The Korean War is supposedly where the military tested integration. Prior to that it had always been segregated units in the military. Jim Crow, he was in the military.

They needed Black fighting men, they wanted to win this war. But when it gets down to fighting, and you're on a battlefield, everybody has a gun, the circumstances change. A man with a gun, Black or White, is no joke. And so in a lot of instances, it appears the military powers didn't really want Black soldiers out on the battlefields to equal the White soldiers, with equal training and weapons. So, Black soldiers were assigned menial tasks, they were cooks, truck drivers and other lesser jobs.

Then there were other times when officials would come to the Black units and say, "We got this assignment that only your unit can do." And usually they were one-way missions, either very dangerous. Black soldiers would always get what nobody else wanted to do.

The Korean War was early on in my life, and I had uncles who participated in that war. They told stories about how easy it was to get court-martialed, how easy it was to be kicked out of the army as undesirable, or dishonorably discharged.

After returning home from the military, the majority of White soldiers could take advantage of the veterans benefits, but Black soldiers couldn't take full advantage of their veterans benefits because of segregation. They couldn't go to any development and use the GI bill to purchase a home, because 90 percent of developments were segregated. There were even schools that made it difficult for a Black man to attend, if not impossible.