A year before I was born, in the small town where I grew up, three African American children walked into my future elementary school while a line of U.S. Marines with rifles watched over them.
Black Marines and the Civil Rights Movement
“We Returned Home to our Enemies”: Black Marines and the Struggle for Racial Equality at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station
On the 23rd of May, 1963, Corporal Bernard Shaw, a 23-year-old black Marine, sent an extraordinary letter to the commanding general of the Second Marine Air Wing and to other senior officers at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Havelock, North Carolina.