Black veterans remember bonds, tension and isolation

Black veterans remember bonds, tension and isolation
By HOLLY EDWARDS

Pictured left: Charles Kimbrough shows the Purple Heart and Korean service medals he received during the Korean War.

When President Truman desegregated the armed forces on July 26, 1948, critics predicted racial tensions would weaken the military and morale on the battlefield would plummet.

Today, Truman’s decision is considered one of the driving forces behind the civil rights movement.

Americans were suddenly confronted with a difficult question: If black and white soldiers could fight and die for their country together, why shouldn’t they be able to sit at lunch counters and attend school together?

”There was a realization at the national level that we couldn’t present an image to the world of fighting to end oppression and continue to have a military that practices segregation,” said Reavis Mitchell, chairman of the history department at Fisk University. ”Certainly the integration of the military set the tone for the country that the American dream should be inclusive.”

While African-Americans served in every armed conflict since the Revolutionary War, the Korean War was the first that joined black and white soldiers in integrated units, Mitchell said.

The conflict brought troops together in life-or-death situations and led to a sense of interracial trust that had never existed before, he said.

But the years after Truman’s order were rocky for African-American soldiers, who still faced taunts, racial slurs and sometimes open hostility and discrimination.

Here are the stories of three Nashville veterans who served in the fledgling years of a newly integrated military.

Arnett Bodenhamer, Nashville NAACP president

Facing limited opportunities at home, Bodenhamer enrolled in the U.S. Army in 1952 right after his graduation from Pearl High School, an all-black school in north Nashville.

Two years later, he was assigned to one of the first integrated units at Fort Jackson, S.C.

One young, white soldier refused to sleep in the bunk next to Bodenhamer and instead slept on the floor. A few days later, he said he overheard another white soldier tell his mother on the phone, ”Mama, they got us sleeping with these person of colors down here.”

Despite the slurs of some of his peers, Bodenhamer said he won the support of several white commanders who helped him obtain key positions. Eventually, he became the platoon sergeant of a unit charged with providing security to Army commanders in the Korean War.

Though the troops were integrated, black soldiers serving in the Korean War weren’t on a level playing field.

”In Korea, black soldiers were poorly equipped and poorly trained,” he said. ”The guys went over there in khakis, and it was cold as hell.”

During the war, black and white soldiers developed bonds and a sense of trust they had never experienced in civilian life. But, he said, as soon as they got home, the bond was broken.

”We were all on a train from Seattle to Kentucky, and the closer we got to the Southern line, the more the boys backed up from us,” he said. ”Their attitudes and reactions to us changed, and they didn’t talk to us.”

While black soldiers returned to a segregated society, their experience with integration in the military made them less willing to accept discrimination at home, he said.

By the time Bodenhamer went to Vietnam in 1966, he said, race relations in the military had changed.

”We better understood one another and we had the same common energy that pulled us together,” he said.

After the Vietnam War, Bodenhamer led the Army’s Racial Harmony Team and worked with commanders and soldiers to ease racial tensions and, as he described it, ”tell the truth about what’s happening.”

The job also involved surveying every aspect of life at Army military bases to make sure a variety of cultures were represented at the library, the general store and clubs.

When he retired in 1973, he had achieved the rank of command sergeant major, E-9, the highest enlisted rank in the Army.

”I was able to accept some things and make some things better,” he said. ”My ambition in life was not to live life as I grew up. And I’m living proof that the military didn’t do me bad.”

Charles Kimbrough, retired veterinarian

Growing up in Giles County, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, Kimbrough had long been aware of the deep roots of racial segregation when he entered the Army in 1947.

While he also encountered racism in the military, he said the experience of serving in integrated units made many soldiers white and black less willing to accept segregation at home.

In 1951, when he was driving two white soldiers from Fort Benning, Ga., to Tennessee, the group stopped at a restaurant to eat and Kimbrough, the ranking soldier in the group, was denied service.

”They told the white soldiers, ”We can serve you but we can’t serve him,”’ he recalled. ”And the white soldiers said, ‘If he can’t eat, we won’t eat.’ ”

During his service in the first integrated unit at Fort Benning, Kimbrough also encountered what he considered blatant discrimination by his superiors. He had been trained to serve in a medical unit and was hoping to be promoted to head the medical ward at the base.

Instead, he said, his captain asked him to train a white man with no medical training to head the ward.

”He wanted me to train someone to take my job,” he said. ”But I wasn’t in a position to say, ‘Are you asking me to train a white guy because you don’t want a black guy for the job?’ ”

Rather than train the white soldier, Kimbrough volunteered to serve in the Korean War.

His first assignment there was in a military police battalion, surveying areas for enemy troops and guarding supply lines.

”I remember the black MPs were all walking, and the white MPs had jeeps,” he said.

Soon after his arrival in Korea, Kimbrough was hit by mortar and shrapnel, spent seven months in the hospital and returned to the United States.

While integration in the military led some white soldiers to change their views of segregation, others continued to support it in civilian life.

Kimbrough recalled riding a bus from Illinois to Tennessee in the early 1950s, and the bus driver told him to move when a white mother and her two children stepped on so the family would not be forced to sit near him. When he refused to give up his seat, a fellow soldier chastised him.

”He said, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t disgrace the uniform,’ ” Kimbrough said.

But overall, he said, serving in integrated units changed the way white and black soldiers viewed segregation.

”The experience of being in the foxhole together makes people have a lot of common interests. The bond that formed between white and black soldiers was critical to the civil rights movement in this country.”

William Daniel, Department of Veterans Affairs claims specialist

When Daniel entered the Army in 1948 after graduating from high school, his first assignment was in a segregated unit in Okinawa, Japan, defusing American bombs left behind after World War II.

At the time, most black soldiers were relegated to food service and transportation, he said, and defusing bombs, though extremely dangerous, was considered a choice assignment.

”I saw a lot of people get blown up defusing bombs, but at that time there was nothing that really scared me.”

He next served in the Korean War in a segregated unit that rescued downed pilots.

When he returned from the war, he was stationed at Rapid City Air Force Base in South Dakota, where he was among about a dozen black soldiers segregated on a base of more than 15,000 men. Daniel had achieved the rank of sergeant and was assigned to another air rescue team.

While the order to desegregate the military had already been issued, it took the Army several years and many phases to fully integrate.

Daniel said he felt isolated at the base and learned ”the true hardship of being African-American.”

When he told the general about declining morale resulting from the isolation, he was shot down.

”He got up and said, ‘You asked for integration, you got integration. Now get out of my office,’ ” Daniel recalled. ”That hurt me worse than anything else that happened.”

But Daniel said he entered the Army believing there was nothing the military could inflict on him that hadn’t been inflicted on his grandmother, who was born into slavery in Brentwood and lived to be 115.

Daniel said he also had a defiant attitude springing from his years of street fighting in Black Bottom, a poor neighborhood near downtown Nashville that served him well in the military.

”At that time of my life, it wouldn’t pay to defy me. When integration came to the military, it wasn’t as hard for people like me.”

Early in his military career, when he was the only black soldier in his training class, he didn’t back down when a sergeant threatened to kill him.

”I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘I didn’t die in Black Bottom, and if I didn’t die there, I can’t think of anything that will kill me in the military,’ ” Daniel said.

And when a white soldier refused an order from Daniel, who was the ranking sergeant, he said he quietly let the refusal go but found the soldier later in his barracks.

”He got whipped up a little bit,” he said. ”But later, I got him promoted and he told me about all the things he’d been told all his life about black people.”

Daniel said he believes that in life people ”travel on credentials.” When he was serving in the Vietnam War in a combat medical unit, treating injured soldiers, he said even people who didn’t like him had to put their trust in him.

”I was in a business where you risked your life. In combat, you have to be good at certain things and you can’t go around crying.”