African Americans Fought for Freedom at Home and Abroad during World War II | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (2024)

“The [Japanese] are very clever fighters. Our boys are learning them, but they have taken the lives of several of my friends. Life is cheap and death is common but we’re slowly growing used to it.”

Cpl. Alex Hamilton

This willingness on the part of AfricanAmerican soldiers to sacrifice their lives for a country that treated them as second-class citizens is remarkable. Various accounts relate how German prisoners of war could enter facilities reserved for white Americans that black servicemen could not patronize.

When the US Marine Corps began recruiting a contingent of black Marines in June 1942, men from across the country flocked to enlist. These Marines trained at Montford Point, North Carolina. Although the “Montford Point Marines” excelled at gunnery and drill, they too faced the same segregation and hostility as men and women in the other branches. The Marine Corps Commandant, Major General Thomas Holcomb, resented being forced to accept African Americans into the Corps, and unlike the Army, the Marine Corps did not permit any Black men to become officers until November 1945.

In May 1943, Private R. J. Wood was even arrested for impersonating a Marine when he traveled home on leave to Cleveland, Ohio. The police officers did not know AfricanAmerican Marines existed. In North Carolina, a policeman slapped Edgar Cole‘s official orders out of his hand and told Cole that he was not allowed to wait on the street corner for a Marine driver to pick him up and take him to Montford Point. Despite the racismblack Marines encountered, they distinguished themselves in the battles of Peleliu, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. By 1944, more than 18,000 Marines had trained at Montford Point and 12,000 were stationed overseas.

Even when AfricanAmericans were denied the opportunity to serve in combat roles, they still found ways to distinguish themselves. Doris “Dorie” Miller was a steward aboard the USS West Virginia during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Although he had never been trained on the ship’s weapons, he manned a machine gun during the attack and carried wounded sailors to safety. For his actions, Miller became the first AfricanAmerican to receive the Navy Cross. Following Dorie’s actions and lobbying from civil rights groups, the US Navy increasingly sent Black sailors to sea in combat roles. On March 20, 1944, the Navy commissioned the destroyer escort USS Mason, the first ship to have a predominantly Black crew.

Other AfricanAmericans serving in Construction Battalions behind the lines volunteered for extremely hazardous duty as stretcher bearers in several Pacific campaigns. Back in the United States, AfricanAmerican men and women worked in defense plants that built the ships and planes of the most powerful Navy and Air Force in the world.

The achievements of AfricanAmericans during the war provided valuable evidence that civil rights activists used in their demands for equality. Though President Harry S. Truman ordered the US military to desegregate entirely in 1948, AfricanAmericans’ fight for equal civil rights was far from over.

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