former states of the Confederacy, and white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, used a variety of tactics—both violent and nonviolent—to intimidate and control blacks.
For a brief time after the Civil War, it appeared that life for blacks in the South might change. Blacks acquired land, established businesses, registered to vote in large numbers, and even assumed positions in state governments. Private charities raised money for new schools and churches. With the withdrawal of federal troops, however, and the disappointment of the Supreme Court rulings, blacks saw many of the gains they had made in the aftermath of the Civil War undermined.
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, was the first of the great, transformational Reconstruction amendments. It extended the “blessings of liberty” to former black slaves and their descendants by abolishing slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, the most contentious of the three (proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868), expanded the definition of citizenship to include blacks and included three important articles that gave them rights in the court of law: the immunity clause, due process, and the equal protection clause. It also struck down the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which attempted to deprive former slaves and their forebears of their constitutional rights. The Fifteenth, the last of the amendments, ratified in 1870, granted voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The Civil Rights Act abrogated the insidious Black Codes, which Southern states had passed to limit the freedom of ex-slaves. Laws differed in each state, but most compelled freed men to work for a white employer, prevented blacks from raising their own crops, restricted their travel—in some areas blacks needed permission from a white employer just to enter town—and subjected unemployed men to charges of vagrancy.
Included in the Civil Rights Act were also provisions to guarantee blacks the right to make contracts, to sue, to bear witness in court, and to own private property. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, arguing that blacks were not qualified for United States citizenship and that the bill would “operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” Republicans, however, overrode his presidential veto in April 1866, and Congress passed the act. Nearly a decade later, Congress added the contentious Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the list of Reconstruction era laws. That act imposed criminal penalties against business owners who practiced racial discrimination. Many outraged southerners—and northerners, too—viewed the law as an infringement on their personal freedom of choice.
Alarmed blacks who believed that the Reconstruction amendments would provide them with legal refuge and recourse felt betrayed by a controversial 1883 Supreme Court decision. Responding to a number of black charges of discrimination—blacks were refused entrance to a hotel dining room in Topeka, Kansas, an opera in New York City, a San Francisco theater, and a passenger car on a train—the court concluded that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional and that the 13th and 14th amendments did not authorize Congress to pass laws enforcing the amendments in the private sector. Kentuckian John Marshall Harlan was the lone voice of dissent.
Defending the ruling, Chief Justice Joseph Bradley explained that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment had limits. Its focus was state-sponsored legislation, and state action of every kind “which impairs the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, or which injures them in life, liberty or property without due process of law, or which denies to any of them the equal protection of the laws.” “Individual invasion of individual rights,” he added, “is not the subject-matter of the [14th] Amendment.” In the wake of the ruling, restaurants and hotels, even public drinking fountains, libraries, and parks, became off-limits to blacks. “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs became prominent throughout the South—and the North, too—rendering emancipation nothing more than an empty promise.
Nothing, though, struck a blow to the heart of black liberation like Plessy
v. Ferguson. With its landmark ruling upholding segregation (Kentuckian Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter), the Supreme Court gave the phrase “separate but equal” legal standing, initiating a wave of new legislation and business practices that allowed whites to further divide society along a color line. Blacks mounted challenges to the “separate but equal” standard, but those challenges proved fruitless. As long as whites observed the bare essentials of due process, they had the law on their side. A few years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Birmingham Ledger newspaper claimed disingenuously that “[t]he court of Alabama and schools of Alabama are open to Negroes and every door of opportunity can be entered and above all it is easier for a Negro to get rich here than anywhere else in the world.” Though the claim was patently false, many white southerners comforted themselves in the belief that separate did not mean unequal, and that blacks, like whites, had access to good schools, justice, and the American dream. Martin Luther King scribbled a long note in the margins of his personal copy of Charles Silberman’s Crisis in Black and White. “The South,” he wrote, “deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person.”
By the time Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian, became president, many states had passed laws disenfranchising blacks. In fact, Jim Crow was so prevalent that W. E. B. Du Bois called the South “an armed camp for intimidating black folk.” Wilson defended the principle of allowing Southern states to decide their racial issues free of Northern influence. In a move that civil rights groups and Republicans regarded as openly racist, Wilson permitted, and provided justification for, his cabinet members to segregate their offices of the federal government.
CHAPTER 12: A WAR OF THEIR OWN
Eventually the Special Enlisted Staff (SES) at Montford Point made efforts to recruit Marines who were the children of immigrants and had grown up being called “wop,” “dago,” “Jew boy,” and “kike.”
Gilbert H. Johnson earned the nickname “Hashmark” because he wore on the sleeve of his Marine Corps uniform three of the diagonal stripes called hash-marks, indicating successful previous enlistments. Born in Mount Hebron, Alabama, in 1905, he joined the Army in 1923 and served two three-year hitches with a black regiment, the 25th Infantry. In 1933 he enlisted in the Naval Reserve as a mess attendant, serving on active duty in officers’ messes at various installations in Texas. He entered the regular Navy in May 1941 and had become a steward second class by 1942, when he heard that the Marine Corps was recruiting African Americans. With infantry experience ranging from company clerk to mortar gunner and squad leader, Johnson felt he was ideally suited to become a Marine. As regulations required, he applied to the secretary of the Navy, via the commandant of the Marine Corps, for a discharge from the Navy in order to join the Marines. He received the necessary permission and reported to Montford Point on November 14, 1942, still wearing his steward’s uniform. As he anticipated, he possessed vitally needed skills that resulted in his being chosen as an assistant drill instructor and later a drill instructor. He ended up supervising the very platoon in which he had started his training. Looking back on his days as a DI, Johnson conceded that he was something of an “ogre” on the drill field. “I was a stern instructor,” he said, “but I was fair.” He sought, with unswerving dedication, to produce “in a few weeks, and at most a few months, a type of Marine fully qualified in every respect to wear that much cherished Globe and Anchor.” In January 1945 he became sergeant major of the Montford Point Camp.
Edgar Huff trained the 16th Platoon.
The infusion of men overwhelmed the system. It was a recipe for disaster unless Colonel Woods could get them trained and promptly assigned to a depot company or the stewards’ branch. Montford Point was producing two depot companies per month, and by fall 1943, after the activation of the first ammunition company, it would organize one ammunition company per month. The 1st Depot Company left California in April 1943. Depot company members were equipped with rifles, carbines, and submachine guns.
Ammunition companies consisted of 251 men, spread out over four platoons. The 1st Marine Ammunition Company was formed on October 1, 1943. Between October 1943 and September 1944, a total of sixty-three combat support companies were created at Montford Point, including one ammunition company and two depot companies each month. The last of twelve ammunition companies was activated on September 1, 1944. Men in the ammunition companies often served in battle and were armed with rifles and/or sidearms.
The addition of a second defense battalion (the 52nd) to absorb the new black Marines did not solve the problem, either. No one seemed to want the 51st or the 52nd. The Marine general who headed up U.S. forces in Samoa (Samoan Area Defense Force) explained why he was opposed to black Marines serving there. According to him, when Samoa’s light-skinned Polynesians, whom he considered “primitively romantic,” reproduced with whites, their offspring was “a very high class half caste.” Similarly, relations between Samoans and Chinese resulted in “a very desirable type.” The general insisted, however, that relations between black Marines and Samoans would inevitably produce “a very undesirable citizen.” The general encouraged the Marines to send the defense battalions to one of the Melanesian islands, where the black American servicemen would not only “cause no racial strain,” but might actually “raise the level of physical and mental standards” among the black islanders. The general (Marine Major General Charles Price) forwarded his recommendation to Marine Corps headquarters, and two black depot companies that arrived in Samoa during October 1943 were promptly sent elsewhere.
Edgar Huff and the rest of the drill instructors hurriedly put together a program to train drill instructors. Pulling out the cream of the crop among the recruits, they would send them to the school. After their crash course, they would take over a platoon or two under the watchful eyes of senior instructors. The apprenticeship program worked well, and soon the drill instructors and their assistants were taking the new recruits through an intense, eight-week training program.
The War Department used black men for jobs no one else wanted, at the same time showcasing Negro sports stars to inspire black patriotism. Huff’s favorite fighter, Joe Louis, was a case in point. The military printed up posters of Louis in uniform with a bayonet in his hands. The caption beneath the photo read, “We’re Going to Do Our Part.” Later it sent Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson on a tour of Army bases, where they participated in boxing exhibitions. The scheme, which was dubbed the “world’s greatest boxing show,” was hatched by Truman Gibson, the new civilian aide on Negro affairs to the secretary of war. The trip would provide a counterpoint to the country’s racial unrest. If the quiet-spoken Louis and the charismatic Robinson could not pick up black troop morale and foster harmony between the races, no one could. Army photographers, attached to the Signal Corps, followed the fighters everywhere.
Their first stop was Fort Devens in the liberal state of Massachusetts, once home to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, an all-black unit that had distinguished itself in the Civil War. In late 1943 another Negro outfit, the 366th Regiment, trained at Fort Devens. White and black soldiers alike attended the events. For one, nearly seven thousand soldiers turned out, shouting and whistling their appreciation. The shows were great successes, and Life magazine, reporting on the event, summoned all the gravity it could muster, calling the black boxers’ Fort Devens appearance “a quiet parable in racial good will.” Louis and Robinson went on to visit Fort Meade in Maryland, Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, and a host of other Army installations. The two fighters enjoyed entertaining the troops, putting a good face on race relations in the military. But when they were out of earshot of the officers and the press, they heard the real stories of black soldiers who, often performing nothing but the jobs white soldiers did not want, the garbage details, felt that the
Army had shortchanged them.
By late 1943 the War Department took the Louis-Robinson show to the South. Their first stop was Mississippi and then Fort Benning, Georgia. For Louis, long-forgotten memories came rushing back: his illiterate mother, only one generation removed from slavery, eking out a living in the Buckalew Mountains of eastern Alabama, where she raised a brood of children, moving from one tumbledown shack to the next. It was a South that made him uncomfortable. He wanted to be back in Harlem, strolling down 125th Street in the cool night air while jazz burst from the doors of the nightclubs. But Sergeant Joe Louis was doing his duty for his country, playing the part of the good soldier. It was a role that he believed in, until the traveling show arrived in Gadsden, Alabama, Edgar Huff’s childhood home, and the goodwill that Life magazine had celebrated butted up against the reality of life in the South.
Camp Sibert was a U.S. Army chemical training base located just outside of Gadsden. Because it was already packed to capacity, Louis and Robinson were set up in a house off the base, and often they had to ride to and from Camp Sibert by public bus. Although they were famous boxers, they had to wait for the one Negro bus like the other black soldiers. The white line moved faster because there were two buses serving the white side.
One day, Louis, hoping to grab a seat on a public bus, grew impatient and decided that he would call a cab. The phone booth, however, sat in the whites-only section. Unaccustomed to being treated like an ordinary black man, Louis did not give it a second thought, and walked over to the phone booth. Louis made his call, and as he stepped from the phone booth, Robinson saw a white MP, holding a billy club, approach the champ. Like the black boy who had ventured into the “white” swimming area at Chicago’s 29th Street Beach (the catalyst for the Chicago race riot), Louis had crossed the line separating white from black.
The Color of War Page 43