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...

In May 1942 Major General Thomas Holcomb, Commandant of the Marine Corps, ordered the Corps’s Southern, Eastern, and Central Recruiting Divisions to begin recruiting African Americans on June 1. The Southern Division was to supply approximately half of the initial 900 recruits envisioned, the other two divisions about 200 men each. Given the opportunity, young men, and some no longer young, responded. The Corps instructed recruiters to enlist only those with the skills needed to prepare Montford Point, still very much under construction, for the training of future recruits. As a result, the initial recruits who trained at Montford Point...

The men of Montford Point joined the Corps for reasons as varied as their backgrounds and, for the most part, for reasons similar to those of white recruits. Some responded to the Marines’ reputation as a fighting service, hoping to become one of a band of fierce warriors, a modern gladiator. Some succumbed to the allure of adventure, to the opportunity to travel to exotic places. For others, the romance of serving in the Corps was symbolized by the appeal of the famous dress blue uniform and the impact they hoped it would have upon members of the opposite sex....

Most of the young men who came to Montford Point boarded a train to begin the journey that would take them into the service of their country. The rail lines funneled them to the East Coast, deep into the segregated South, to railway stations in such small eastern North Carolina towns as Wilmington and Rocky Mount. There they detrained to await a bus to carry them the final few miles to Jacksonville and Montford Point.

For those who lived in the South it was merely a journey through a segregated society they understood all too well. From childhood they had...

While the construction of Camp Lejeune began in 1941, it was not until April 1942 that construction began at Montford Point, which was located on a small peninsula jutting out into the New River. Separated from Montford Point by a branch of the New River, the much larger Camp Lejeune extended southeastward to the Atlantic, providing miles of beach for amphibious landing training exercises.

The segregated camps shared the coastal environment of southeastern North Carolina. The land stretched inland from the Atlantic coast in an unrelentingly flat plain interlaced by brackish creeks flowing into the New River, which drained the...

Impoverished, relatively isolated, and completely segregated, Onslow County was representative of many rural southern counties in the 1940s. According to the 1940 census, it contained not a single urban area, defined as a community of a thousand people. Of the county’s 17,939 residents, the majority, 13,077, were white. The 1940 census classified 13,603 of the county’s residents as farmers, and land ownership patterns revealed the racism that pervaded the region. Whites owned 1,822 of the county’s farms; blacks owned 366. Large numbers of both whites and blacks labored as tenants on tobacco and cotton farms. Others eked out a living...

It was not just in the South that Montford Point Marines and all African Americans faced racial discrimination; segregation reflected the racial attitudes and beliefs of the entire nation’s white population. For the entire time black recruits trained at Montford Point, segregation was the of-ficial policy of the Corps, and it was the law of the United States. American armed forces remained segregated after World War II, until July 26, 1948, when President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, finally ending segregation within the military. The implementation of Truman’s executive order proceeded gradually, however. The deactivation of Montford Point as...

For the men trained at Montford Point, just as for white Marines trained at Parris Island, engaging the enemy in combat was the ultimate goal. They understood the dangers of combat, and feared combat, but feared even more the possibility that racism would deny them the opportunity to experience it, a fear that was well grounded. Like the combat troops of any culture, they held courage on the field of battle as perhaps the ultimate virtue. And while proving one’s personal courage was important to them, even more important was the need to prove that African Americans were as capable...

The experiences of the men who trained at Montford Point and served in Korea and Vietnam were nothing like those of the Montford Point veterans of World War II. Nearly 20,000 black Marines had served in World War II, but at the outbreak of the Korean War, less than 1,500 African Americans served in the Corps, nearly a third of whom served in the Stewards Branch. Although combat-trained black Marines represented only a tiny fraction of the Corps’s manpower, it was they who integrated the Corps at unit level as the Corps used the Korean War to implement President Truman’s...

For the men of Montford Point, the memories of their experiences together are deeply personal, powerful, and unforgettable. Montford Point shaped them into a unique brotherhood, men who share and identify with the Marines’ reputation as the nation’s mythic warriors. They are proud of their service in three wars. They understand the significance of their victory over racism and the price they paid to achieve it. They know that what they endured made possible a career in the Marine Corps for future generations of African Americans and helped bring an end to segregation in the United States. Whether they remained...

The brief biographies that follow were compiled primarily from interviews recorded on video tape between 2001 and 2005 for a documentary on the Montford Point Marines. The questions asked were designed to explore the subjects’ experiences as Marines, not their lives after leaving the Corps, although each interviewee was asked to speak about his postservice career. Some responded in considerable detail; others said practically nothing. Since the project and the interview questions focused on the Montford Pointers’ experience as Marines, no further effort was made to persuade the subjects to provide details about their lives after leaving the Corps. Some...