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By Corporal Paul Steinberg, U.S. Marine Corps
It was the winter of 1942-43, and John Hamlin saw one of his Brooklyn, New York, schoolmates in a sharp new uniform—Marine Corps. “You don’t want to get involved in this outfit,” his friend cautioned, “they’re tough.”
Bristling at the not-so-subtle challenge, Hamlin went down to the recruiting office and announced his intention to be a Marine. “He looked like a recruiting poster and was about six feet tall,” he recalls of the recruiting officer. “He drew himself up to his full height, looked down at me, and asked, ‘What makes you think you’re good enough?’ ”
“What do you mean, I’m not good enough!” Hamlin shot back immediately.
The sergeant put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You’ll do.”
John Hamlin was one of the first blacks in the U.S. Marine Corps. Leonard Fitchett, who served at Montford Point (at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina) in 1942, recalls that black Marines were so rare they were sometimes detained by police and charged with impersonating Marines. In the archives of the Montford Point Marines Associa- hon, there are photographs of some recruit platoons, but none of Fitchett’s. “They didn’t take official photographs °f the first platoons; they intended to wash us out,” says Pitched. “It wasn’t until a few platoons had become Marines that they realized we weren’t going to go away.” One evening as the black recruits were gathered in a theater, a Marine jumped onstage and shouted, “Why don’t you all just go over the hill? Just go home. Nobody "Ml care, nobody will come looking for you. Just go!” lt “It was then that I decided to stay,” says Fitchett.
And everything we got from that point on was by perse- prance and by accident. Even in war, they put us where lhey didn’t think there would be any fighting. When the hooting started, we were heroes by accident.”
Hamlin remembers the day a young first sergeant gave
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the order to “Fall the jigaboos out.”
With two other Marines who witnessed the incident, Hamlin went to their senior, a warrant officer. The gunner summoned the first sergeant, who admitted to the truth of the story. “These are Marines,” the gunner told him. “You will refer to them that way from now on.”
“But I’ve called them jigaboos all my life,” the first sergeant protested.
“Not in my unit. Pack your seabag.” The first sergeant was gone before the day’s end.
As Hamlin tells this story, his eyes focus on his listener and there is a soft but unmistakable intensity in his voice. “For the first time, I thought there might be hope for change in the Marine Corps; hope for changing attitudes of bigotry.”
In the United States of World War II, transportation was sometimes difficult under the best of circumstances, and segregated facilities made it even more so for blacks. While on liberty in Kinston, for example, blacks began lining up early for the buses back to Montford Point. Whites had priority on the bus, and when the blacks had filled an arbitrary quota at the back of the bus, the driver could refuse to let any more on. Whenever that happened, the Montford Point Marines got punished for being late returning from liberty.
Trains were segregated into white and black cars. The fact that some blacks were light-skinned and some Caucasians dark-skinned sometimes made it difficult to tell who belonged in which cars. On one such train, the seating was filled in the white cars and one man decided he’d rather sit in a black car than stand in a white one. The conductor, aghast, demanded, “Why are you in the Jim Crow car?”
“I’m a Negro.” The response hung in the air of the silent car. Whispered conferences between members of the train crew failed to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Finally, in exasperation, the conductor decided to leave the passenger in his seat.
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But not all such problems were resolved so easily. William Thomas Gourdine grew up in Jersey City. A member of the Third Platoon, he “wanted to be part of the best. I saw Halls of Montezuma." These days, he laughs as he tells his story.
Gourdine, who was to serve for 21 months in the South Pacific, recalls meeting a white friend in New York’s Penn Station. After they rode together to Washington, D.C., Gourdine was told that he would have to move to a black car for the rest of the trip. At Montford Point, he tried to visit his friend at Hadnot Point, in the “white” part of Camp Lejeune. This caused trouble, so his friend tried visiting Montford Point.
“But the guys would ask me why I was having someone from Hadnot Point visit when the whites were kicking our ass out in town. It was embarrassing,” Gourdine concluded. The visits stopped.
Of the small band of men who braved bullets and bigotry, a few remained on active duty after the war, but most went on to achieve success in the civilian world far beyond what might have been expected, given the prejudice of the
These black World War II Marines were bound for combat in the Pacific, but were not destined to serve in frontline units. They could only be heroes by accident—or could they?
times. The unique nature of the Montford Point Marines was in their ability to succeed in uncharted waters as well as to serve as role models for persons of all races—at a time when racism was not only accepted, it was often openly encouraged.
Even if the Montford Point Marines had never done anything more than what they did at Montford Point, they would still be worthy of recognition: their actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the great fighting force they became a part of. And Leonard Fitchett was wrong: Heroes are not made by accident.
Corporal Steinberg has written for Navy Times and various Marine Corps base newspapers. This article won the 1987 Camp Lejeune Black History Month essay contest, Junior Enlisted Category.
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Proceedings / January
1992