Black History Month 2010: Fighting Jim Crow in WWII

Ned Turman: ‘He died fighting for democracy’

Printed below is an excerpt from Fighting Racism in World War II by C.L.R. James, George Breitman, Edgar Keemer and others.... The item quoted is titled "The Case of Pvt. Ned Turman: He Died Fighting for Democracy." Written by Albert Parker, it originally appeared in the Aug. 23, 1941, issue of the Militant. Copyright © 1980 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

BY ALBERT PARKER
Ned Turman, Negro draftee, died like a hero, fighting for democracy. He did not have a hero’s burial, but he joined the long list of fighters for Negro freedom and equality who were not afraid to risk everything, even their lives, in the struggle against oppression.

Like thousands of other young Negroes, Ned Turman was drafted into the United States Army and told he would be given military training to prepare him to help save the world for democracy.

But once he got into the army, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he found that the democracy he was being trained to defend was not supposed to include him.

He found that as a Negro he did not have the same rights and standing that other soldiers had. He found that he was not good enough to sleep in the same barracks that white soldiers used. He was not allowed to eat in the same mess hall. He could not drink soda in the same post exchange. He was forbidden to play checkers in the same recreation hall.

He was good enough to serve as cannon fodder like white soldiers, but not together with them. He was segregated from the whites, shunted off on the side. He saw that there were practically no Negro officers, and none of these few could command white soldiers, while most of his own commanding officers were white. He saw only a handful of Negro military police. He saw that most of the MPs were deliberately recruited from among the most backward, prejudiced, southern whites--men who were accustomed to treating Negroes as so much dirt.

There is no question that he, like the thousands of other Negro draftees, resented the way Negroes were being treated. In civilian life, Jim Crow is unbearable enough. But when he was being trained to die for democracy, he must have thought to himself many times that he would like to have a little of it himself, that he might just as soon die fighting for it here as anywhere else.

August 6 was payday for the men in Ned Turman’s regiment, Battery C, Seventy-sixth Coast Artillery. With many others, he went to town that night, to "celebrate" in Fayetteville, to go to a Jim Crow movie house, to walk around and see the sights in the windows. When Turman returned to the bus later that night, he was perfectly sober. Witnesses of what followed, who knew him, reported this to newspapermen from the Pittsburgh Courier and the Afro-American.

Turman entered the bus and sat down near the front. The bus driver refused to start back to the fort because he claimed that some of the men, colored and white, had been drinking and were too boisterous. He demanded MPs and the soldiers didn’t like this.

They argued with him until seven or eight MPs showed up. They entered the bus and told the men to shut up. One of them, Pvt. Mack C. Poole, continued to talk and the MPs began to savagely beat him over the head with their clubs. "It looked like the whole side of his head was caved in," one of the soldiers said later.

Ned Turman spoke up, said that Poole was in need of hospitalization, that he should be taken care of."Hospital, hell!" said the MP sergeant, E.L. Hargraves of Texas. "I’m going to take him to jail."

Evidently Turman repeated that he thought Poole needed medical attention. "Talking back" is what they call it in the South when a Negro tries to say something to a cracker.

Hargraves told him to shut up and struck him roughly on the shoulder. Turman threw up his hands to ward off the blow. In the South such an act is unpardonable. Crackers don’t like Negroes to lift their hands to a white man, even in self-defense.

Hargraves began to club him over the head. At the same time an MP outside the bus began to strike at him through an open window. And the other MPs advanced to do their share.

Suddenly Turman broke away and produced a revolver. The Pittsburgh Courier reports that he cried out:"I’m going to break up you MPs beating us colored soldiers!"

Those were his last words. He began shooting. Hargraves was killed, two other MPs wounded. When Turman’s gun was empty, an MP who entered the bus from the back shot him dead.

A night of terror followed. All the five thousand Negroes at Fort Bragg were rounded up, cursed, beaten, and driven by MPs armed with sawed-off shotguns out of the camp to another nine miles away.

All friends of equality for the Negro people will honor the bravery of Ned Turman and defend his action against his Jim Crow defamers. But at the same time they must realize that while bravery and self-sacrifice are necessary in the struggle against discrimination and segregation, they are not enough.

Jim Crowism cannot be overthrown by individual acts, justified though these acts of protest may be. One man may be able to inspire others, but only a mass movement will actually destroy racial discrimination. And to do it, a mass movement must have the proper program.

This program must be based on unity of Negro and white workers in struggle against the creator of Jim Crowism, the system of capitalism itself that is also responsible for war and fascism and unemployment. To achieve this unity, it must fight for full social, economic, and political equality for the Negro people. It must also demand military training under control of the workers themselves to put an end to the Jim Crow practices now employed by the officer caste.