Trailblazing paratrooper broke color barrier in secretThurgood Marshall, Hattie McDaniel, the Tuskegee Airmen and Walter Morris -- all African-Americans who made history breaking the color barrier. But while America's first black Supreme Court justice,
Tile Bladethe first African-American Oscar winner and the U.S. military's first African-American pilots are well known,
Hair replacementyou may never have heard of Walter Morris or his role in American history.
The War Department, as the Defense Department used to be called, wanted it that way. On Thursday, a ceremony at the Pentagon will undo that.
When Walter Morris first joined the Army just before World War II, he wasn't a "black" or "Negro" or "African-American" soldier -- he was "colored." And he was treated like all the other "colored" men who wanted to fight for their country.
"We were servants, we were not soldiers," Morris said. "Most of us had an inferiority complex and it was a result of what they had assigned us to do."
In the Deep South in the 1940s, racism was out in the open,
Hair replacementincluding in the Army.
"You could walk down the street in the main post exchange area and in the summer the door would be open and you could look in and see white soldiers and prisoners of war from Germany sitting at the same table drinking, smoking," Morris said. "That in itself gave you this inferiority complex.
Tile BladeYou are in uniform. and you couldn't go in, but the prisoners could go in and have coffee and cigarettes."
But by the time he left the Army, Morris would become the first "colored" man ever to earn the U.S. Army Airborne Parachutist Badge. It's all because he wanted to overcome that "inferiority complex."
Morris was the sergeant for a unit of black soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Hair replacementThat's where the Army was training white soldiers to be Airborne parachutists.
So after watching the white soldiers training,
Tile Bladehe would gather up black soldiers who had finished their jobs as cooks, guards or drivers, and they would duplicate the training the white trainees had just gone through.
