FEMA

Maryland National Processing Center

Recruits of the Moss Point Marine Regiment on maneuvers preparing for deployment to Saipan in 1943.

Black History Month @ FEMA MDNPCS

by G. Mark Davis Sr.

This is Black History Month at the Maryland NPSC and we are presenting a PowerPoint  presentation on the impact of military service on the pre-civil rights era black  families.

Since my family seems to fit the bill in this respect I decided to document the military’s influence on my own family. The following presentation is just a synopsis of the service to country provided by my family down through the last two centuries. We have had a family member in every conflict since the civil war as far as I have been able to document.

My wife’s family has no slave history ( she is from Rhode Island and part French Canadian and Portuguese ) Her Great Grand Uncles were part of the legendary 54th Massachusetts  Infantry depicted in the Academy Award winning film “Glory” starring Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington.

I trace my family’s military history to my Maternal Great Grandfather who fought in the Spanish-American war (1899) and my Paternal Great Grandfather who was a “Buffalo Soldier” during the Indian Wars (1866 to 1900) serving on the Great Plaines and the New Mexico and Arizona Territories.

G. Mark Davis Sr.

The PowerPoint presentation below has sound files attached to it.  If  you don’t hear the sound check your speakers or headphones. If the audio does not begin with the opening slide, click the sound icon at the bottom of the slide.

Click on the PowerPoint presentation and make sure your speakers are on or your headphones are in.  Your PowerPoint program will open. Click on the Slide Show button to begin the presentation.Depending on the speed of your computer, the file might take a minute to download.

Top left: A very lucky Coastguardsmen (1943).  Top right: Lt. Houston of the 366th Regiment (Colored). Bottom:  Battery  A of the 54th Mass.  Infantry and Artillerymen in the Ardennes Forest (Bastogne, Belgium ) 1944.

A special note: A great many of these soldiers gave up their rank to join the  beleaguered 101st  Airborne Regiment  surrounded at the “Battle of the Bulge”.

Local commanders, afraid of  backlash from white officers and enlisted men forbade blacks and other minorities from outranking any white serviceman fighting at Bastogne.  At left are Moss Point Marines , the first of their kind to serve in the United States Marine Corps, 1943.  An integrated Seaplane crew in the Solomon Islands  in 1944. Right: Capt. Howard Wooton, a Tuskegee Airman.  At bottom right : Black Tankers of Patton’s 3rd Army  wait to  clear German machine gun nests at Cobourg, Germany in the spring of 1945.