America's First Black Marines
by Melton A. McLaurin
The companion book to the American Public Television documentary
The following excerpt is from The Marines of Montford Point: America's First Black Marines published by The University of North Carolina Press
Joseph Carpenter (part one)
from the chapter Segregation in the Civilian World
This is my first time being in the Deep South and I was fully aware of the Deep South, ’cause we’ve heard of all the lynchings. All this was in the papers in D.C., and I grew up in D.C., District of Columbia. I had read about the Ku Klux Klans and all that, and we were in the South, in North Carolina.
I wasn’t too anxious to go out on the town on liberty because of my experience of getting down there. But a group of us got together.We decided that we would go and, as I said, Jacksonville was a very small place. It did have a railroad track and just on the other side of the railroad track, I guess there may have been a dozen African American families lived on the other side of the railroad track. But there were thousands of us, so you can imagine how that turned out. And so, and of course, we worried constantly about malarial diseases, this type of thing, not malarial, but, but venereal diseases and this type of thing. So that, that concerned me particularly, so I said, well, I don’t want to [be] involved in that. So I then started going to the District, ’cause I lived in District of Columbia, so, and I could catch the train and get there if I could get out.
And that was the disappointing part, because we only had that one bus station that would get us out of Jacksonville and that was the Trailway Bus. When the Trailway Bus would fill up, they would have two lines, one for the whites and one for the African Americans. So they would fill up with the whites as far as they went in the bus, and then if any space left over, any seats left over, we were then allowed to get on there. So we’d maybe start at 4:00, they may not get out of Jacksonville ’til about midnight because of that situation, you know, it was, if it had enough whites to fill the bus, we couldn’t get on it.
And then when we got to Rocky Mount, if you’re catching the train, when we got to Rocky Mount, we would have to catch the train. And of course, there was only one car, one coach for us. Fort Bragg [an Army base] was just south of us, so on the weekend, Fort Bragg soldiers would just about fill up that [African American] car. So when they got to Rocky Mount there would, maybe one or two seats. And of course, they had mps there to stop us from getting on. So what we would do because the black car was way forward anyway, we’d go down the track and wait ’til the train pull off. Then that time, when the train pull off, they had a platform that they laid over the steps and then they could close the door. So before, when the conductor laid the platform down over the steps, we would then toss our bags at him, which made him move and then we would jump on the train. And of course, the train is going as we got on it. So that’s how we managed to get out of Rocky Mount.
Now, to catch the buses, we had the Trailway Bus could take you to Washington. But if you did that, when it, where it stopped, there was no place for us to eat. They would stop for the whites to go in. But we made out on that deal because we were able to go around the back, or they sent us around the back of the restaurant and that’s where the cooks were, so they would fix us all kinds of sandwiches, charge us little or nothing for it. So, we made out as far as the meals were concerned. But it was just embarrassing. We were what you would call typical Marines, one for all and all for one. And wherever we went, we were that way. After I’d been in for a couple of years, the white Marines had begun to accept us and support us. ’Cause what happened one day, I was coming back and I just wasn’t thinking. I was coming back to camp and I came to Rocky Mount, and I got on the bus coming into Jacksonville. I sat down in the front just because at home, I would do it anyway and I just wasn’t thinking. And, the driver said, move to the rear. And this, like I said, I don’t know where my mind was, but anyway, it mustn’t registered on me what he was saying. So he says, move to the rear. So finally a couple of white Marines spoke up and says, you, you drive this bus and get us to Jacksonville or else. So he kind of left me alone and then we went on in to Jacksonville. And then after I got off the bus it dawned on me, he was talking to me.
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Both the film and the book are based on more than forty-six hours of taped interviews with sixty Montford Point veterans. The film...uses thirty-five minutes of those interviews. The book...provides about five hours of the very best material from the interviews.
--Melton A. McLaurin, from the author interview