PFCs Willie Kanaday, Eugene Hill, and Joe Alexander—Marines trained at a segregated base—take a break during the fight for Iwo Jima. What their generation endured gave birth to a great legacy.
A few weeks after his 18th birthday, in November of 1944, Ellis Cunningham walked into a recruiting office in Charleston, South Carolina, and told the officer he wanted to fight, to defend his country, to join the Army, and serve overseas.
Before World War II, the U.S. military had been a mostly segregated world, and even after Pearl Harbor and the first tentative steps toward integration, the chance that an African American teen like Cunningham would see combat were slim. Blacks, if they were accepted at all by the military branches, had typically been assigned to support roles-in the kitchen, in the supply corps, as drivers, and stewards.
A few days later, he waited in line with a few dozen other newly recruited sailors, about to board a bus headed to a naval training base in the Midwest, when a Marine Corps officer approached Cunningham's superior and said, "I need thirty-two volunteers."
"Take what you need," the petty officer replied. The Marine walked down the line, pointing and saying, "You, you, you, you . . ."
Said Cunningham, "I was one of the you's." He didn't learn until four the next morning, when his bus pulled up at a training camp called Montford Point, adjacent to Camp Lejeune in eastern North Carolina, that he had "volunteered" to become a Marine.
At the start of World War II, the Army and Navy had already begun integrating minorities into their ranks, but the Marine Corps lagged behind. In fact, Commandant Thomas Holcomb said in 1941 that he'd rather have 5,000 white Marines than 250,000 blacks, and often suggested that African Americans seek military service in the Army.
Such attitudes began to change, often by fiat, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1941 signed Executive Order No. 8802, which prohibited employment discrimination. Initially aimed at preventing discriminatory hiring among defense contractors, the order led to broader integration in the military. For the lily-white Marines, the full effect of Roosevelt's action came a year later, when Navy Secretary Frank Knox was ordered to begin recruiting blacks into the Corps, the Navy, and the Coast Guard.
Next to the Marine Corps' new base along the New River outside Jacksonville, North Carolina-soon to be named Camp Lejeune-a segregated training base for the incoming African American recruits was created in mid-1942, on a spit of land called Montford Point.
The first recruit to arrive was 18-year-old Howard P. Perry, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was soon joined by 119 others who began basic training in September. Conditions were less than hospitable. Prefab huts used as barracks were often filled beyond capacity. Those buildings and other ones-leftovers from an earlier Civilian Conservation Corps unit-were decrepit. The hot and humid waterside grounds were infested with mosquitoes and poisonous snakes. All officers and drill instructors were white, and more than a few seemed to feel their duty wasn't to train the new recruits, but to work them so hard they'd drop out. The black Marines withstood racist name-calling and withering physical abuse.
"Many of the white officers looked upon being assigned there as punishment-and they took it out on the guys," said Jack McDowell, who trained at Montford Point in 1945 and served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. During a break from the events of the annual Montford Point Marine Association convention in Chicago this July, McDowell said some drill instructors seemed determined to break the black recruits, to prove they didn't deserve to wear the Globe and Anchor. "But the more crap they threw at these guys, the tougher they got," he said.
Racial slurs were common, as were the implied insults. For example, a visiting general once referred to the recruits as "you people." And, instead of transporting the African Americans to the rifle range by bus, the white officers decided to make the trip in a rusty barge along the New River. "I guess the people in town were afraid of blacks with weapons," said Turner G. Blount, a Montford Point alumnus who is now a city councilman in Jacksonville. During his time at Montford Point, Jacksonville was so segregated that blacks would be arrested just for walking in the white part of town.
When Ellis Cunningham arrived at Montford Point in early 1945, thousands of blacks had already been trained and were now serving overseas. The first black drill sergeants had been assigned to the base, including the legendary Gilbert "Hashmark" Johnson, who had previously served in the Army and Navy, and who became a stern father figure to thousands of Montford Point Marines. (Today, Montford Point is called Camp Johnson.).
By the end of World War II nearly 20,000 African Americans would pass through Montford Point, with more than 12,000 of them serving overseas, primarily in the Pacific. Another 3,000 would be trained at Montford Point after the war. Most of the enlistees were from the South. Although some of the men were assigned to the 51st and 52nd Defense Battalions, most were assigned non-combat duties, serving with depot and ammunition companies, or as stewards or supply personnel. But as Cunningham and many other black Marines discovered-on Iwo Jima, Saipan, Guam, Okinawa, Tinian, and Peleliu-non-combat most certainly did not mean combat-free.
Joe Geeter believes that men like Cunningham, who slowly broke the color barrier in the military, should be recognized as civil rights legends. But he feels there's been a lack of historical attention focused on the Montford Point Marines. So when Geeter recently learned that actor/director Clint Eastwood was making a film about the 1945 invasion of Iwo Jima-based on the best-selling book, Flags of Our Fathers-he immediately fired off a letter. In it, he urged Eastwood to correct the mistakes of previous cinematic depictions of World War II, in which all troops' faces were white.
Geeter thinks Americans too easily forget that the military, like society, was largely and sometimes defiantly segregated at the time of Pearl Harbor. Over the years, scholars and historians have acknowledged the role black troops played in battle, including the Revolutionary War (despite a temporary ban by George Washington) and World War I. And entire films have focused on the valor of black troops in the Civil War ("Glory") and the combat actions of the first black fighter pilots in World War II ("The Tuskegee Airmen"). In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of D-Day on Iwo Jima, President Bill Clinton acknowledged the "African American Montford Point Marines who fought off the last desperate attack by the enemy." But historical gaps loom, and the legacy of the Montford Point Marines today remains largely overlooked.
That's why Geeter writes letters to filmmakers, as he did after seeing a lack of black faces in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." Geeter said he knows black soldiers fought at Normandy and elsewhere in Europe because his grandfather was one of them.
At the convention in Chicago this past summer, Geeter-a retired master gunnery sergeant from Philadelphia-was elected president of the Montford Point Marine Association. The nonprofit veterans' organization was created in 1965 to keep alive the legacy of the first African American Marines. The association now has thousands of members, some from other branches of the military. But as the original Montford Point graduates age and pass on, there are fewer men like Cunningham around to tell the story of integrating the Corps.
"They paved the way for blacks in the Marine Corps," said Barnett Person, who was trained at Montford Point in 1946 and went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam. "Montford Point was the place where they proved what had to be done. That was the turning point, and it ushered in a new era."
After eight weeks of basic training at Montford Point in 1945, followed by advanced training in California, Ellis Cunningham was shipped to Hawaii, where he spent long days repacking and stacking ammunition to prepare for combat in the South Pacific.
A month later, in February, his ammo company and three depot companies (more than 500 black Marines in all) landed on the black sand shores of Iwo Jima to provide ammunition for the attacking 3d, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions. It was the first time many of the white Marines had seen black faces among them, but men like Cunningham quickly earned the respect of their fellow Leathernecks.
Under heavy fire from the Japanese, the ammo and depot companies unloaded ammunition from ship to shore, driving trucks and bulldozers across the beach through a fusillade of bullets and shells. Cunningham helped dig embankments behind which he'd stack the ammo; he then helped deliver ammo to infantry units. Two of Cunningham's comrades earned Bronze Stars for their heroic actions during those first few days on Iwo Jima. Others on Guam, Saipan, Peleliu-despite not being slated for direct confrontation with the enemy-killed many Japanese soldiers and earned praise from their peers and superiors. The new Commandant, Lt. Gen. Alexander Vandergrift, said, "Negro Marines are no longer on trial. They are Marines, period."
Cunningham remained on Iwo Jima until April, returned briefly to Hawaii, and then sailed back to Japan to join the fleet entering Tokyo Bay after the surrender.
In 1948, President Harry Truman issued another executive order, No. 9981, to more permanently enforce equality of treatment and opportunity in all of the armed forces, which in time led to the end of racial segregation in the military.
Still, it had been a difficult start toward integration, and Cunningham always felt some resistance from his superior officers. "They just didn't want to do it," he said.
Echoing the sentiments of other Montford Point alumni, he felt scrutinized by white officers from the moment he arrived. It forced him to learn every job, every drill and duty perfectly, so no one could question him. The experience also gave him thick skin. In September of 1950, Cunningham joined the first Marine infantry units in Korea, but his commanding officers initially kept sending him back to headquarters, saying, "We have no need of this man." He finally was assigned to a company whose skipper put him in charge of a six-man detachment assigned to run telephone lines to another unit. On returning from that mission, on the outskirts of Seoul, he was wounded in the thigh and spent 14 months in the hospital. He returned to duty and later served in Vietnam, retiring as a first sergeant after thirty years of service.
Montford Point was closed in 1949, the first major step in bringing segregated training to an end. Over the years, Cunningham and other alumni have returned to the renamed Camp Johnson, to walk around the flat and dusty grounds, to revisit the days when they were "colored Marines." A small museum is now housed in the old dining hall. Plans are afoot to expand the museum and create a Montford Point Marines memorial park. The camp is now home to the Marine Corps' Combat Service Support School, a training facility for such specialties as field logistics and combat medicine.
Jack McDowell said there remains a bond among black Marines that would be hard for others to understand. They all share stories of racism-getting called names, being openly defied by white Marines of inferior rank, getting into fistfights to defend themselves. McDowell's bond with Montford Point goes even deeper, since it was another Montford Point man-Barnett Person-whom he credits with saving his life in Vietnam.
In 1967, McDowell was serving with the 3d Marine Division near the DMZ when his company was overrun. Two officers were killed, and the men were looking for an escape route. Suddenly, through the tall grass, came a blood-covered tank, atop which sat Person, who led McDowell's company out of the bush and toward safety, even after two rocket-propelled grenades struck the tank, killing Person's gunner and driver and wounding Person. McDowell was hit in the leg with an incendiary round and crawled into the grass, where he expected he would die. He was later found and evacuated, but his leg was amputated. Still, he credits Person with rescuing him and the others. McDowell would have been happy to see anyone atop that tank that day, but it was especially gratifying to be led to safety by a fellow Montford Point alum. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here today," McDowell said. "He saved our whole company."
Later that year, Person was awarded the Silver Star for his battlefield gallantry.