 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| | | | | | | |
Volume IV, No. 1/November 2001
Remembering the Forgotten of the Forgotten
War
By T. Michael Sullivan
In a seminar to marked the 50th anniversary of the Korean War, Ron Armstead of the Congressional Black Caucus’ Veterans’ Braintrust likened African-American Vietnam veterans to their predecessors in the Korean War. "The Vietnam generation are the children of the Korean generation," Armstead said, opening the forum on African-American veterans of the Korean War.
Citing the "Tribute to Korean War Veterans" hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Veterans’ Braintrust in September 2000, Armstead talked of national amnesia and societal neglect of black veterans, stating that forgetting veterans and especially African-American veterans is a tradition dating from the Revolutionary War.
Updating that neglect, he read from a report on blacks in the Korean War prepared by Thurgood Marshall, then counsel to the NAACP and later a Supreme Court justice, and cited "legal lynching," the practice by which black soldiers’ performances in combat would be altered in military reports and court cases.
Lawrence Hogan, a veteran of the 7th Infantry Bayonet Division, spoke of the forgotten soldiers of the forgotten war. "We’re just not there," he said of black soldiers, referring to photos and other sundry records of the experience. Yet he praised the performance of African-American soldiers and spoke of "what they have done, what they can do and what they still do." He concluded his presentation with a moving and emotional reading of "The Killing Game," a poem he wrote in tribute to soldiers in the Korean War.
The president of the New Bedford Chapter of the NAACP told the story of his uncle, Sgt. Cornelius Charleston, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor "defending rights and freedoms he didn’t enjoy," and how he couldn’t be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Armstead related the experiences of African-American prisoners of war who, after their release and return to the United States, "had to sit at the back of the bus" before he honored Oscar Dotson, now a wheelchair-bound prisoner of war who spoke to conclude the forum.
