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Chapter 1 Home Towns I n 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 were, on average, better educated and slightly older than their counterparts at the white boot camp at Parris Island. Many had some college education , although others had lacked an opportunity to continue their education beyond elementary school. A number of professionals, especially teachers, joined, as did some skilled tradesmen and laborers. Other recruits had participated in rotc, the Boy Scouts, or high school drill teams. They came from a variety of backgrounds, from the rural South and the big cities of the North, from small towns and country hamlets, from tenant farms and urban factories. Like their white counterparts, they were representative of the nation. Unlike their white counterparts, however—or at least to a different degree—they were, whether or not they sought to be, representatives of their race. Fred Ash I was born in Mississippi, a little town called Delisle. It’s a French town. I [lived] with mother, naturally, and a father, and my whole family lived mostly with my grandmother, my mother’s mother. We were very, very poor actually, but we were sort of wealthy, because we had livestock they call oxen. And at the age of twelve or thirteen, I think I was what I would say a professional ox driver. My parents had two yokes of oxen. Oxens was powerful animals, more so than mules and horses. And we’d use them for plowing. We’d use them for cleaning up new ground and whatever else that was necessary that they needed heavy equipment, like they didn’t have during that time, but they do have today. We use our oxens to do that. And salaries was very low. For a yoke of oxens and a driver, the salary was only about $2.00, $2.50 a day. My education was a little bit slim. During the time I was going to school, we only had the little rural school, one-room school. We only had about three months of schooling. And then they kept on raising it, raising it. They raised it up to six months, and I ended up, before I came in the Marine Corps, I dropped out in about the eighth grade; but after I got in the Marine Corps, I finished my education. I went on to complete the twelfth grade. Adner Batts I was born at Edgecombe, North Carolina, seventy-five years ago, this day [said in 2004]. I was born in a family of two boys, two girls. I lost my dad when I was a year old, I don’t remember him, and my mother, when I was seventeen. Where we lived was just on the inside of the Pender County line, on Highway 17, south, seventy-five yards south, just on the inside of the line. I was raised in a home with the five of us, and I was a seventh grade dropout. Lost my mother when I was seventeen years old. I attended school at a little place you call Edgecombe, well, of course, that was where the [train] station was, the trains was running, in those days. And the school room carried about six grades. And then when you got to seventh grade, you had to go to Rocky Point. And we had to get a bus to go to Rocky Point. Of course, all the communities, about five communities , which namely, Woodside, Topsail, Edgecombe, Brown Town, and others, had to purchase a bus. The state wouldn’t provide a bus because black people in that area wasn’t making enough money to purchase a bus, so the churches got together, purchased a bus. And then we started going to school at Rocky Point, so that’s where I dropped out of seventh grade at Rocky Point, in North Carolina. Herman Darden Jr. Well, I’m from Washington, D.C. I did my high...

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