Staff sergeant made history as one of first black U.S. Marines

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Staff sergeant made history as one of first black U.S. Marines
LaSalle Vaughn, part of the first Marine base for black recruits at Montford Point, N.C., suffered discrimination during his career in the military
Published Thu, Aug 30, 2007

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LaSalle Vaughn said the hardest thing in his 23-year career as a Marine was being passed over for promotion and retiring as a staff sergeant despite passing the test for a higher rank.

He said it was because he declined to work for yet another general as a steward, a type of personal assistant.

"My life in the Marine Corps was hard because every base I went on there was nothing but discrimination," said Vaughn, who was one of the first black men to enter the Marine Corps in 1942.

However, the outspoken 83-year-old Port Royal resident has garnered much more recognition since his retirement than he did in the Corps because of his insistence on passing on the story of the first black Marines, who were trained at Montford Point, N.C., from 1942 to 1949.

Vaughn was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Montford Point Marine Association in July, and a documentary on the Montford Point Marines, for which he served as one the advisers, is set to air on public television stations in the Carolinas starting in September and nationwide in November.

The story of the 20,000 black recruits who trained at the segregated base was threatening to be swept under the rug as recruits at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island seem to have not been told of it in their history lessons, Vaughn said. He said he asked a recruit at a speaking engagement whether he had heard of Montford Point Marines.

"He said, 'No sir, never heard of it. All we heard of is the Marine Corps,'" Vaughn said while sitting in a living room of his home on Sergeants Drive this month. "I blame the government, and they didn't tell the boys how misused and abused" we were.

Vaughn enlisted in the Marine Corps after he received a draft card for World War II. He signed up at a recruiting station in Chicago, shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt decreed blacks could join the armed force's smallest and most elite branch.

"We were not wanted in the Marine Corps," Vaughn said. "But I refused to go in the Army and Navy."

So, Vaughn set off in 1942 to the newly opened all-black training base in Jacksonville, N.C., where the drill instructors were white because no black men had been Marines, and the recruits lacked basic training facilities at the Corps' recruit training bases for white men, such as a pool and rifle range.

After training, Vaughn stayed on the base as a cook until black Marines started being stationed at other bases as the Corps began integrating them.

In January 1944, he arrived on Parris Island to work at the Officers Club and became one of the first black Marines on base. He said they weren't allowed to live in the barracks but slept in tents outside and only could travel to limited areas on base.

"You can forgive people, but it's hard to get out of your soul," Vaughn said.
Documenting the discrimination Vaughn and his comrades faced and their determination to overcome it is important, said S.C. State University assistant professor Learie Luke, who is the director of the project at the university. Along with personnel at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the Office of Naval Research, S.C. State University has produced a documentary and educational materials about the Montford Point Marines with a federal grant of $500,000.

"Undermining segregation is very important in U.S. history," Luke said. "This is a story about heroes."

Career paths for the first black Marines were limited, especially since the Corps didn't want them in combat, but many of the Montford Point Marines found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with white Marines in World War II battles and went on to fight in Korea and Vietnam after President Truman desegregated the military in 1948, S.C. State history professor William Hine said.

Completing the documentary now is imperative because many of the Montford Point Marines are growing older, and a few interviewed for the project have already died, Hine said. And their story is one barely known and worth telling, he said.

"Almost everyone has heard of the Tuskegee Airmen," Hine said. "Nobody has heard of the Montford Point Marines. It's a key reason" for the project.
The documentary, "The Marines of Montford Point: Fighting for Freedom," premieres at 10 p.m. Sept. 20 on S.C. Public Television, or ETV.

In the coming weeks, the project will begin holding seminars for South Carolina school teachers on resources and materials they can use to integrate the Montford Point story into their curriculum, including a CD-ROM and the documentary film on DVD.

Vaughn, though not featured in the hour-long documentary (a transcript of his interview is posted online), played an important role in the project by serving as one of two Montford Point veterans on an advisory board, Luke said.

"He helped give credibility to what we produced," Luke said. "His story is as compelling as every other veteran's story. ... Basically, what we found is that the story of one person was the story of many."

Vaughn tries to perpetuate the stories by being active in the Montford Point Marine Association. He is vice president of the Beaufort chapter that meets on Parris Island once every two months.

Right now he's showing off his Montford Point Marine Association Hall of Fame status, which he and a few other men received at the national convention in Jacksonville, Fla., in the end of July.

"To make the Hall of Fame, you do what I did -- be outspoken," he said.

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The Beaufort Gazette: Retired Port Royal Marine staff sergeant makes history