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The Right to Fight - African-American Marines in World War II (Paperback)
Loot Price: R217
Discovery Miles 2 170
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The Right to Fight - African-American Marines in World War II (Paperback)
Series: Marines in World War II Commemorative
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Loot Price R217
Discovery Miles 2 170
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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When the United States began arming against aggression by the Axis
powers - Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy- the
Marine Corps had a simple and inflexible policy governing
AfricanAmericans: it had not accepted them since its
reestablishment in 1798 and did not want them now. In April 1941,
during a meeting of the General Board of the Navy - a body roughly
comparable to the War Department General Staff - the Commandant of
the Marine Corps, Major General Thomas Holcomb, declared that
blacks had no place in the organization he headed. "If it were a
question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000
Negroes," he said, "I would rather have the whites." Whereas
General Holcomb and the Marine Corps refused to accept
African-Americans, the Navy admitted blacks in small numbers, but
only to serve as messmen or stewards. The forces of change were
gathering momentum, however. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after
meeting in September 1940 with a panel of black leaders, offered
African-Americans better treatment and greater opportunity within
the segregated armed forces in return for their support of his
rearmament program and his attempt to gain an unprecedented third
term in the November Presidential election. Roosevelt won that
election with the help of those blacks, mainly in the cities of the
North, who could still exercise the right to vote, and he did so
without antagonizing the Southern segregationists in the Senate and
House of Representatives whose support he needed for his antiNazi
foreign policy. By the spring of 1941, many black leaders felt that
the time had come for the Roosevelt administration to make good its
pledge to AfricanAmericans, repaying them for their help. This book
offers a concise narrative that recounts the history of
African-American Marines in World War II.
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