The Marines of Montford Point: America's First Black Marines

Chapter 5. Resisting Segregation in the Civilian World

Chapter 5 Resisting Segregation in the Civilian World I mpoverished, 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 in the timber industry, felling pines or working in the sawmills of the region, accounting for many of the only 275 persons classified in the census as wage earners. Many rural residents, black and white, supplemented their income, and their diets, with seafood harvested from the Atlantic and the county’s numerous tidal bays and creeks. Although schools for whites were vastly superior to those for blacks, many white county residents as well as black were barely literate; the county’s males averaged only 6.1 years of schooling , its females a slighter higher 6.9 years. Jacksonville, the county seat, had a population of 873 people in 1940. The county bureaucracy that labored in the courthouse and the lawyers who represented the county’s citizens in civil and criminal cases comprised much of the town’s population, along with a few professionals—doctors, pharmacists, teachers—and shop owners who served them. Blacks survived as domestics, tradesmen, day laborers, and, of course, teachers in the public schools, where they received a salary much lower than that paid white teachers. The community’s paved streets ended at the railroad tracks across which its black population lived, graphically illustrating the region’s segregationist code. While the construction of Camp Lejeune and Montford Point threatened to disrupt a centuries-old pattern of rural life, it promised undreamed-of prosperity for the county’s residents, which most were eager to embrace. What Montford Point did not threaten was the South’s, and Onslow County’s, dedication to segregation and the overt racism of the white population , the depth and intensity of which is hard to imagine in today’s world. The doctrine of segregation governed every aspect of life—employment, schools, churches, hospitals, restaurants, theaters, and transportation. Legislation compelled blacks to drink from separate water fountains and in court to swear on separate Bibles. The mores and folkways of the white citizenry rigidly enforced those aspects of racial segregation not incorporated in the South’s legal system. No aspect of daily life was overlooked in the white South’s relentless determination to keep the region’s black residents in a subservient position. Whites sought to deny African Americans their essential dignity as human beings, even in the most routine and ordinary events of everyday life. Thus they refused to address blacks by the titles of Mr. or Mrs., forced them to use the back entry to white homes, and required them to sit in the back seat of private automobiles just as they were legally required to sit in the Jim Crow back seats of buses and trains. For those African Americans who dared challenge the system, the threat of the lynch mob still loomed as the ultimate means of enforcing the segregationist code. Enlistment in the armed forces provided no protection, even from the possibility of lynch mob violence. Al Banker I was on a bus, going to Kinston, North Carolina, from Jacksonville . And the bus was loaded with Marines and a few civilians. And this Afro-American Marine was sitting in a seat on the bus, and this white lady who wanted to sit down, the Afro-American Marine being in the rear of the bus, where we all had to sit. The bus driver told the Marine he had to get up and give the lady the seat. And he refused. But then the bus driver had a few words, said a few words to this young Marine and went up to his front seat and came back with a wrench of some sort. Like he was going to hit the kid. And a few white Marines on the bus warned the bus driver not to touch the guy. Not to touch the Marine. Don’t put your hands on him. That...