The Marines were last to integrate. Here are the stories of the first Black recruits

Jacksonville, North CarolinaThe first thing Carroll William Braxton remembers about June of 1943 is the heat. It was hot in Manassas when Braxton and two friends caught a train to Quantico and another to Jacksonville, North Carolina. Braxton was 18, and as World War II engulfed more of America’s mental and physical bandwidth, he didn’t want to wait to be drafted. He wanted one the sharp, blue uniforms worn by the United States Marines.

Then came the scorching abuse.

“They made us line up and empty our pockets, and shouted, ‘We don’t want those knives in here,’ I guess they thought we always had knives, you know,” Braxton says. “And I recall that I was wearing a cap, and the MP threw it on to the ground and stomped upon it. And he proceeded to call me every kind of “n—-r’ you can think of, and it seems like he was never going to stop.”

The 98-year-old ‘s shared memory of this experience comes in late August while he’s seated in what was once the mess hall for recruits at the former Montford Point Marines Training Camp. Established in 1942, the building was decommissioned in 1949 and is now part of a museum honoring the service of approximately 20,000 men who became the first Black recruits in the U.S. Marines Corps. Braxton and four other Montford Point Marines wore their blue woolen jackets with gold lettering and ribbons. They sat in the first row metal folding chairs. Some could grip canes while others could stand on their own. All now in their mid to late-90’s, they were joined by the families of 11 other men who had trained at what is now known as Camp Johnson, a satellite school for the nearby Camp Lejeune.

During the 57th annual convention of the National Montford Point Marine Association, Inc., family members received bronze replicas of the Congressional Gold Medal that was originally awarded to those history-making recruits in 2012.

But 80 years after the Montford Point Camp was carved out of a swampy woody 1,600-acre peninsula near Jacksonville, many of those who followed those recruits are in a race against time. They want more men like Braxton to know that their service is lauded in the same vein as the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers, or the Tuskeegee Airmen, aka the “Red Tails.”

“We estimate there are about 16,000 names that we still haven’t been able to locate and verify,” says the association’s president, James Averhart, Jr., a retired chief warrant officer 5. “That’s 16,000 families who may not realize the sacrifice and service of a father or grandfather. It is an inherent obligation that we identify these individuals and acknowledge their service.”

Prohibiting racial discrimination

The year 1941 was a tipping point in U.S. military history. Although African Americans had served their country in battles back to the Revolutionary War (since then, the Marine Corps was the only branch that refused to allow them to join), the year marked a turning point in American military history. As the nation prepared for full engagement in WWII, the demand for recruits grew exponentially. Iconic civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph saw an opportunity to ignite the issues of equity and access. He had organized and led the first African American labor union–the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters–and was planning a march on Washington for more defense industry opportunities and better treatment of Blacks in the military, where racism and segregation within ranks was still rife. Even then Commandant, Major General Thomas Holcomb, rejected the possibility of Black recruits: “If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather the whites,” he is reported to have said.

But on June 25, 1941–a week before Randolph’s planned march on Washington–President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order, which prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry or in government. Nearly a year later, the first Black recruits arrived in Montford Point. Some helped clear the land and build the barracks.

This was the history that Chicago native Joe Geeter virtually stumbled across after enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1976. The young lance corporal, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton as his first permanent duty station, served under Master Gunnery Sergeant. Joseph Abrams, Sr. who he had bonded with and admired for being an expert in logistics. When Abrams learned Geeter had been assigned to Okinawa in 1978, he handed the young recruit a book called Blacks in the Marine Corps, to read during his journey to the Far East.

By the time that 15-hour flight had ended, Geeter had not only learned about Montford Point, he realized that Abrams had been one of those first Black recruits.

“I was just fascinated,” says Geeter, who was in the Marines for 25 years and served two terms as president of the Montford Point Marines Association. It is amazing to think about what they saw when they got there, and how they persevered and endured. The vast majority of Black recruits at that time never saw a Black officer and never saw anyone in authority who looked like them. I realized that I hadn’t learned about this for no reason.”

Today, the 850 square-foot basement of Geeter’s suburban Philadelphia home is filled with framed photographs, books, documents, plaques, trophies, artwork, and countless other Marine memorabilia. The most valuable item is the dress-blue jacket that Louis Roundtree, one of the most decorated Montford Point Marines, owns. He was a sergeant major who retired after the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

After his death in 2004, Roundtree’s widow Famie offered the jacket and other personal items to Geeter who initially refused them all. After a visit, Famie had the treasured memento put on the back seat Geeter’s vehicle so that he would not be able to return it. Geeter states that all of these items belong to museums and that we are moving in that direction. “But right now, finding the remaining Montford Pointers who are still with us is the main focus.”

Generations of service

If there’s a common theme that unites most of the families of Montford Point Marine recruits, it’s the fact that few knew their father or grandfather was a member of that group.

Reginald Moore was stunned to learn that his grandfather had served. He found out following his father Charles’s funeral in February of 1997. Moore, who joined the Marines in 1993, opted to wear his military uniform for the service. His grandfather Morris Ruffin told Moore that he had also served during the burial. Moore says that he was shocked. “He mentioned that he served in 1942 under a man named ‘Hashmark’ Johnson, but I had no idea who that was… It wasn’t until about 15 years later that I got invited to a Montford Point event at their lodge in Jacksonville, and there was this roll call picture on the wall, and the name ‘Ruffin’ was on it. That’s when it hit me–it was my grandfather.”

Moore tried learning more about his grandfather’s service with little success until late 2021, when a childhood friend from his hometown in Indiana contacted him with news about her own grandfather, Maurice Burns, who’d trained at Montford Point throughout 1944 and 45. I have always wondered why a man with three children and a wife would sign up for the Marines,” says Mallorie Berer, who spends most of her time helping to locate the Montford Point Marines. “But then, I realized that he was from Talladega in Alabama and that it was a time when a man such as him believed he could join military service and make his family’s lives easier. The majority of the other recruits were still in their teens. My grandfather was in his 30s.”

Berger remembers “Papa Burns” as a handsome, light bronze, tall and thin man who walked with a cane but whose energy could light up a room. He was a brick mason by trade and had an amazing green thumb. There was still a sadness about Papa Burns at times. Berger believes it had to do with his time at Montford Point. He was undergoing grueling basic training. When he couldn’t move as quickly or as fluidly as his teenage peers, drill instructors would sit on his back and force him into strenuous positions, according to Berger, adding that her grandfather spent 26 years in agonizing pain after he left Montford.

By 1969, Burns was fully disabled. “He even reached out the V.A. in 1970 to try and get medical assistance for his back, and they accused him of gold-bricking,” says Berger, who wears his military dog tags on silver chain around her neck. “You have to wonder about him and all the Black men in the military who fought so hard for their country, and who when they came home, in some cases they were almost invisible.”

Efforts to document Marine history

The effort to document the contributions of the 20,000 recruits has largely fallen on the few remaining survivors and their relatives. Berger’s grandfather was meticulous about labeling photos of Black recruits with their names, service years, and home addresses in their graduation books. Others set up local Montford Point Marine chapters, inviting younger Marines to join them.

Today, Geeter, a retired master gunnery sergeant, travels the country attending chapter meetings and spends hours each week visiting local surviving Montford Pointers like 94-year-old retired Sgt. Henry Wilcots, Jr., now lives in an assisted living facility in suburban Philadelphia.

For Wilcots, who was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1928 to a nurse and a janitor, mistreatment due to his skin color was an alien concept.

“Our neighborhood had Jews and Italians and Germans, you name it,” says Wilcots, who enlisted in 1946. He had aspirations to become an architect and believed that military service could help him achieve this dream. Wilcots didn’t believe his father’s warnings about the dangers he would face in the South. Two of his cousins, who had served in WWII, had returned wearing the most impressive uniforms and bragging about how training had made them men. Wilcots recalls, “They said, “Man, when they get over with you, your s—t will have muscles.”

Those first weeks and months at Montford Point were an awakening. He says, “It was terrible, just awful, what they would say, and do, to try and break me.” After training and a stint in Korea, Wilcots later achieved his goal of becoming an architect with education benefits provided by the GI Bill. He worked alongside the famed Louis Kahn and later finished the architectural work of the renowned National Parliament Building in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, after Kahn died of a heart attack in 1974. By contrast, Marine recruits who were raised in the South were well-prepared for the brutal hazing.

“From the minute I got off that bus from Raleigh, I knew what to expect,” says John Lee Spencer Jr., who enlisted in 1944, and now lives in a retirement facility in Wilmington, North Carolina. “Racism was not the right word.” It was downright disgusting. It was horrible. It was bad.”

But as with other Montford Pointers, Spencer says the desire to serve his country and prove his patriotism helped him endure the abuse, especially when headed into battle. The Black Leathernecks quickly gained respect from their commanders and peers.

“After Saipan, they sort of slacked off on calling us ‘nightfighters’ and other ugly names,” Spencer says. “When you’re fighting for your life, you don’t care who’s lying next to you as long as as they’re on your side.”

At the time, Lieutenant General Alexander A. Vandegrift declared: “The Negro Marines are no longer on trial. They are Marines, period. “

Since Montford Point, Blacks have made their mark across the military. Among them: Late Secretary of State Colin Powell, who served in the Army, and Michael Elliott Langley, who on August 6 became the first African American promoted to four-star general in Marine history. And in 1974, the former Montford Point Camp was renamed in honor of Gilbert H. “Hashmark” Johnson, one of the first African American Marine drill instructors. But it is recruits like Braxton and Wilcots, who have the military history and experience of being original Montford Point Marines that Geeter and others want documented before they disappear. Geeter states that the fact that they gave so much to defend our country is too important to ignore. “While there’s a family out there who may not know that they have a hero or a hero’s memory in their midst, we want to correct that.”

Based in Washington, D.C., Michael A. McCoy has photographed for numerous media outlets including Google, The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine. His work covers a wide range, including veteran-focused storytelling and protests.

Rachel Jones, a frequent contributor to National Geographic, serves as Director of Journalism Initiatives for the National Press Foundation. She has produced news and analysis content about topics such as health, gender, sustainability, justice, and development policy.