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Trenton Makes, the World Takes

Trenton, New Jersey, where I grew up, was a major center of manufacturing in the Northeast. A working-class city, Trenton was home to a half-dozen rubber companies, Roebling Wire and Steel, and Lenox China; its factories made cigars, anvils, farm tools, steam turbines, aspirin, dolls, watches, bricks, linoleum, and felt-tip pens. Westinghouse, General Motors, Eastern Aircraft, American Standard—all called Trenton home. The world’s largest bathtub was made in our fair city and was sent to President William Howard Taft. A sign on the side of the Lower Free Bridge over the Delaware River announced proudly, Trenton Makes, the World Takes. Locals still call it the “Trenton Makes Bridge.”

I was born in Trenton on July 10, 1927, and my first memories are of the Great Depression. None of these factories was doing very well. I didn’t know it was the Depression, I thought this was just how life was.

My parents, William Harvey Dinkins Jr. and Sarah Lucy, met at Huntington High School in Newport News, Virginia. My mother, whom everyone called Sally, stood perhaps five-foot-two and was very proud to be co-captain of the girls’ basketball team. They married young and came north.

My father went to beautician school in Newark, and my earliest memories of him are in the one-chair barbershop he ran on the ground floor of the row house in which we lived at 81 Spring Street. The street was wide, and the houses that lined it were two and three stories high, some made of brick, some of wood. My father did all the renovations himself; he was very good with his hands. I shined the shoes of the men who came for a cut and a shave. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we got by.

When I was around six years old, my parents separated. I couldn’t understand why and they didn’t tell me, but I went with my mother and grandmother, Nora Bacon, to live in New York City. My younger sister, Joyce, came with us and later moved to Baltimore to stay with my father’s sister. We lived in Harlem. The only apartment I remember must have been on Seventh Avenue, overlooking the subway yards. We never stayed in one place very long; we moved when the rent was due.

My mother and grandmother both worked as domestics, cooking and cleaning for white folks for a dollar a day. I don’t remember ever being hungry, I never went to bed without dinner, and my clothes were clean. I had toys; when the children of the families for whom my mother and grandmother worked outgrew or got tired of theirs, they were given to me. We were poor as hell, but I didn’t know that we were poor.

There were rules in my mother’s house. If we were walking in the street and encountered an adult and I called that person by his or her first name, I would receive a stern rebuke. “This is Mr. Smith,” I was informed. Propriety was important. And respect. I was an obedient child, and they didn’t have to discipline me often. I do not mean to suggest that I was never bad, because I’m sure I got into as much trouble as the average kid, but I would not defy them. If I did something wrong, my mother or grandmother would simply talk to me. Whatever the infraction—perhaps my room was messy—they would say, “Today we worked so hard, why don’t you pick up your clothes?” In about thirty seconds I would be in tears. They were loving, caring, hardworking women, and they never had to lay a hand on me.

With just one exception.

In the mid-1930s on the streets of New York, the latest in personal transportation was what we called skate scooters: wooden soapboxes nailed onto two-by-fours with metal roller-skate wheels affixed in the front and back. They made a racket in the street, and we would race them incessantly. Of course, if you wanted a really good-looking scooter, you’d nail on reflectors, the kind found mostly on license plates. We wouldn’t buy reflectors; we didn’t have the money or the inclination. We would liberate them. On one occasion, as a group of us were huddled over the back bumper of a particularly vulnerable automobile, a police officer—a black police officer in plainclothes—saw us and knew immediately that we were up to no good. We all took off and he chased us, and because I was the smallest he caught me. He could have taken me to the station house, but he did something he knew would be far worse: he took me home to my mother and grandmother. They took off all my clothes, stood me in the bathtub, and beat me with straps. I haven’t stolen a reflector since.

When I was around seven years old, I used to sell shopping bags. At the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue, men sold fruit and vegetables from pushcarts. This open-air marketing was the very personal way shopping got done in Harlem. And because nobody had any money, you didn’t get a shopping bag in which to place your groceries, you had to buy one. Little entrepreneur that I was, I would buy bags from a wholesaler three for a nickel and sell them to shoppers at two cents apiece. It took quite a while, but when I finally made ten cents, I went to the five-and-dime and bought a present for my mother. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

I was still in grammar school when I was sent back from Harlem to Trenton to live with my father. His name was Bill, but I called him Pop, and everybody else did too. If Pop had gone to college, he would have done quite well; he was a very smart, self-made man. By the time I got back, his barbershop was thriving. He had started with one chair and then expanded, renting space to other people. Ed Veldeen had a chair, and a man named Cox, and another fellow from nearby Philadelphia used to come over and cut hair. In the years I was away, Pop was certified as a real estate broker and insurance agent, and he managed his businesses from an office in back of the barbershop. He was making a better living than my mother, and apparently together they decided I would be better served living with him in Trenton.

I had responsibilities. In those days people didn’t pay their bills by mailing in a check at the beginning of the month, they went to each office personally and paid in cash. Pop had a box with many compartments into which he would put aside some money each week—“This is the rent, this is the electric, this is the telephone”—and as each was due I would be dispatched to pay the bill. He didn’t use these exact words, but he was teaching me the difference between “gross” and “net,” he was teaching me that not all the money in the cash register was his. We had debts, and he was teaching me how to save. And he was demonstrating his faith in me.

There was a smattering of black families on Spring Street. We didn’t live in a ghetto. From my father’s barbershop all the way down a couple of blocks to the shoemaker was mostly white. There were two black families on the 200 block. Mrs. Hence, an African American, ran a little tearoom, but most of the families in the immediate vicinity were working- or lower-middle-class white folks. No one locked his door, not during the day, not at night. We all knew each other. It was mostly black in the stand-alone wooden homes on West End Avenue, a little mixed on nice, quiet Montgomery Place. There was not much crime to speak of. Once, a man opened the door of the neighborhood doctor’s car, parked unlocked as it was in front of the doctor’s home/office on Spring Street, and stole his medical bag. An hour later the same man drove by and tossed the bag on the sidewalk; he didn’t want to deprive the doctor of his equipment, he just wanted the morphine the doctor was carrying. That is the sum total of crime I can recall.

Once back, I quickly rejoined a tight group of friends. There was Frederick Schenck (pronounced Skank); Hilmar Ludwig Jensen Jr., also known as Junky Joe; and Aloysius Leon Higginbotham Jr. The Hayling brothers, Leslie and Hartley (known as Bill), lived across the street. Fred Schenck grew up to become the deputy undersecretary of commerce for the Jimmy Carter administration. Junky Joe became a teacher and school principal in Delaware. Leon Higginbotham became chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Les Hayling was one of the Tuskegee Airmen—in 2007 they were honored with the Congressional Gold Medal—and became a successful dentist, and Dr. Bill Hayling delivered everyone’s babies.

When we were little boys, we would play down by the canals that ran through Trenton, fed in part by the Delaware River and remnants of the horse-drawn barge system that served as a shipping lane from New Brunswick in north Jersey all the way down to Lambertville. My father had found an old piece of wood that was wide enough and long enough to stand on, and he had anchored it with rocks and dirt in the well-worn towpath out behind West End Avenue for us to use as a diving board. Trenton summers were hot, and it was a great treat to be able to jump into the water, even if some of us, myself among them, could not swim. One afternoon I trotted out to the end and started jumping up and down, singing, “This is my daddy’s diving board! This is my daddy’s diving board!” I slipped and fell. The first time my head got above water, I saw Junky Joe’s heels rounding the corner of the alley, running. I was going down for the second time when Les Hayling walked into the water and pulled me out. Later that afternoon I saw Joe.

“You left me to drown!”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I went to seek aid!” Nine years old and he went to “seek aid”!

Not long after I returned to Trenton my father told me he was going to remarry. I thought I would die. All this time my parents had been very civil to one another—we were together at holiday times—and I was convinced that they would someday be a family again. I had built my vision of the world on that reunion, and when that future fell apart I was very distressed. I cried for a week.

The woman my father married, my stepmother, was named Lottie Lee Hargett, but everybody called her Sis. In my day there were no African American teachers at Trenton Central High School, but she started in the middle school and taught for forty years, and by the time she retired Sis was teaching English and drama at Central. She was a presence. The year she retired they dedicated the Trenton Central yearbook to her. On occasion we would encounter two generations of her students—say, mother and daughter—walking down the street. She was very helpful to me and my friends when we needed educational assistance. Whenever there was a school play or poetry recital, the participants always asked her to help. It didn’t take long for me to learn to love her, and I ended up having two mothers who loved me. They were very much alike, and each of them thought there was nothing I couldn’t do.

Sis was a trusting soul. My father would fill the gas tank in our car without telling her, and she never caught on. According to Les Hayling, she once said, as Pop winked at us around the dinner table, “This car gets good mileage. I’ve been riding all summer and haven’t had to fill up once!”

I attended the Bellevue Avenue Colored School, later named the New Lincoln School, obviously an all–African American institution. Black students, black teachers, and a black principal, P. J. Hill, a no-nonsense educator whom kids used to call Pickle Juice. I was a decent student. Each of the adults in my life instructed me to pay attention, and I did.

In junior high school we studied Latin, and my very strict teacher, Ms. Bernice Munce, never gave me better than a B. However, I got to Trenton Central High School and proceeded to lead the class. On the other hand, my arithmetic teacher, who had earned his doctorate, never gave me less than an A−. The first day in high school the math teacher, Mr. Murphy, put a square root sign on the blackboard and referred to it as a “radical.” I had never heard the term, didn’t know what he was talking about. In the six math marking periods that year, I started with a D and by the end the best I could do was a B. Ever since that time I have felt that it is not the subject matter that is primary in the creation of a student, it is the quality of the teacher. I have had a handful of good teachers in my life, men and women who made an impression on me and who I think taught me well, and I am very thankful for them.

As we grew older Fred Schenck, Junky Joe, and I grew even closer. If you saw one of us, you saw us all. We were known in the neighborhood as the Three Musketeers. I wasn’t an athlete. Although I was too little to play basketball, I loved to play baseball—second base or shortstop—but wasn’t particularly good. We played football in the street as though we were competing for professional contracts. Our football, however, was old and beaten, and the bladder was dried out completely. We didn’t have money to replace it, so we stuffed the leather shell full of leaves and continued our pursuit of athletic greatness. In fact, at age ten or twelve, we played a game against a team of white kids down the shore in Asbury Park. We arrived, and they couldn’t have been nicer. They fed us sandwiches and cookies and ice cream, and we stuffed ourselves, and then they went out and ran all over us. We didn’t know whether that was their plan, but it worked!

On Saturday mornings, Fred, Junky Joe, and I would investigate the alleys of the affluent neighborhood west of Spring Street, looking for soda bottles in rich folks’ garbage. There was a nickel deposit on those bottles, which was big money. We would trade in what we found and head over to the local bakery, Pryor’s Doughnuts on Edgewood Avenue. On any given day fresh pastries were too expensive for us, but a nickel would get you a baker’s dozen of day-old doughnuts, and those we shared happily. Pryor’s was right across the street from the Strand Theater, where we spent many Saturday afternoons. Starting at one o’clock, the price of admission got you four hours of a movie matinee, serials, cartoons, and an on-screen contest. If your ticket number came in, you’d win a candy bar. Fred Schenck swears he actually won one.

Of course we sat in the balcony. When we stepped up to the ticket window, that’s where they automatically put us. I don’t have any recollection of white and colored water fountains in Trenton, but I do know that I was never permitted a seat in the orchestra of the Strand Theater. Now and then we would ask for a downstairs seat, but these requests were never granted. (Maybe because that is where I sat during my formative moviegoing years, I have always felt that a seat in the mezzanine is superior to one in the orchestra. One, it is cheaper, and two, it has a better view.)

None of us was allowed to smoke, but that didn’t stop us from buying cigarettes. Usually we would buy them loose for a penny apiece, but one day we gathered enough money to purchase an entire pack—we must have made off with a great haul of soda bottles. It was Joe’s responsibility to take the pack home, and he got caught. In our neighborhood it wasn’t hard to figure out who the other culprits were. There was no inquisition, no call to ask any of us, “Did you do this?” The assumption was that we were all co-conspirators, and that assumption was almost always correct. As we shared our successes, we shared our failures: whatever punishment was meted out to one of us the other two got as well, as a matter of course. And they did not spare the rod; this punishment was corporal.

We spent a lot of time at the colored YMCA. The white Y was downtown on Clinton Avenue, where we would occasionally get invited to shoot pool, but most of our time was spent at the colored Y, a townhouse at 105 Spring Street run by Junky Joe’s father. Mr. Jensen had an assistant, Calvin Brown, who was a nice fellow with an excellent singing voice, and he was there to help make sure we kids didn’t get unruly.

The colored Y was free. There would be fifteen or twenty boys and girls there almost every day—before dinner, after dinner, it was like a second home. We would play Ping-Pong, and if you backed up too far trying to hit a shot, you would bang your paddle against the wall and knock out some plaster. Years later, my father bought that house, and I found myself patching some of the holes I had helped create.

There was a gym in Les Hayling’s basement built by an Indian man who worked for Les’s father. He had taken a card table, turned it upside down, fastened it to the ceiling, and hung a punching bag from it. He had erected a platform to serve as a ring. We went down there and fought like cats and dogs. I would fight in the schoolyard; if you pushed me, I would push you back. My friend Alphonse Wheeler—“Fonz”—was not much bigger than I, but he was a tough cat who liked me because I refused to get pushed around; he kind of became my protector. He, too, later joined the Marine Corps. Still, since I was smaller than most of the other boys, I knew enough not to put on gloves and step into a ring.

The Y housed a number of colorful characters. We had a fellow named Ike Williams who ended up being lightweight champion of the world from 1945 to 1951. A fighter like Sugar Ray Robinson—he threw a thousand punches and you couldn’t touch him. And we had at least one guy who could beat Ike! Jake Richardson, whose brother Percy became a cut man for Larry Holmes and Michael Spinks, was tougher than anyone. Jake wasn’t tall—around five-foot-eight or -nine—but he was very strong, limber, and athletic. He could stand on the first step of my stoop, keep his legs straight, and put his palms on the pavement. He could throw a snowball halfway down the block and hit you dead in the head. He would throw a bolo punch and send people into the middle of next week. Les Hayling swears he saw Jake hit a guy with an uppercut and flip him 360 degrees onto his stomach. When Jake fought on the second floor of the Y, we had to station two boys in front of the window to keep him from knocking his opponents into the street.

Jake went into the service, and a sergeant who did not know with whom he was messing started picking at him. Jake hit the sergeant, knocking him out cold. The officer, who only a moment before had thought himself the toughest guy in the Army, could have put Jake in the brig. Instead, he put him in the ring. Jake said, “I’m not a boxer, I’m a fighter.” They put him in anyway. Jake knocked out everyone he faced . . . in the first round! He wasn’t one to throw a lot of punches and score points; he would just stand flat-footed, and when the time came he would hit you in the jaw and you were finished. He ended up an all-Army champ.

Junky Joe grew to be about five-foot-ten. He was a light-skinned handsome boy with a sharp nose who put his energy to good use. In high school he played the drums and organized a band, Junky Joe Jensen and his Jim Jam Jiving Jamboree, which, when World War II started, evolved into Junky Joe and the Jiving Jodys. (“Jody” was what soldiers called civilians—guys who stayed home and messed with people’s wives and girlfriends.) You may have heard soldiers singing while marching in cadence; these are the lyrics for one of those songs:

 

Your baby was home when you left,

You’re right!

 

Jody was home when you left,

You’re right!

 

Ain’t no use in going back,

Jody’s got your Cadillac.

 

Ain’t no use in calling home,

Jody’s got your gal and gone.

 

Ain’t no use in feeling blue,

Jody’s got your sister too.

 

Les Hayling’s father had gone to art school, so he painted a fancy JJJ on the bandstands for the professional touch. The very distinguished Aloysius Leon Higginbotham Jr., about six feet, four inches tall and possessed of a sonorous voice, played saxophone. I couldn’t play anything, but I used to carry the instruments so I would get into the dances for free. We were underage, and our Jody status was tenuous, but we played it up anyway.

One summer during high school, Les Hayling, who was working at the Trenton Country Club as a waiter, got me a job there as a busboy. We weren’t country club kind of guys, but we were happy to have jobs. When we got there, we learned how that world worked.

The headwaiter was a very short, very strict black man named Mr. Nevius, who walked with his chin slightly raised, countenanced no nonsense from his people, and completely controlled the dining room. If members wanted a table of some stature, it behooved them to put some cash in his hand. The going rate was a dollar.

One of the regulars was Mr. Hindecamp, an insurance banker who often dined at the club with his wife. At one meal the man crossed Mr. Nevius’s palm with two quarters. The headwaiter lowered his eyes and peered into his hand. “Mr. Hindecamp . . . can’t very well fold this, can I?”

Mr. Hindecamp was not swayed. “Well, Nevius,” he said, “takes little ones to make big ones,” and went on and sat down.

Some members were certainly less appealing than others. One man, a doctor who wore black-and-white golf shoes every day and never seemed to go to work, carried himself with an excess of importance. He was approximately thirty-five years old, entirely imperious, and often in the company of an older lady who must have been seventy if she was a day. The woman had double chins and bags under her eyes, and to a teenager she was a prime example of what not to become when one aged. One afternoon, sitting in the second-floor grill room, she called me over.

“Young man,” she intoned, “go down and tell the doctor I want him.”

I found the doctor in the lounge. Others on the staff were waiting tables, serving drinks, folding napkins, going about their business. “Sir,” I told him, “your mother wants you.”

The guys just about fell down laughing. The man looked at me with cold steel in his eyes. Hell, I didn’t know she was his wife!

From that moment forward, that man and I simply did not get along. He treated me with the disdain of the wealthy, and I just didn’t care. One rainy day I was sitting around a table between meals, playing cards with some of the guys in charge of the locker room, when he came walking by. “What are you doing, young man?” He and his wife shared a withering tone. I looked up from my cards.

“I’m playing poker.”

The doctor shook his head and continued his promenade.

Country club employees lost their jobs all the time for all sorts of reasons. There was a long driveway that wound from the street to the clubhouse, and when someone got fired the phrase was “Hit the lane.” One afternoon the club’s manager, Mr. Donahue, stood in the bay window of the dining room with his hands behind his back, just looking. He had the air of a bird holding its place in the air stream, waiting for a fish to approach the surface and become a meal. Below him, a coworker named Nate was playing Ping-Pong with a little white girl at a table that had been set up near the pool. Mr. Donahue did not approve of such employee-member trans-racial fraternization. He told Leon Shepard, another member of the waitstaff, “Leon, go out there and tell Nate that as long as he’s got the Ping-Pong paddle in his hand, he’s got a job. But when he puts it down, tell him to hit the damn lane!”

I worked wherever I was instructed, but the bulk of my job was to bus tables during meal service. Busboys were responsible for setting the tables beforehand and removing dirty dishes, glasses, linen, and silverware afterward. Scut work. Still, a job was a job, and I performed adequately. We routinely loaded an aluminum tray with what must have been forty to fifty pounds of china and cutlery, hoisted it on one shoulder, and swept through the swinging doors into the busy confines of the kitchen, where through the din of orders and curses we would set the tray down and let the dishwashers have at the pile.

For some reason the geniuses who designed the Trenton Country Club’s kitchen saw fit to place a small set of steps just inside these doors. As a result, bringing in a load successfully was a feat of considerable navigational difficulty. But we were young, strong, and coordinated, and after a while each of us developed his own personal rhythm and the operation became second nature.

The dining room was staffed by men only, except when we had a big function; then they would put on some women to help out. One of the classic waiter’s rules is that you stack your own tray—it’s just the way things are done—and at a midsummer banquet, when one of the temporary busgirls was about to lift this big tray, I said, “I’ll take that for you.” I had things well in hand as I shouldered through the entryway. “Les,” I called to my friend, “we’re going to the tennis dance party up in north Jersey tonight, right? What time are we leaving for Shady Rest?” And as I was talking the plates began to fall. Maybe the tray wasn’t stacked properly, maybe her sense of balance wasn’t in line with mine. First one slid off the stack. It took an age. Then another. Of course, only a moment passed, but it seemed like two or three minutes before the last dish shattered on the concrete floor. And of course, at that very moment the doctor was passing through. He looked at me, looked at the wreckage at my feet, and said, “He’s fresh and surly and everything unbecoming a busboy. Get him out of here!” It wasn’t long before I hit the lane.

I got another job immediately, trucking freight at the Pennsylvania Railroad station. We worked in crews of five or six, and our job was to use heavy wooden carts to transport whatever was being shipped from the loading dock, down the platforms, through freight car after freight car connected by wooden walkways, to the car in which it would travel. You got paid extra for tonnage. If you were unloading lightbulbs, you were out of luck—you weren’t going to make a lot of money. If you had the opportunity to cart stoves or appliances, you stood to make a good day’s pay. I weighed about 125 pounds and stood in front of the wooden cart laden with freight several times heavier than I was, and every once in a while I’d miscalculate the leverage and it would lift me up in the air, right off my feet. If I had it balanced and I was moving, I was moving fast. Sometimes the weight would chase me. As was the custom, I’d yell out, “Makin’ tonnage!” and everyone would clear out in front because I had a runaway train behind me.

Scrappy Manny ran a bar in Trenton and was one of the best pool shooters in the world. He didn’t get a lot of action outside the local community because he was black, but when the Haylings bought a pool table, he came down to their basement and showed Les how to make trick shots. More to the point, Scrappy Manny was a gambler with connections in the world of horse racing. Scrappy sent his nephew, Killer Manny, to Trenton to watch over his action and run the numbers racket. As time passed Killer Manny tried to go legit. He married a schoolteacher, donated to the church, and got involved in politics. As part of his civic beneficence, he fixed it so some of us could take the civil service test and get work at the post office sorting mail.

At the post office, I worked one summer under a little man who enjoyed using his power to the fullest, an assistant supervisor who took pleasure in intimidating his workers by throwing them out and docking their pay. Losing a day’s pay was a significant deprivation; no one who worked at the post office could afford it. He would tell that day’s transgressor, “Get your card and stand by the clock,” which meant he or she should take his time card from its assigned slot and cool his heels before the assistant supervisor arrived for the ritual humiliation of punching him out. This became my catchphrase for the summer. Whenever anyone anywhere did anything of which I disapproved—at the pile of mail next to me, in the street, at the poker table—I would tell him, “Get your card and stand by the clock!”

One morning I arrived after the 9:00 punch-in.

“You’re late,” he told me.

I didn’t like this man at all. “That’s obvious,” I said.

“Where were you?”

“Clearly, I was elsewhere.”

“Get your card and stand by the clock!” I was out a day’s pay, but talking back was worth it. There are some abuses one ought not stand for.

I was seventeen years old in the summer of 1944, heading into my senior year of high school. World War II was in full force. My friends and I would go to the Strand and watch the newsreels of soldiers hitting the beach. No one thought of not going to war. Everybody went. Only a physical disability or a job in an essential occupation like the police or fire department could keep you from defending your country overseas. I knew I was going to fight, and I knew a lot of people were dying. People I personally knew were dead—young men from across the street and around the corner. I figured the way to stay alive, or at least to increase my chances of survival, was to be well trained. There were the Army Rangers, who were an elite fighting corps, and the Navy Seals, who were equally tough and well prepared. I had never heard of either of them. But I knew about the Marines.

I liked the way the Marines looked. My friend Everett Mills’s brother Julius looked good in his dress blues with the red stripe they called the “bucket of blood” running down the side of the pants leg. But more than that, even though I was only seventeen years old and around 125 pounds, like a lot of young people I was determined, I was bad, and I was ready, willing, and able to fight for my country.

These were Jim Crow days, and as I grew older I found that people in the United States were still being murdered because of their color. I heard things like, “You Negroes shouldn’t be so pushy, they only lynched five last year.” By this we were supposed to understand that things weren’t so bad, by God, they were getting better. I was not intimidated by white folks, and I wasn’t angry at white folks. But the armed forces were segregated. If a black man was drafted and went to the induction center and asked to be placed in the Army, they would put him in the Navy. If he wanted the Navy, he’d get the Army. In the experience of the young men in my Trenton neighborhood, nobody got what he asked for. Clearly, the way to be inducted into the branch of service you preferred was to enlist. The object then became to enlist in the armed forces before you turned eighteen, when you were required to register for the draft and it was too late. So began my sojourn to the Marine Corps recruitment offices.

The Marine Corps was an elite unit, “a Few Good Men,” and prior to 1942, there were no black men at all in the Marines. It took an executive order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to begin the integration of that armed service, which was done grudgingly at best.

First, I found there was no recruitment station in Trenton, so I went to Newark and presented myself. I was turned away cold. “We have our quota of Negro Marines,” the officer-in-charge informed me. A few days later I pushed on, traveling to the recruitment center in Jersey City. “We have our quota of Negro Marines.” Camden, the same. I took the bus to New York City and tried to enlist at the recruitment station in Manhattan. They asked me where I lived. I told them Trenton. They turned me away. “You have to go to the state in which you reside.” But I had done that, I said, to no avail. That wasn’t their problem. I took the train to Philadelphia, only to be told the same thing. I came home, then returned to Philadelphia. “I want to be a Marine. That’s all there is to it. I just want to be a Marine.” I told the story of my quest and hounded the recruitment officer so intensely that he allowed me to take the armed forces physical and fill out the necessary forms. I was five-foot-seven, 130 pounds. They said I had high blood pressure and turned me away.

I knew I didn’t have high blood pressure; this was just another way of discouraging black men from joining the Marines. I found a doctor’s office nearby and had my pressure taken. Normal. I went home to Trenton and visited my family doctor, Dr. Granger, who had been an Army surgeon. Normal. I went back to Philadelphia, and they took the pressure in my left arm. Too high. Right arm. Too high. Lying down, standing up—according to them, always too high. (Later I concluded that I had what’s known as “white coat syndrome,” in which one gets nervous in front of doctors because one wants to pass the test so badly. At the time I didn’t know what was going on.) But by now I was a regular . . . and an annoyance. The officer prepared a letter for my draft board and gave me a copy. It said, in substance, “This man passes the physical and selects the Marine Corps. Put him in the Marine Corps.” I was in.

I don’t remember much about my senior year of high school. All I wanted to do that year was finish and enlist. Everybody was going to war, it was the natural order of things, and I was going to be a Marine! On July 10, 1945, I turned eighteen. I signed up for the draft that day and requested immediate induction. About two weeks later I was on my way. My parents did not gnash their teeth that their son was going to war; I think they were impressed with my persistence. Of my friends from home, Junky Joe was never in the service and Schenck and Everett Mills served in the Navy.

The black Marines were trained at Montford Point, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; the white troops trained separately at Parris Island, South Carolina. We left as a group via train out of Jersey City, about twenty-five white kids and two African Americans. Since the other black inductee was a year older than I, they gave him both our orders to present.

I was so proud. I bought a stack of postcards and began writing everyone I knew, telling them where I was, where I was going, what I was going to do. We were going by train to Washington, DC, and from there making several stops through Virginia and into North Carolina, where we would get on a bus to the base. I wrote the itinerary so many times that I memorized it.

Good thing too, because the clown I was traveling with missed the connection in Washington, DC, never got on the train, and all of a sudden I was on my own—without my orders. The conductor came through to take our tickets, and I pointed to the white Marines and said, “I’m with them! I’m with them!” That worked until I had to get off in North Carolina and take the bus. Fortunately, I had some money in my pocket and knew my destination. I stepped up to the ticket window.

“Around back, boy.”

This was my first real experience with Jim Crow in the Deep South. It felt different from what little I had encountered in New Jersey. It felt significantly more threatening. There was an unyielding physicality to it. I had no more chance of getting a ticket from this person than I did of moving the building. I went around back.

Finally, I arrived at the little town of Jacksonville, North Carolina, took another transport to the base, and thought I would enter Camp Lejeune with a story to tell. I got off the bus, and a great big black sergeant said, “Where are your orders, boy?!” I started to launch into an explanation of how the Marine I was traveling with had my orders but missed the train and I had to—

The sergeant hit me. Knocked me down. I bounced up, and that was my introduction to the United States Marine Corps.

We were taught to obey the commands of whatever officer was directly in charge. If a sergeant or corporal was drilling us and a lieutenant or even a general were to come by and say, “Platoon halt!” we would keep on marching. The idea was to teach us discipline, and we learned it well. They ran us through the “manual of arms,” porting footlockers instead of weapons. “Right shoulder . . . locker box!” If you were cited for an infraction and were disciplined, the drill sergeant would hang wet clothes on a pole and tell you, “Now run around them until they dry.” Guys would run until they dropped. I saw grown men cry, but I was young and fit and I could run all day. I wanted so much to be a Marine, I wasn’t going to quit no matter what.

Obedience to command was completely ingrained in us. In fact, not in my time but later, two Marines in battle gear were marched into water and didn’t make it out. They drowned following orders. I still take my service in the Marines very seriously.

Our drill instructors, the DIs, taught us the basics. All of them were black. Our gunnery sergeants taught us to use bayonets and the M1 rifle. All of them were white. The gunnies would show up and say, “All right, niggers, fall in!” And we would fall in. They treated us that way right up until we were issued live ammunition; then their attitude became different. Vastly different.

Now, that’s the way I remember it. However, in real life it doesn’t sound likely that battle-tested Marine gunnery sergeants would change their tune for anything, least of all a platoon of black recruits, which brings me to this story my father used to love to tell:

There was a man who said he had a horse. He did not have a horse, but he said he had a horse, and he would tell stories of his horse and all the adventures he and his horse had together. These adventures were thrilling, and everyone admired him for his horse and his adventures, this man who had no horse. This man who had no horse said he had a horse so often that one day he went out . . . and bought himself a saddle!

Maybe the gunnery sergeants did not change their tune, but in our minds something big had changed, and maybe that’s what they were aiming for.

There were no black commissioned officers in our experience, that’s for sure. We used to joke that the only way one of us would become an officer would be to get commissioned one day, hold the march and parade the next, and get discharged the third. Segregated as we were, we heard stories from black Marines under fire who told us how warmly they were greeted by white Marines who had been pinned down and were running low on ammo when our men hit the beach bringing fresh supplies. We liked those stories.

We recruits didn’t get much liberty, but every once in a while we would get sixty-two hours off base—the other branches of service got seventy-two hours, I have no idea why ours was ten hours shorter—and I would either try to get home or go to Kingston or Wilmington, North Carolina, just to get out of there.

It was no picnic being black in the armed forces during World War II. The Tuskegee Airmen served with distinction and were denied credit and respect for more than fifty years. These men were heroes. They begged to be taught how to fly but were initially told, “No, you black folks are not smart enough.” When they won the battle to be trained, they were denied combat duty because they were thought to be cowards who would turn in the face of the enemy. And when they were allowed to fly escort for bombers, they never lost a single one. In fact, the white bomber pilots requested their cover. When their commander, Benjamin O. Davis, attended West Point, he had been shunned for four years, and no one spoke to him outside of the line of duty. This was the world in which we were serving.

I knew several Tuskegee Airmen personally: besides Les Hayling, there was Dr. Roscoe Brown, a fighter pilot who was the first in his group to shoot down a jet while flying a propeller plane; Percy Sutton, who was a stunt pilot before enlisting and became a very influential presence later in my life; and Lee Archer, who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and was an ace, which is to say he had five confirmed kills.

On one of their liberties, as several black airmen were heading north, the train stopped to pick up a group of Italian and German prisoners of war who were being transported from one prison to another. They had not been riding in the best of seats to begin with—this was the Deep South, after all—but the conductors, guided by the military officers in charge, told the airmen that they had to relinquish even those seats to the prisoners. These men were prepared to give up their lives to protect our country, and here they were being told to give up their seats for our enemies. Captured on the battlefield, these POWs were treated better than black soldiers. They had been taught to respect the command of our officers, and they did so, moving forward to seats behind the engine filled with smoke and soot. I found this to be un-American in the extreme, and I’ve never forgotten it.

I had been in the Marines for less than a year when a drill instructor gathered our platoon, number 547—some things you remember!—in the barracks and said, “Get on your knees. Thank God the war is over!” We couldn’t believe it. “Now get up!” he said. “Nothing’s changed.”

And nothing had changed. We drilled, we went about the business of being Marines, but we never saw combat. I was honorably discharged on August 21, 1946.

In August 2012, the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, awarded to persons “who have performed an achievement that has an impact on American history and culture that is likely to be recognized as a major achievement in the recipient’s field long after the achievement,” was awarded to all African American Marines who served in the Corps between 1942 and 1949 and were trained at Montford Point. Twenty thousand black men had come through there. We were Montford Point Marines and said the name with pride, deserving the same place in history as the Tuskegee Airmen and the post–Civil War Buffalo Soldiers. Those of us still surviving were presented with replicas of the Gold Medal in a ceremony held at the Capitol Building and the following day at the Marine Corps barracks in Washington, DC. I was proudly among them. I had been a teenager when I enlisted, and although I was eighty-five years old when I accepted the medal, I was almost the youngest Montford Point Marine in attendance. They called me “kid.”