The Color of War

by James Campbell

  The ammunition companies were intended to be a step up from the depot companies. Although they, too, performed supply jobs, their members were better trained, receiving two months’ education in ammunition handling and limited infantry instruction.

  For Huff, the new companies represented a source of frustration. Why did the Marines refuse to send them into battle? Annoyed, Huff told his buddy Gilbert Johnson, “All they do is just take the new men, no matter what their qualifications, and send them to ‘tote dat bale’ and load that ammo.” Hashmark, whom the men affectionately called “the Preacher” because of his predilection for inspirational speeches and his positive outlook, emphasized the need for patience. Their job, he said, was to turn out the best men they could until the Marine Corps recognized its mistake.

  As Montford Point expanded and talented black NCOs were being groomed for positions of responsibility, Huff hit the fast track. On April 17, 1943, he made sergeant, and Colonel Woods called him in to his office to congratulate him.

  “Go wet down your stripes,” the colonel encouraged Huff. “You deserve it.”

  Huff could not have been prouder. Here he was, a poor kid from the sticks of Alabama who had never even heard of the Marines before he joined up, and now he was a respected sergeant with a future.

  Deciding that he would follow the colonel’s advice, Huff went into Jacksonville, planning to catch a bus to Wilmington. When he got there, a carnival was going on, and he bought himself a bag of popcorn. Eating his popcorn and enjoying the day, he saw six white Marines approaching him. Usually MPs walked the town. After some early scuffles, Colonel Woods had taken the precaution of sending them into Jacksonville on a regular basis. There they patrolled the bars and the restaurants where white and black Marines were likely to clash. On this day, however, there were no MPs in sight. Damn, Huff thought. This ain’t gonna be good.

  The Marines circled him. Their leader was a first lieutenant. The others were sergeants or PFCs. All wore the Guadalcanal patch. Huff had never seen the patch before and was fascinated by it. These men are heroes, Huff thought, and for a moment he harbored the hope that they were not looking for trouble.

  The lieutenant motioned to Huff’s stripes. “Nigger, who gave you them?”

  What’s this guy doing? Huff thought. He had been taught to revere Guadalcanal veterans. And lieutenants were like Lord God Almighty.

  Had the man not used the word “nigger,” Huff might have answered. Instead he did not say a word. The lieutenant asked again, goading Huff. “Nigger, I’m talking to you. Who gave you them stripes?”

  Now Huff was mad. There would be no more pickin’ the white folks cotton and beggin’ their pardon. “Your mama,” he replied.

  At that, the lieutenant reached out to pull the stripes off Huff’s sleeve. Huff seized his wrist and shoulder and broke the lieutenant’s arm across his leg. Then the sergeants rushed him. Huff pounded them with uppercuts and both fell to the ground. When one of the PFCs tried to tackle him, Huff crushed his ribs with a punch and stomped him while he lay in the street. The other two ran off to find a military policeman.

  As Huff smoothed his clothes and wiped his sweaty forehead, Montford Point’s white provost sergeant ran up to him. “Goddammit,” he said. “All this trouble. I gotta take you back to camp.” The sergeant knew Huff, knew him to be a good man and a dedicated Marine. But he had gone too far.

  “I ain’t goin’ no damn where,” Huff exclaimed. The adrenaline surged. No white man was going to tell him what to do.

  “You’ve gotta come back to camp,” the provost sergeant persisted.

  Huff stood his ground. “I’ll be back in camp on Monday,” he replied. “You can put me in jail then, but you aren’t going to put me in jail today.”

  On Monday morning, Huff was training his platoon when a warrant officer walked up to him. Huff snapped him a salute and then turned the platoon over to his assistant DI.

  The officer looked at him. “Nothing wrong with you?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Huff answered.

  “Well, good God Almighty. The colonel wants to see you now. He says he’s got people lined up there that you been fighting. I knew it couldn’t be you.”

  “It was me,” Huff corrected him.

  “But there are six of them,” the warrant officer said. “And there’s nothing wrong with you?”

  When Huff entered Colonel Woods’s office, he saluted. “Sergeant Huff reporting as ordered, sir.”

  The colonel got up from his desk and looked Huff up and down. “Did you have some trouble on Friday?”

  “Yes, sir,” Huff answered.

  “Just what were you using?”

  “What?” Huff asked. “I didn’t use nothing but my hands. That’s all I had, just my hands.”

  “They say you must have been using brass knuckles,” Woods replied. Huff had never even seen a pair of brass knuckles.

  “No, sir,” he answered.

  “What happened, then?” the colonel inquired. When Huff finished telling him his version of the story, Colonel Woods fastened his eyes on him. “I don’t want you starting fights.” Then he walked out into the hall where the other Marines were now standing. “When you get back,” he said, “make sure to tell the rest of them damn men over there that they better let my boys alone. Now get off this post.”

  Later Woods assembled all the Montford Point men in the theater. He told them about the incident, and urged them to be careful in town. Then he said that he did not want them looking for trouble, but if a fight did break out, the last thing he wanted was for them to come back to base like a bunch of whipped dogs. If Huff and the others did not know it before, they did now: “The great white father of everybody” had their backs.

  By the summer of 1943, Huff was growing restless. Sometimes it felt as if he were taking on not only white cracker Marines and the racist Corps, but the whole goddamn country. He wanted to be overseas fighting. With one thousand African Americans coming through the Montford Point gates every month via Selective Service, however, the training facility was teeming with recruits. Colonel Woods could not spare him.

  Huff and the other drill instructors pushed themselves to the brink of exhaustion. They did not take any shortcuts, either. White Marines were doing all the fighting, and black Marines were providing the labor, but Huff was committed to putting his black “boots” through an intense eight-week training program, making certain that they measured up in every way to Marine Corps standards.

  To the recruits it seemed sometimes as if the sergeant were possessed. They all knew his reputation. He was the giant of a man who had single-handedly whipped a handful of combat-hardened white Marines. Not only had Colonel Woods not disciplined him for fighting, he assembled all of Montford Point at the theater, stood on the stage, and then praised him in front of everyone. After that incident, Huff achieved godlike status. Not every black Marine believed the story. But whether or not they believed it, they all loved telling it. Now they had a myth of their own.

  By late 1943 there was a palpable sense of enthusiasm as all of Montford Point geared up for Secretary Knox’s visit. Even Huff felt it. The secretary of the Navy had never been to the facility. On the morning Knox arrived, Huff and his fellow drill instructors had nearly two thousand men standing in formation by 4:00 a.m. When the secretary did his inspection, the men did Huff proud, standing as tall and straight as rows of corn. Later that morning, Knox went out to Onslow Point. Accompanied by General Holcomb, he watched as a crew from the 51st Defense Battalion went through firing exercises. Using a 90-mm gun, the crew fired on a sleeve target being towed overhead by a plane, and to everyone’s astonishment hit it within a minute. Commandant Holcomb was nearly speechless. Turning to the secretary, he said, “I think they’re ready now.”

  Later that afternoon, Knox returned to the drilling field to observe some of Montford Point’s more seasoned recruits demonstrate advanced training, unarmed combat, and bayonet skills. Huff swelled with pride when
he saw Knox talking with the officer in charge of training, Lieutenant Colonel Holdahl. The men had performed well, and he imagined what the secretary might be saying. Later one of the Marine sergeants who overheard the exchange filled him in on Knox’s remarks.

  “Now, all that’s fine,” the secretary had said to Lieutenant Colonel Holdahl. “But these people don’t need all that stuff. They don’t need all this learning.… Teach these people how to move at an orderly pace and courtesy and discipline, because what they are going to do is unload and load ships and supplies for the fighting troops. You’re wasting your time with that other stuff.” Huff burned inside when he heard what the secretary had said. It was hard not to curse the very men he was serving.

  CHAPTER 13

  A Desolate Place

  Percy Robinson Jr. was inducted into active service in the Navy on July 10, 1943. The day after being inducted, Robinson left for Great Lakes, but not before his mother gave him a piece of advice. “Take care of yourself,” she said to him. “Keep God in your prayers.” Then she added, “And don’t let the white man lynch you.”

  Percy Robinson was born in the heart of Chicago’s Black Belt just five years after the Chicago race riots. The Black Belt (later it acquired the spiffed-up name Bronzeville), which ran down State Street from 22nd to 55th Street, and was bordered on the east by Cottage Grove and on the west by the Rock Island Railroad, was where the vast majority of Chicago’s blacks lived. Here, like most people, Percy Robinson Sr. scrambled to make ends meet. After serving in World War I and coming north to Chicago, he cobbled together a life in the stockyards, painted houses, and made moonshine. It was Prohibition and bootlegging was illegal, but the neighborhood’s white policemen looked the other way as long as he paid his tribute.

  Ruth Robinson chipped in, too, throwing the best “rent parties” around with good cheap soul food—fried chicken, buttered corn, chitlins, red beans and rice, gumbo, collard greens, banana pudding, and sweet potato pone—bootleg whiskey, and a room in the back that could be rented by the hour. On the morning of the party, Ruth Robinson removed much of the furniture from the apartment, rolled up the rugs, and put folding chairs in the rooms. For the price of some corn liquor, she hired family friends as bouncers. At night, dozens of people packed into the apartment to flirt, drink, dance, gamble, eat, play the Robinsons’ piano, and listen to the jukebox until the wee hours of the morning. By Sunday afternoon, after they collected their jukebox coins, the Robinsons had enough to pay the rent.

  Like his parents, Percy junior was a “born hustler.” Over summer vacation, he sold vegetables and fruit on the street. Waking at 3:00 a.m., he would help his cousin hitch the horse to the wagon and bargain with the Jewish vendors in what was called “Jewtown” on Halsted Street. He would haggle until the wagon was full, and then he and his cousin would ride down the streets and alleys of the Black Belt, peddling whatever they had bought that morning. At night he would turn over most of his money to his mother.

  Young Percy was a scrapper in the ring, too. Although he was not big, he was a plucky kid, boxing flyweight on the Catholic Youth Organization team that combined fighting with Bible study. Some of the boxers were Golden Gloves hopefuls, but Percy never had that kind of ability. He did not move his feet fast enough, his jab was less than lightning quick, and he never developed the kind of ease in the ring that a good fighter had to have. But he was all work. He devoted himself to the speed bag to quicken his reflexes, and hit the heavy bag like a demon.

  In the summer of 1937 the Robinson home, like much of Chicago, was abuzz with excitement. Jimmy Braddock, the “Cinderella Man” who had won the heavyweight championship from Max Baer at Madison Square Garden, was scheduled to defend his title for the first time against Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Promoters pitched the ring in the middle of the ballpark’s outfield. Braddock was a gentleman and refused to play the obvious race card. Nevertheless, he was Irish and wore a green robe with a shamrock. Joe Louis was black America’s fighter. Louis was a man whose roots resembled theirs. Born in a sagging sharecropper’s shack in rural Alabama to illiterate parents, he moved north to Detroit with his family at the age of twelve.

  Forty-five thousand people attended the fight, nearly half of them black ticket holders who bought cheap seats in the bleachers. At the Robinson home everyone was crowded around the radio—aunts, cousins, neighbors too poor to own a radio, and Eugene, Percy’s younger brother. Percy had never heard it before—utter quiet. Not a person gathered around the radio made a sound. Even the streets were still.

  Percy and Eugene were two of Louis’s biggest fans. Louis, who had moved to Chicago in 1934, liked to go horseback riding in Washington Park, in the heart of Chicago’s South Side ghetto. Percy knew this, and when he and Eugene could get away, they would go there to catch a glimpse of their favorite fighter, with his bodyguards in tow, riding his white horse across the grounds.

  For Louis the fight began inauspiciously when Braddock caught him with a right uppercut in the first couple of minutes. With the beloved challenger down on the canvas, all of black America held its breath. Was this to be a repeat of Louis’s devastating loss to the German fighter Max Schmeling? Percy and Eugene refused to breathe until Louis was back on his feet.

  From the fourth round on, Louis pummeled Braddock with fierce body blows and quick jabs to the face. When, in the eighth round, Louis knocked the champ off his feet with a punch, according to Braddock, that “about blowed half my head off,” Percy looked around the living room at the frozen faces. Eugene looked as if he had just been visited by the Angel Gabriel. No one, not even the children, had dared to utter a word or laugh or scream until the final punch that sent Braddock crashing to the floor. There was a moment of euphoric silence, and then, after everyone had absorbed the impact of that punch, the Robinson house blew. The streets of Chicago erupted, too, in a collective roar the likes of which Percy had never heard before.

  That night Ruth Robinson broke her own rule and let Percy out after dark to join the celebration. Revelers donned costumes and hugged and danced in the middle of the avenues. Drivers laid on their horns in jubilation. Though it was June, people built bonfires, grabbing whatever they could to feed the flames. Newsboys hawked fight extras. On 47th Street revelers staged an impromptu parade. In “the Stroll,” the Black Belt’s version of Harlem, ecstatic fans jammed the gambling houses and sporting dens, dance halls, clubs, and cabarets. They drank whiskey and smoked one-dollar joints until the sun rose over Lake Michigan. For all of black America, painfully aware of its second-class status, and hungry for a hero, it was a day to be celebrated and remembered. The Brown Bomber was the Heavyweight Champion of the World.

  By the time Percy entered high school, these gambling houses and sporting dens were familiar to him. By day he was a diligent student, making the honor society despite DuSable High School’s rigorous curriculum of English, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, civics, and history. On Sundays he studied his catechism so he could be baptized. But after the sun went down, he cultivated a double life, running with a gang from which he had to hide his other identity. Had the members known of it, they would have roughed him up and run him out. No one wanted to be associated with an ass-kissin’ goody-two-shoes.

  At night the rival gangs warred with each other, using knives, razors, bats, clubs, and crowbars where they once fought with their fists and feet. Women, booze, fashionable clothes, and running numbers were also part of the scene. In order to maintain his street credentials, Percy played the part. He shot dice, learned to walk with a malicious swagger, and committed petty acts of thievery.

  When Percy Robinson entered the gates of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, with his mother’s words echoing in his head, he witnessed a Navy undergoing tremendous change as it struggled to meet quotas prescribed by the Selective Service headquarters. To handle the influx, the Navy created two new camps, Lawrence and Moffett, and cut recruit training from twelve to e
ight weeks.

  Because the Navy still discouraged any “mingling with the whites” at Great Lakes, Lieutenant Commander Armstrong initiated other changes to bring the black training camps up to par with the white ones. He oversaw the construction of a new school building with state-of-the-art classrooms and laboratories, promoting “Negro pride,” and assembled three Great Lakes bands that were on a par with the best bands in the country.

  Despite Armstrong’s efforts to make the three camps the kinds of places where black men could thrive, recruits like Percy Robinson quickly discovered that the Navy had sold them a bill of goods. Nothing, not even a world-class band, could make up for the fact that the Navy was steeped in segregation and unlikely to change. Service School openings for anything other than musicians or cooks and bakers were few and far between. What’s more, there was little rhyme or reason to the selection process. Well-educated blacks were often passed over for appointments. Talk among the recruits was that the Navy divided blacks into two classes—“good niggers” and “bad niggers”—and, fearing that intelligence made them ripe for radicalism, put the smart ones into the latter category.

  Percy Robinson witnessed the inequity of the selection process firsthand. He had done well on his aptitude test, and based on his high school grades, his pre-engineering classes, and four years of high school “shop” at one of Chicago’s top city schools, he should have been a shoo-in for a service school. He could have been a machinist’s mate or a metalsmith’s mate and stayed right there at Great Lakes. By the time he made it through training, however, he had come to the bitter realization that he was not going to be staying at Great Lakes and was never going to get the chance to go to Hampton University or the Air Training Command in Memphis, Tennessee.