Local event remembers the first modern black Marines

When Frank C. Brown showed up to serve his country in World War II, he got beatings and an insult.
It wasn’t just the normal treatment Marine recruits get, either. It was because he was black.
In 1943, Brown, who now lives in Kents Store in Fluvanna County, enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in Washington.

Only recently had President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Marines to accept black enlistees, though he stopped short of banning segregation.
The Marines decided to build a separate training facility for their black recruits, so the bus Brown boarded headed not to Parris Island, S.C., but Montford Point, a new site next to Camp Lejeune, N.C.
When the bus stopped briefly in the city of Wilson, on North Carolina’s coastal plain, Brown and the other black recruits were told the only place that would serve them was up on top of a nearby hill. By the time they got to the top of the hill, the bus was honking, and Brown and his comrades got no supper.
When the bus got to Jacksonville, about 80 miles south, the recruits were told they would have to walk the rest of the way.

After a hike, the group came to a camp, and Brown asked a military policeman if he was where he was supposed to be, he said.
The policeman told Brown, “We didn’t send for you,” slapped him in the face and stomped on his feet, Brown said.
But Brown and his comrades persevered to become some of the first black Marines since the American Revolution, when three men served.
Their story was on display Sunday afternoon at Burley Middle School, as schools officials teamed with a local documentary maker to show a film and host a discussion about the first modern black Marines.
Brown said he enjoyed the documentary tremendously. He said he wished the filmmakers had been able to include footage of the tent city in which the recruits initially lived. The film mentioned, but did not show, the flimsy structures.

Melton A. McLaurin, the film’s director and author of the book on which the film was based, was on hand to answer questions and sign books.
He said the story of black servicemen in WWII is increasingly being told.
“Gradually, that idea that African-Americans were not involved in the Second World War is starting to break down,” he said.
The documentary covered the history of the camp and the men who passed through it from its creation in 1942 through the Vietnam War, which was the last war in which Montford Point Marines saw action.
During World War II, the combat units created at Montford Point, called defense battalions, went to relieve white Marines on previously captured and relatively secure islands in the Pacific.
Instead, it was ammunition and depot units that saw combat as they supported, and sometimes fought alongside, white units during the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.

Black Marines from Montford Point also helped clean up ash after a nuclear bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Some served during the Korean War, in the early days of integration. And a few stayed in the service long enough to see the Vietnam War, when all units were integrated, even if racism wasn’t gone.
Diane Brown Townes, a local historian who hosted the event, said she chose the material because it realistically humanized history.
She recalled being dissatisfied with the history lessons she received in school.
“I grew up in this community, and I studied Virginia history from a book that told us that the slaves were happy because they were well-fed and clothed,” she said.