THE MARINES OF MONTFORD POINT

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

Reuben McNair
from the chapter Legacy

     Each day, I tell my young people as I walk around, I paid for the things that you got here, receiving today, and the opportunities that you have. So you don’t have to go out here doing what I did in the Marine Corps wishing for war to prove to someone that you can make a change, that you do the same thing that everyone else can do. You don’t have to take the abuse or sit on the back of a bus to go into Jacksonville, or any other place in the world. We don’t have to do that anymore. And I tell them, you don’t have to prove it. I’ve already gone through this, and you don’t have to prove anything to anybody in the world.

 

 

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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