This Day in Black History: The Marine Corps Integrates

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

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Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

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June 25, 2012

From the African American Registry

The Montford Point Marines, ca. May 1943. They were among the first Black Marines. (National Archives)

On this date in 1941, the Marine Corps formally integrated. This was a result of President Roosevelt signing Executive Order 8802 months before Pearl Harbor.

FDR officially opened to Blacks one of America’s most celebrated all-white strongholds. In previous years, the Truman order and the Fahy Committee could not budge the services segregation. It was at the urging of his wife, Eleanor, and threatened by civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph with a march on Washington that the Fair Employment Practice Commission was established which prohibited racial discrimination by any government agency.

Black Marines were housed in Montford Point, NC, and recruiting for them had been scheduled for June 1, 1942. A quota of 200 recruits each from Eastern and Central Divisions had been set, while the Southern was to furnish 500 of the initial 900 people. These men were to be enlisted in Class III (c), Marine Corps Reserve, and assigned to inactive duty in a General Service Unit of their Reserve District. Both the service record book and the enlistment contract were to be stamped “COLORED.”

The first African-American recruit to arrive at the camp was Howard P. Perry of Charlotte, NC, on August 26. From July 1942 through the end of the war, 20,000 Black men were trained at Montford Point and inducted into the Marine Corps. Black troops would train and become Marines, they would still be kept separate from the White troops. Unless accompanied by a white Marine, they were not allowed to set foot in Camp Lejeune. And after they were shipped off to battle zones, they served exclusively in all-Black units.

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