Melton McLaurin Lecture “The First Black Marines” March 18: Part of UNCW Brown v. Board of Education Learning
3/11/2004 12:00:00 AM
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Wilmington, N.C.—University of North Carolina at Wilmington Professor Emeritus of History Melton A. McLaurin will lecture about “The First Black Marines” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 18 in Morton Hall, Bryan Auditorium. McLaurin is a Lillian Smith prize-winning author of Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South and Celia, a Slave. The talk is sponsored by the history department as part of UNCW’s Brown v. Board of Education learning community semester.
McLaurin will discuss African-American Marines who, as a result of America’s entry into World War II and President Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, were recruited into a branch of military which had forbidden non-white recruits since the American Revolution. These men began receiving basic training not with their white counterparts at Paris Island, but at the hastily constructed segregated Montford Point Base adjacent to the recently created Camp Lejeune, N.C. Some of those trained at Montford Point saw action in the Pacific Theater, while most served in support units in the United States and overseas. After the Second World War, all African-American Marines continued to train at Montford Point until the segregated camp closed in 1949 following President Truman’s executive order leading to the desegregation of all military services. Thousands made the Corps their career, and many of these men saw combat duty in the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War. The story of these men who desegregated the Marine Corps and loyally served their country in three major wars is largely unknown to the American public.
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Media Contact: Professor Emeritus Melton A. McLaurin 392-0395 or mclaurim@uncw.edu.
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