<Begin Segment 7>

FS: When we were, when we first got to Camp Shelby, we were told by the officers, and these of course were Caucasian officers, said, "You are, here, down in the South, you are white. You are not to use black facilities; not the toilets, the water fountains, or you are not to ride in the back of the bus." And that was very, very clear. And the people down there did not, well, did not treat us like black folks. It, in those days, in the '40s, it was very, very apparent. I tell this story, I heard it, I didn't see it. But the, one of the guys in my company said when he was, when he got to the recruit detachment in Camp Shelby in Mississippi. They, they were watching the formation, retreat formation, a white platoon, or a white company, and a white commander, they're going through the drill, and this black recruit walked along the edge of where they were forming. And the officer stepped forward and punched this black soldier, black recruit, knocked him down, and then went about his business. And the black soldier didn't do anything; the black recruit just got up and walked away. And it's a story that, that when you think about the South, represented the worst of southern Mississippi. It doesn't happen all the time.

[Interruption]

FS: But you've got to think, when you talk about segregated units, you've got to think, first of all, that the army was segregated in those days. For instance, most of the, like the service units, truck drivers and stuff, there were a lot of black segregated truck driver units, and stuff like that. They formed the all-black 92nd Division. But it was pretty much the, it was pretty much the standard for, for the military. Units were segregated.

[Interruption]

FS: Well, that's, you're right about, about being considered white. But I guess they only had so much prejudice to go around, and so we were not, we were not treated as, as blacks. Like I say, I would have expected, going to the South, that they would have made us ride in the back of the bus, too, but it did not happen.

AD: Was that, I mean, did you think about it at the time as being anything strange?

FS: Yes, I was. I was... well, I grew up in a community where there weren't any blacks, and I didn't think much about, about whether, about segregation at all. But I knew about segregation in the South, and when we got down there and saw the, the segregated, all of the segregated facilities, everything was segregated. The water fountains, turn on, says, "black" and "white," you turned it on and the water's the same. [Laughs] And of course, you see the, when you're walking down the street, if you walked down the street, the black man gets out of your way. "Holy cow, this is tougher than living in Spokane by far." It was, it was difficult, difficult to watch, actually.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.