After graduating from recruit training with the 51st Composite Defense Battalion, Huff joined its 155-mm gun battery as gun commander. As he explains in this edited excerpt from his 1972 oral history interview with Henry I. Shaw Jr. from the Marine Corps History and Museums Division, instead of shipping overseas with the battalion, he was selected to attend drill instructor school. Following completion of the course, in March 1943 he was assigned as drill instructor, and in November 1944 he became the field sergeant major of all recruit training at Montford Point Camp. From the end of World War II to May 1949 he was the noncommissioned officer-in-charge of recruit training there. After 13 years of service, in 1955 he was the first African-American to be promoted to Marine sergeant major.
Sergeant Major Huff’s personal decorations include three Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars with Combat “V,” three Navy Commendation Medals, the Navy Achievement Medal, and the Combat Action Ribbon.
On 2 May 1994 Sergeant Major Edgar R. Huff passed away at Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital.
Q: Sergeant Major Huff, would you give me a little of your background before you came into the Marine Corps and why you came into the Marine Corps.
A: Well, as you know, I’m from Gadsen, Alabama, and I was working at the Republic Steel Company as a crane rigger in the shipping department. During the morning of 25 June 1942, I read in the paper that if a Negro had the qualifications there was a possibility that he could be accepted into the Marine Corps. And on the 26th morning, I went down to the recruiting sergeant, which was in Gadsen. He felt that I would be an excellent candidate for the Marine Corps and asked me if I was really interested in joining. He told me that it was a brand-new outfit and this was to be the beginning of having Negroes in the Marine Corps. So I assured him that I wanted to be a Marine. I wanted to be a Marine because I had always heard that the Marine Corps was the toughest going, so I wanted to be a member of the best organization. And so, a couple of days after that, they took me to Birmingham, Alabama, to the senior office of recruiting, and I joined the Marine Corps.
Q: The Montford Point Camp had just started that summer, had it not?
A: Yes, the Montford Point Camp had just started receiving recruits, and they had formed somewhere in the neighborhood of the 1st Platoon to the 9th. I was at the beginning of forming of the 9th Platoon and started training about a week after I arrived at Montford Point Camp, and during that week we were cleaning the camp and preparing it to receive additional recruits. And training was really strenuous work. At that time the Marine Corps was all segregated. We had white officers and white staff NCOs who gave us our boot camp training.
Q: Were these, for the most part, experienced NCOs?
A: Oh yes, they were good instructors, very rigid type individuals, and at the time I thought it was a hell of a damn thing the way they operated and the way they were giving instructions, but as I went through my training I saw that what they were doing was, in most cases, necessary, except some harassing that even today I feel was unnecessary.
Q: Were there any incidents in boot camp that were really untoward, or was it just the normal harassment of boots?
A: Well, I remember very well about the second day we were in training my drill instructor, his name was Corporal Schuck, broke us out one night and he told us we might as well pack up our bags and leave quietly because there had not been any Negroes in the Marine Corps for so many years, and what ever made you people feel that you can be Marines. He said, “If you want to escape this thing the best thing to do is to just leave quietly and shove the hell on off home.” And in that case quite a few of the members of my platoon started packing their gear . . . getting ready to leave.
And so I remember a friend of mine, he came from Birmingham, his name was Cooper. And so Cooper and I got together and we told them don’t nobody leave, we said that’s what they want us to do. I explained to them that nobody was going to drive me from nowhere. If they [whites] could be Marines I thought I could too, and they could too, and I finally convinced them not to leave. And so the next morning when the DI came, he broke us out, we fell out, he went through and counted noses, about twice, three times, and said: “Well, I see you are still here. I’m going to make you wish you had never joined this damn Marine Corps.” And so we started training that day. And I assure you, it was training.
Q: You spent three weeks on the rifle range?
A: No, it was one week actually on the rifle range. We had preliminary marksmanship training right there at Montford Point Camp, and then we also had a week of firing the small-bore range, and then we went out to the Camp Lejeune rifle range. At that time there were no quarters at the rifle range for Negro troops, only white troops, and so we would commute back and forth. Leave early in the morning, come back late in the evening. Later we built a Negro camp, which was named Stone Bay. That was for Negro troops to live in while out at the range.
Q: How many men were at Montford Point at this time?
A: It was approximately 1,250.
Q: I am quite interested in how you got your first assignment after boot camp and how you moved from that assignment into being a drill instructor.
A: When I came off the range it was December 1942. I was in a seacoast artillery 155-mm gun battery. I was gun captain in that battery. I had three guns. My number 1 gun, I named this weapon Zombie.
Q: What’s the significance of Zombie?
A: To me it was something just out of this world—it was the word. It was my battery, my equipment, and my gun. I was told by the officer in charge that I could name it what I wanted to, so I named my number 1 gun Zombie. My second gun, I named it Lena Horne, and my third gun was Joe Lewis. The names were painted in large letters on the tubes. And at that time we had never fired these weapons. We would always have gun drill, day in and day out. We waited for the day when we would get a chance to fire these monsters. Our day finally came. We went out to Onslow Beach to fire these weapons. As the gun captain at that time I was the one who pulled the lanyard on these weapons. And so when the target first appeared . . .
Q: What was the target, Sergeant Major?
A: It was some type of target they were pulling behind a small boat quite some miles out to sea. And at the first shot, the first salvo that went out of that weapon fired by Negro Marines, I pulled the lanyard, fired, and hit the target, and tore the target up. They had to go back to Morehead City and get another target before we could continue our practice.
Q: This was a three-gun salvo, right?
A: No, one gun. Zombie is the gun that I fired.
Q: This was the gun you were telling me before on which now Sergeant Major [Giblert] Johnson was the gun pointer?
A: Yes, Sergeant Major Johnson was my gun pointer. He had quite some time in the Army and the Navy and of course he was a steward attendant when he came into the Marine Corps. I was a PFC at the time and he was my gun pointer, as a private. And later on I recommended now Sergeant Major Johnson for PFC.
Q: I notice that the men that proved themselves did move up, at least to the junior NCO ranks, rather rapidly. What was the purpose of this rather rapid promotion?
A: If the officers and the staff NCOs that we had, who were all white at that time, felt that a man could be NCO material they would recommend him and try to elevate him as soon as possible. What they were trying to do was get as many Negro noncoms as they could where they could handle themselves and release the white instructors.
Q: When did you report to what was now Company A in the Recruit Depot Battalion to be a drill instructor? After you made corporal?
A: I was still a PFC. At that time the 51st Composite Defense Battalion was in preparation to get ready to go overseas and the Marines were looking for potential drill instructors to train recruits. There was going to be a large influx of people coming in, it was going to be a hell of a lot of them, and so they wanted to get some people they could send to DI school to train them. I wanted to go with the 51st, I wanted to go with my guns, but they wouldn’t let me. They transferred me from the 51st Composite Defense Battalion to Recruit Depot, and so I went to school to become a drill instructor. One platoon was about half through training—the 16th Platoon. They were transferring the white instructors overseas, and so when this platoon’s instructor was transferred I was made the drill instructor.
Q: How large was the platoon, Sergeant Major?
A: It was approximately 25 or 30 people. Now, a platoon would start out say with 40 or 45 people. On the completion of training they would drop somewhere in the neighborhood of 10–15 people. The 16th Platoon started off with approximately 40 people.
Q: Excuse me, when you say they dropped them, do you mean they dropped them out of the Marine Corps or they took them off other duties?
A: Some went over the hill and then you had some misfits, and so forth and on, and some in the hospital due to their training, because it was a very rigid training. It was almost impossible to survive, and if you could get through training at Montford Point Camp you could go through hell singing a song.
Q: Sergeant Major, you mentioned that you were the third man out the gate the first time the Negro Marines went on liberty in Jacksonville. What was liberty like in Jacksonville, in those days?
A: We all just straggled out the gate. I imagine it was somewhere in the neighborhood of about 200 or 300 of us walking to Jacksonville down the middle of the street, walking to the bus station, just casually walking, shooting the breeze. When the merchants saw us coming, they closed the doors and the ticket agent closed up the bus station; they wouldn’t let us into any of the public places, and they wouldn’t let none of us get on the bus. So Grinstead, he called Colonel Samuel S. Woods.
Q: He was commanding officer at Montford Point Camp?
A: He was the commanding officer. He was the great white father of everybody. And I believe to this day every black Marine who has ever known Colonel Samuel S. Woods loves him. He treated us like Marines, and the bad treatment that we got, I’m sure he didn’t know anything about it, because he was certainly a gentleman. So the colonel said, “Just hold tight, I’ll be there in a few minutes.” When the colonel got there he called all of us together there at the bus station and told us to just take it easy, don’t worry about it, that he would get our own trucks and dispatch them out to Kinston and to Wilmington and New Bern. And he did.
Q: Did that become a steady practice or did they open up the buses and allow you on?
A: No, that was the only incident as far as not allowing us to ride the bus, because that following Monday there was some negotiation between the city lords and the camp commander. And he [Woods] made arrangements that we could ride the bus. However, you know North Carolina is a southern place and at that time any time a Negro gets on the bus he had to ride in the back seats. And so this is where we would ride, in the back seats. And they had only so many seats back there for the Negroes to sit down, so quite naturally you would have to stand up to be able to go to these places.
Q: I notice, Sergeant Major, that you made sergeant on 17 April 1943. How many of the drill instructors and the NCOs in the 51st and other units on board the base were black Marines then?
A: Oh, it was quite a few. I don’t remember now, but it got up in the thousands at that time.
Q: Were the majority of the NCOs, the junior NCOs, Negro Marines?
A: Well, it was only a few at the time who made sergeant, it was only about four or five, five or six, sergeants. When I made sergeant, I remember very well, the colonel called me in and gave me my sergeant warrant and told me to take off and go on liberty and wet down my stripes. I was really proud of those three stripes. And so I went to town, I went up to Jacksonville and went to a carnival that they had there and bought a bag of popcorn. I was standing on a corner, waiting to cross the street, I looked around and six white Marines had circled me completely.
One of them was a first lieutenant, there were a couple of sergeants, and the rest of them were just PFCs and privates; they were wearing the Guadalcanal patch. That was the first time I ever saw a patch in the Marine Corps, that’s why I remember it so well. And this lieutenant, he looked up at me and said, “Nigger, who gave you them stripes?” Well, I was astounded to hear that coming from an officer, cause hell, you never seen a lieutenant where I had been training, and we had been always taught an officer was just like Lord God Almighty. And to hear a Marine officer say something like that, hell, it startled me, I just didn’t know what to say. So, he asked me another time, “Nigger, I’m talking to you, who gave you them stripes?” I said that time, “Your mother gave them to me.” “I’ll pull them off then,” he said.
He reached up to pull my stripes off my sleeve, and I caught him by his hand and shoulder and broke his arm right across of my leg. At that time a couple of sergeants walked up and struck at me and I hit them. I broke two sergeants’ jaws, and the other two, I just broke their ribs, and I took this little small one and just kicked the hell out of him.
I went on about my business and when I got back to camp, sometime Sunday night, went in and showered up and so forth. Next morning, I was out on the drill field training my platoon, and the officer in charge of training came over, hollered, said, “Huff, come here.” I stopped my platoon, turned it over to my assistant DI, and I walked up and saluted, “Yes, sir.”
He looked at me like he saw a ghost, and I asked him what was wrong with him. He said: “Ain’t nothing wrong with you?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “Well, good God Almighty, the colonel wants to see you now, he said they got people lined up and down there you been fighting. I know it couldn’t have been you.” I said, “Oh, yes, it was me.” He said: “But, there were six people you were fighting? And there’s nothing wrong with you?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “Well, let’s go.” We went on down. And so when I walked in the passageway I saw these six people all lined up there with their arms in slings and bandaged, and I recognized them as being the same people that I had this fracas with downtown.
When I walked in [Sergeant Gilbert] Johnson grabbed me and said, “Lord God, boy, what have you been in now?” I said, “I haven’t been in nothing.” He said, “Well, the colonel wants to see you right now.” So I walked in and I said, “Sergeant Huff reporting as ordered, sir.” The colonel got up, walked from behind his desk came round and looked all around me and went back and sat down. He said, “Huff, did you have some trouble, Friday?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said: “I’ve already talked to these other people out there and they said you are the man that beat them up. Just what were you using?” I said, “That’s all I had, just my hand.” He said, “Well, they say you must have been using brass knuckles.” I said, “No, sir.” In fact at that time I never saw a pair of brass knuckles. I didn’t even know what the hell he was talking about.
And so the colonel said, “What happened?” After I told him, he called my brother-in-law, Sergeant Johnson, and said he wanted all the black Marines in the theater immediately, he wanted to talk to them. And he told me, “Well, I’ll tell you this now, Huff, I don’t want you starting no fights, but I’m happy and glad that I do have a sergeant that can whip six people.” Then he got up and walked out into the hall and he told them six white people out there, five people and the officer, “You’ve heard right here what happened and there’s no doubt in my mind that it did happen,” he said. “I’ll let you now to go back and tell the rest of them damn people they better let my boys alone because we just whipped six of you now, one of them did. Get off this post.”
The colonel went down to the theater and he got up on the stage and told them about this incident and how to be careful and how to avoid it and so forth and on, but he don’t expect for them to come like whipped dogs back on the base by being beat up by them Hadnot Point Marines. At that time we didn’t call them white Marines, we called them Hadnot Point Marines.
Q: I noticed in some pictures of the Montford Point Camp that you apparently had an extensive period of unarmed combat and bayonet instructions.
A: Yes, we had all that bayonet training and so forth; in some instances we’ve had Colonel [Anthony J. Drexel] Biddle come down and give us instructions. Later we got a fine Marine in, his name was Tony Ghazlo, and he was a judo expert.
Q: What would you estimate was the breakdown in, say northerners and southerners among the Negro Marines at Montford Point? Were there more southerners than northerners?
A: Yes, I’d say there was. I’ll tell you why, because we got a hell of a lot of these Negro Marines out of Louisiana, a lot of them out of Texas, we got a lot of them out of Alabama, we didn’t get too many Negroes out of North Carolina, we got quite a few out of South Carolina, we didn’t get too many out of Virginia.
Q: I notice in one place, at least initially, there were no facilities for, and they evidently were not prepared to recruit, any Negro Marines on the West Coast, but did you eventually then get some Marines from California?
A: Yes, ’cross country all the way from Los Angeles and San Francisco. Montford Point Camp was the home of all the Negro Marines. It was the grinding mill for the Marines.
‘Hashmark’ Johnson’s Lasting Legacy
Standing tall alongside Edgar Huff in the pantheon of legendary Montford Point Marines is Sergeant Major Gilbert H. Johnson. The two friends had much in common: They originally hailed from Alabama, were two of the Marines’ first African-American drill sergeants, and were the only blacks in the Corps to serve as sergeant majors during World War II. Moreover, after marrying twin sisters they became brothers-in-law.
But while Huff was 22 years old when he first arrived at Montford Point, Johnson joined the Marines at the ripe old age of 36. Nineteen years earlier he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and served two three-year enlistments before being honorably discharged. In 1933 he again enlisted, this time in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a mess attendant. In 1941 he transferred to the regular Navy, and the next year received permission to resign from that service in order to reenlist as a Marine Corps private.
During boot-camp training at Montford Point, Johnson became his platoon’s assistant drill instructor before taking charge of the unit. The three service stripes on his uniform coast sleeve soon earned him the nickname “Hashmark.” He stayed at the camp, training new recruits and earning his corporal stripes after having taken several platoons through the course of instruction. Johnson climbed the NCO ranks, becoming sergeant major of Montford Point Camp in January 1945.
Serving on Guam as sergeant major of the 52d Defense Battalion, Johnson saw action in the closing months of the war after requesting that the African-American battalion’s Marines be allowed to conduct combat patrols. The sergeant major personally led 25 sorties against Japanese troops remaining on the island. He later again served at Montford Point and then at the Earle, New Jersey, Naval Ammunition Depot before deploying to Korea in November 1951. During the Korean War, he served in various roles including as a first sergeant in the 1st Shore Landing Battalion. After the war, he returned stateside and mainly held various supervisory administrative positions before retiring from the Corps in 1955.
Sergeant Major Johnson passed away on 5 August 1972, and two years later Montford Point, which had been deactivated in September 1949, was renamed Camp Gilbert H. Johnson. It is currently home to the Marine Corps Combat Support Schools.