Forgotten Quotes

“Black soldiers comprised 60 percent of the fifteen thousand Americans who suffered through blistering heat, monsoons, and disease to build the Ledo Road, the 271-mile supply route through the mountains of northeastern India and Burma. The role played by black troops was acknowledged for the first time by the Department of Defense in 2004.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded during World War II, none went to the more than one million African Americans who served. Nine black soldiers received the Distinguished Service Cross. In the navy, one African American received a high award: Dorie Miller, the cook at Pearl Harbor who jumped behind an AAA gun he had never been trained to use and fired at Japanese planes until he ran out of ammo. For his efforts, Miller received the Navy Cross, the third-highest decoration at that time (it was later elevated to the second-highest). Among the fifteen men awarded the Medal of Honor for their service on December 7, 1941, one was Mervyn Sharp Bennion, the mortally wounded captain of the USS West Virginia, whom Miller had helped pull to safety before he began firing.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Detroit was ready to explode. On a Sunday afternoon marked by rising temperatures and short tempers, scuffles broke out between whites and blacks at a park called Belle Isle. A false rumor ricocheted among the African Americans that whites had thrown a black woman and child to their deaths off a bridge leading to the park. For the next thirty hours, until several thousand federal troops and tanks intervened, mobs raged through the city. “Race War in Detroit: Americans Maul and Murder Each Other as Hitler Wins a Battle in the Nation’s Most Explosive City,” bellowed Life magazine. Eight pages of disturbing pictures showed bloodied black men being chased, surrounded, and beaten by whites armed with lead pipes and bottles. In the end, twenty-five blacks and nine whites lay dead and six hundred injured. Seventeen of the black victims were killed by policemen. Of the fourteen hundred people arrested, twelve hundred were black, even though most of them reportedly had been attacked first. Despite the many problems in Detroit, bigotry did not reign in all quarters of the city. The United Automobile Workers union refused to tolerate whites who would not work with blacks on its assembly lines, and there were few problems. It was a lesson in what could happen when discipline was imposed. It is an example that another organization renowned for discipline”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“The South was more vigorously engaged in fighting the Civil War than in training soldiers to resist Hitler,” said Grant Reynolds, who made the remark about his first posting at Camp Lee, Virginia. He later resigned as chaplain at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in protest of the racism he experienced there.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“The mounting wave of discontent culminated in a riot that broke out off base in April 1942 as black and white soldiers queued outside Waldron’s Sports Palace. What happened next is unclear. In one version, a black soldier wanting to use a telephone took offense when a white MP told him he couldn’t leave the line. In the ensuing violence, some fifty shots were fired and three soldiers lay dead, two black privates and one white MP. The post’s public relations officer later explained opaquely that the melee was triggered by “some persons with a little too much race consciousness getting off track.” The situation remained unchanged one year later, when the Afro-American reported that the base was still a “veritable powder keg.” The incidents certainly belied the findings of a 1942 report by the Army General Staff that concluded that the policy of segregation had “practically eliminated the colored problem, as such, within the Army.” Even when violence wasn’t an issue,”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“the Tyson men watched, incredulous, as a long line of German prisoners of war filed into a restaurant where black men were not welcome. The enemy can eat there but we can’t. It was an often-repeated scene: African Americans were turned away at restaurants throughout the South, and sometimes in the North, but German and Italian POWs were welcome because they were white. During the war years, 425,000 Axis prisoners were interned in the United States, some 800 of them at the Memphis Army Depot.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win the war than work beside a nigger on the assembly line. —WHITE PROTESTER, DETROIT, JUNE 1943 CAMP TYSON, TENNESSEE APRIL 1943”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Their subsequent journey to Europe took them to New York City, where they boarded a converted passenger liner and set off on a harrowing trip across the North Atlantic, during which German U-boats hunted for ships just like theirs. Finally, they landed in Britain, where, to their delight, they were welcomed by people who had never heard of segregation. The freedoms they experienced there were life-changing. In villages in Wales and Oxfordshire, they lifted pints in pubs alongside white men for the first time and danced with white girls. This warm welcome infuriated many white American soldiers, particularly southern ones, who tried, and failed, to poison the Britons against the “Negroes.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Nearly four thousand African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Most of the victims were not accused of any crime before they were sentenced to mob justice for offenses usually of a dubious nature, such as “seeking employment in a restaurant,” “using offensive language,” and “trying to act like a white man.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“It is unknown whether the slaves of Greensville County had a life that was typical of or gentler than the norm. Records show that twenty-three of them were granted their freedom between 1790 and 1825, out of the presumably hundreds of slaves there. One extraordinary man born a slave in 1834 was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates forty-five years later. Henry D. Smith was among about one hundred black men who served in the state legislature after Congress ordered the former Confederate states to allow Negroes the right to vote and hold office. (The rise of Jim Crow laws ended this practice by 1890; Virginia wouldn’t see another black legislator until 1968.)”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“if I had ever learned about it to begin with, I had long forgotten that the U.S. military was segregated in World War II. It was a Jim Crow system of extraordinary breadth underpinned by virulent racism that mirrored life in many parts of my own country. As a white woman from Massachusetts, I was angry that the history classes I’d taken from grade school through college had downplayed, or even ignored, this shameful reality.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Black southern voters were shut out of the process entirely through the imposition of poll taxes they could not pay or literacy tests they could not pass. Some states outright banned black voters from primaries, and others sent armed men to polling stations to deliver a frightening message to any African Americans who had the temerity to attempt to cast a ballot. The winners of those elections rose through the ranks in Washington, creating a fearsome southern bloc that presidents such as Roosevelt were loath to cross.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Yet only one highly trained black combat force landed on Omaha and Utah Beaches. They would struggle to stay alive and get their balloons aloft, under withering German fire. The 320th medics would see glory, credited with saving scores of men wounded in the early hours of the invasion. One of them, a college student twice hit by shrapnel named Waverly Woodson, was recommended for the Medal of Honor, the United States’ highest decoration for valor. It was an award he would never receive, and I wanted to know why.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“the black soldier wasn’t wanted in the first place, and then he was held to a higher standard than the white man.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“Instead of accolades, what many Negro soldiers got after the Armistice was an order to stay behind in France and bury thousands of bodies.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“long line of German prisoners of war filed into a restaurant where black men were not welcome. The enemy can eat there but we can’t. It was an often-repeated scene: African Americans were turned away at restaurants throughout the South, and sometimes in the North, but German and Italian POWs were welcome because they were white. During the war years, 425,000 Axis prisoners were interned in the United States, some 800 of them at the Memphis Army Depot.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“At Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, German POWs could move about freely and use the same facilities as white soldiers. They got passes into town—a privilege denied to black troops, who were confined to barracks built on swampland in the worst part of the sprawling base.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War

“In one of the army’s most outrageous Jim Crow episodes, an order came down at a Pennsylvania camp warning that “any association between the colored soldiers and white women, whether voluntary or not, would be considered rape. And the penalty would be death.” After howls of protest from William H. Hastie, the civilian aide to the war secretary, and the NAACP, the War Department revoked the order.”
― Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War