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| U.S. MARINE CORPS PHOTO | LANCE CPL. PAUL A. OCHOA |
| Montford Point Marines stand for the National Anthem during an evening parade in Colonel Truman W. Crawford Hall at Marine Barracks Washington in Washington, D.C., on June 16, 2017. The Montford Point Marines were the first African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps. |
A Charlotte street’s new name will honor the city’s ties to the first Black Marine Corps recruits.
Phifer Avenue, which was named after a slaveowner, will become Montford Point Street on Thursday to denote the location of the World War II base. Among the speakers confirmed to attend the 11:30 a.m. unveiling at the corner of North College Street and Phifer Avenue are Montford Point Marine Association President James Averhart, Charlotte Chapter 40 President Craig Little and Lt. Gen. Walter Gaskins.
“The legacy of these men and women who valiantly stepped forward to defend our nation at a time when they faced discrimination while doing so must be remembered,” Little said in a statement.
Phifer Avenue is one of nine streets to be renamed following a City Council vote to adopt Legacy Commission recommendations to remove street names that honor confederate leaders, slaveowners and avowed racists.
From 1942-49, more than 19,000 Black recruits trained at Montford Point, now part of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Volunteers trained in segregated facilities as the Corps became the last of the armed services to take African Americans.
“It was like the Black West Point,” Montford Point graduate and Johnson C. Smith University alumnus Thomas McPhatter told The Post in a 2004 interview. “We were the best Black folk could find.”
Charlotte is intertwined with the Montford Point Marines. Pvt. Howard Perry was the Corps’ first Black recruit and its first African American officer, Lt. Fred Branch, was a Hamlet native and JCSU alumnus. McPhatter, who dropped out of college in 1944 to enlist, was the last Montford Point alumnus to retire from active duty in 1983.
Admitting Blacks to the tradition-steeped Marines – formed a year before America declared independence from England – was offensive to Corps leadership’s sense of racial superiority. The branch was exclusively white until President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order banning racial discrimination by federal agencies in 1941.
A year later, he signed a directive that allowed Blacks to serve, which was met with skepticism and resentment in the ranks.
Key to Roosevelt’s decision were the counsel of educator Mary McLeod Bethune, a Barber-Scotia College graduate and founder of historically Black Bethune-Cookman College (now university) and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Executive Order 8802 established the Fair Employment Practice Commission, which opened a door to service – up to a point.
“We were USMC-R, Selective Service,” McPhatter said. “We were on trial. We were not supposed to stay in the Marines after the war. We were going to be off-trial.”
The training was brutal, which was designed to separate the fittest and toughest recruits from the rest.
“Parris Island couldn’t compete with Montford Point,” said McPhatter, who grew up in Lumberton, N.C., and died in 2009. “I feel my knees are gone now because of doing the duck walk (with the knees pointed inward) and my rifle over my head.”
Isolation and racial hostility shadowed Montford Point recruits. Blacks couldn’t train with whites based at nearby Camp Lejeune. But that separation brought recruits and instructors closer as warriors and people.
“It was rough, but we loved each other,” McPhatter said. “There were days when we wanted to kill our drill instructor, but they became our family.”
Montford Point graduates served in the 51st and 52nd Defense Battalions in support roles. But in the Pacific theater, Black Marines took up arms in some of the war’s bloodiest battles, wiping out Japanese resistance at Saipan, Iwo Jima, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu and Okinawa.
“The last firefight on Iwo was my company turning back the last Japanese kamikaze,” said McPhatter, a sergeant with the 8th Ammunition Company. “We were still living in holes, and we cut them down as they came down from the north. We just laid them out.”
Camp Montford Point was decommissioned in 1949 as Parris Island, South Carolina and San Diego, California accepted recruits without regard to race. In 1974, Montford Point was renamed Camp Johnson after the Corps’ first Black drill sergeant, Gilbert “Hashmark” Johnson.
Although all-Black units like the Buffalo Soldiers and Tuskegee Airmen are better known in popular culture and military lore, the Montford Point Marines have gained recognition in recent years.
In 2011, then-President Barack Obama signed a bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal – America’s highest civilian award – to Montford Point graduates. In 2016, the Montford Point Marine Association dedicated a memorial with 20,000 stars inscribed at the Lejeune Memorial Gardens in Jacksonville.
