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thedrifter
01-16-08, 05:23 AM
Marines celebrate Civil Rights leader
Published Wed, Jan 16, 2008 12:00 AM
By DAN HILLIARD
dhilliard@beaufortgazette.com
843-986-5531

Two of the Marine Corps' first black Marines and the president of the Montford Point Marine

Association were at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island's recruit chapel Tuesday to celebrate the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.alongside officers from the depot and Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort.

Before 1949, the Corps' recruit training process was segregated. Black Marine recruits were sent to Montford Point, a training facility within Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Retired Master Sgt. Frederick Drake arrived at Montford Point in 1942, the same year President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Marine Corps to begin training black recruits for service in World War II.

Originally from Birmingham, Ala.,Drake, 87, spent the next 20 years at Parris Island as a chef. He now lives in Port

Royal.

As Drake listened Tuesday morning to poems, hymns and readings celebrating King's life, he said it made him proud to see black and white Marines gathered together to train and pray.

"It's nice, like it should have been," he said. "We were serving together, and my capacities were just as great as the next Marine."

LaSalle Vaughn, 84, joined Drake for recruit training at Montford Point in 1942.

He also served as a chef, as did many of the Marine Corps' first black recruits, serving at nine bases until his retirement as a staff sergeant in 1964.

"There was a time when we had 50 generals in the Marine Corps, and I knew all of them personally," he said. "I had to be there to serve them coffee and that."

Vaughn, a Baton Rouge, La., native, also now lives in Port Royal and is vice president of the Montford Point Marine Association's Beaufort chapter.

Before Joseph Geeter, a retired master gunnery sergeant and president of the Montford Point Marine Association, took the pulpit, depot chaplain Lt. Arthur Wigginsled the gathered Marines and guests in a short prayer.

"We pray for our nation and our world, still reeling and healing from the residue of discrimination," he said. "Lord, it's ironic that in a nation that codified laws so that we wouldn't have a king, you gave us one anyway."

Geeter said he was just 15 years old when he'd heard that King had been shot in Memphis, Tenn. King's birthday will be celebrated across the country on Monday.

"I think I was angry, I was mad and I was scared," he said. "I didn't know where it would stop."

Geeter's younger brother kept asking him what nation's king had just been shot, he said. He told his brother that King was just a man's last name - he wasn't literally a king of any

nation.

"Not that many years have passed, I (understand) this King did lead a country," he said. "If I were to get that question from my brother today, I'd say he led the United States of America."

Ellie