Richard Davis, 97, sits at his home in Sacramento’s Pocket-Greenhaven community on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. He’s one of the last surviving Montford Point Marines, a Black World War II unit who were the first African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps. (Paul Kitagaki Jr., The Sacramento Bee/TNS)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Tribune News Service) — Richard Davis keeps his replica Congressional Gold Medal in a glass case that his wife had specially made to hold the award..
The 97-year-old Davis, who lives in Sacramento’s Pocket-Greenhaven community, is one of around 200 people left from roughly 23,000 who trained at the segregated Montford Point Marine camp in North Carolina between 1942 and 1949.
These men were the first African-Americans to serve in the United States Marines Corps. And in 2012, the unit was awarded the medal, Congress’s highest expression of appreciation for an individual’s or group’s contributions to the United States.
Davis was one of about 430 men to travel to Washington D.C. that year to receive a replica of the medal. To date, about 3,000 replica medals have been given to Montford Point Marines, with about 2,300 of them presented posthumously to family. With records incomplete or missing, Montford Point Marines are continuing to be identified.
Men like Davis served the United States by enduring racism, harsh conditions and no guarantees they would see combat or meaningful service. And for decades, their stories were largely forgotten.
Saying goodbye
About 50 people had gathered at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Berkeley on a Monday morning in early May. They were celebrating the life of Moses Simon Jr., a Montford Point Marine who lived for many years in the Bay Area and died April 13 at 96.
Two Marines in uniform stood in front of the pews, holding an American flag. At the back of the room, a third Marine played “Taps” while a fourth stood next to him, at attention. Simon’s widow Juanita Simon sat in the first pew, with other members of her family, waiting to receive the flag.
This has become a familiar event to organize for L. E. Johnson, a retired Marine and member of the Montford Point Marine Association (which led a several-year push for Congress to award the unit the Congressional Gold Medal, building on this honor being given in 2007 to the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American military pilots who also served in World War II.)
Approximately 20,000 Black men trained at Montford Point during the war. Another 3,000 or so trained at the camp until the Marines were desegregated in 1949, according to a 2005 article in a Naval Institute magazine.
Some well-known members of the group, such as Sgt. Majs. Gilbert “Hashmark” Johnson and Louis Roundtree have been dead since long before Congress honored the group. Other members have died in recent years, with Davis being one of two Montford Point Marines that Johnson knew of in Northern California who are still living.
Davis wasn’t at Simon’s service, but the other Montford Point Marine in Northern California, Rev. Wortham Fears of Oakland was. Two days from his 97th birthday, Fears was wearing the navy blue blazer, white shirt and red tie that Montford Point Marines wear as part of their uniform.
Shortly after Simon’s service, as he sat downstairs in the reception hall, Fears told another representative of the Montford Point Marine Association, Michael Dodson of Elk Grove, that he’d kept quiet about his military experience after returning from the service.
“I didn’t make known that I was a former Marine,” Fears said. “Because we were so humiliated.”
A few days later, Fears sat for an hour-long interview in his office at the Christian Cathedral in Oakland where, like Davis, he spoke at length about his life and what led to his service.
Early life
Fears, Davis and Simon led divergent lives before and after their time as Marines.
Simon was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and began working summers in high school with his father as a plasterer, a trade that Simon would ply for more than 70 years, according to his funeral program.
Meanwhile, Fears grew up in Madison, Georgia, where his grandfather, Rev. Wortham Charleston, a former slave, built a church in 1889 that still stands. Fears’ father was also a minister.
Life in 1930s Georgia wasn’t easy for Black people.
“We knew we were human,” Fears said. “But we also knew we were treated less than human.”
After Davis’ father, a truck driver, abandoned the family in 1936, Davis’ mother, a housekeeper, raised him.
Davis and his family were among a small number of Black residents in Watts, California, which was then predominantly white and Hispanic. Others at Davis’ high school in nearby Compton included future NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and baseball Hall of Famer Duke Snider.
Davis remembered a Sunday morning when he was heading to the beach and heard an alarm alert that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. “I just didn’t give it much of a thought,” Davis said. “And I was just 16 years old at that time.”
When the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, the Marines still did not allow Black people to serve in their division. A 2021 History Channel article noted that the Marine’s highest-ranking officer Gen. Thomas Holcomb had said in April 1941, “If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites.”
Two months after Holcomb’s remarks, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination in defense-related industries. In May 1942, Holcomb allowed Black people to join the Marines, so as to comply with Roosevelt’s order, according to a 2002 Marine Corps Times article.
Davis was drafted into the Marines within weeks of his birthday in 1943. Fears and Simon were each drafted after turning 18 the following year.
How Montford Point Marines trained and served
Compliance with Roosevelt’s order didn’t necessarily mean instant acceptance for Black men who joined the Marines. Davis got an early taste of what was in-store while traveling from Los Angeles to basic training and having to give up his sleeping car when his train reached El Paso, Texas.
Rather than have Black recruits train at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, the Marines created an adjacent segregated camp at Montford Point. Conditions were harsh, with the men staying in prefabricated Quonset huts in the woods. Mosquitos and rattlesnakes abounded.
The Montford Point Marines didn’t get things any easier from the men who trained them, even Black men such as Sgt. Maj. Johnson (today the namesake of the camp.) The toughest punishment Fears remembered was the time he let a grain of sand get on the rifle he used for drills and Johnson discovered it.
“He told me to take my rifle and put it on my bedsheet,” Fears said. “And he brought eight more rifles from my fellow Marines. So I had nine rifles under my bedsheet. He said, ‘I want you to sleep on those.’”
The bolts on those rifles, Fears added, were up.
“You can imagine how much sleep I got,” Fears said.
Davis said that coming into the Marines, he didn’t have much discipline in his life “but coming out, I thought about that many days, many nights, the discipline that they taught me to survive. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have survived.”
Montford Point Marines were trained to fight. Fears remembered learning judo and how to take a rifle from an enemy. But between Fears, Davis and Simon, only the last of those men saw combat, fighting at the western Pacific island of Saipan.
While Montford Point Marines helped liberate German death camps, other WWII-era service could be less high-profile for Black enlisted men, who were often relegated to support roles for troops.
Davis wound up in Honolulu, serving in a munitions company that loaded ships bound for Saipan and Iwo Jima in the Pacific theater.
Fears prepared for deployment in the closing months of the war as a steward assistant, according to military records. After initially hearing he would be sent to China, Fears instead served in Pearl Harbor, where he said there was little for him to do.
“That was a relaxing six months in Pearl Harbor,” said Fears, who finished his service overseas in 1946.
Life after the war
After their service concluded, Davis, Fears and Simon each returned to the continental United States, where they got far from a hero’s welcome. None of the three men talked much, if ever of their time in the Marines, with Davis saying, “I didn’t give much thought to it after I came home.”
Simon fathered three children and resumed his work as a plasterer. Eventually, he got to know another person from Meridian who worked for a time in the trade, James Chaney. Chaney also did civil rights work and was traveling with two coworkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner on June 21, 1964 when the three were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Ku Klux Klan members.
The murders helped to galvanize the civil rights movement and became the basis for the 1988 film, “Mississippi Burning.”
Simon’s younger brother Donald Simon was friends with Chaney and had wanted to make the trip with the three men who were killed that night. “I was in school at the time so I didn’t get a chance to make the trip,” Donald Simon said while attending his brother’s service. “Otherwise, I would have been the fourth.”
Moses Simon Jr., by comparison, led a more low-key existence, moving to Berkeley around 1970. He met the love of his life, the former Juanita Mitchell while on a trip to see family in Detroit in 1977. Juanita and her two daughters soon joined Simon in California.
Fears moved to Oakland shortly after completing his military service and used the G.I. Bill for school. He later worked as an aircraft mechanic before becoming ordained in 1975. Aside from his career he had two daughters with his late wife, Saundra Fears who died in 1999.
Davis returned to Southern California following the war. Like Fears, Davis used the G.I. Bill while he attended college at Pepperdine. He eventually worked in educational administration, moving to Sacramento in the 1970s to work with the county office of education before retiring in 1986.
Davis’s wife of 75 years, Dolores Davis, said her husband talked “not a lot” about his military service. One of their three daughters, Marilyn Davis, a city of Sacramento employee, said her father never spoke of the Marines. All the family knew about it were Sam Browne belts, the distinctive hip and chest belts from the Marine uniform that her father would wear.
Rich Davis, 97, holds his Congressional Gold Medal as one of the last surviving Montford Point Marines, a Black World War II unit, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. (Paul Kitagaki Jr., The Sacramento Bee/TNS)
Getting honored
When the effort was underway to get the Montford Point Marines honored with the Congressional Gold Medal, Fears and Davis were each located in time to attend a 2012 ceremony at Marine Barracks in Washington D.C.
Approximately 430 men in attendance that day received replica medals, with many “sporting wheelchairs parked in rows spanning the entire length of the parade ground,” according to a September 2012 article in Leatherneck, a Marine magazine.
Fears wore his medal around his neck on the plane ride back to California and has it in his office today at the church, where he is still an assistant pastor. He is working on a book about his life tentatively titled “Blood, Sweat and Fears” that he hopes to finish.
Davis kept his medal in his handbag for his flight home from Washington D.C. The captain came over the loudspeaker at one point to note the presence of the honorees onboard and joked that lunch was on the plane’s staff.
Simon only received his medal last year, with Johnson traveling to present it to him. “None of us knew that he was actually a part of that,” said Simon’s stepdaughter Monique Mitchell of Berkeley.
For decades, men like Davis, Simon and Fears had their sacrifices, courage and service as Marines largely forgotten by society. These men easily could have been embittered by the experience. But when Davis talks to high school students, he encourages them to serve in the military.
“All of them can’t go to Harvard or Cambridge and the Peace Corps,” Davis said. “Without that, they’re lost. And that’s important.”
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