Activism That Led to the First Black Marines

It was just a month since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. U.S. troops were arriving in Europe to join Allied forces in fighting Adolf Hitler’s invasions. The United States needed its people to help win World War II. And yet, in January 1942, the highest-ranking officer in the Marines, General Thomas Holcomb, expressed contempt for an effort to recruit more marines—Black marines—to the force.

Holcomb contended that African Americans seeking to enlist in the Marines were “trying to break into a club that doesn’t want them.” Holcomb was reiterating a complaint he had registered in April 1941, when he said, “If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites.”