(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- I am Mike Galligan with the Law Offices of Galligan & Newman in McMinnville, Tennessee.

I support WCTE, the Upper Cumberland's own PBS station, because I believe it is important to create entertaining TV programs that also promote lifelong learning and understanding.

When I support WCTE, I know that I am helping our Upper Cumberland community for generations to come.

- [Announcer] The Law Offices of Galligan & Newman provide clients with large firm expertise and small firm personalized care and service.

- So why I decided to join the military, it was during the Gulf War.

My mom came in to me one day after I had refused to go to a school that was offering me a football scholarship.

She came to me and she was like, "Okay, you got three choices."

And one was go to work, and I didn't wanna go to work.

Two was go to college, and I was like, yeah, I probably won't graduate if I go to college, so no, I'm not gonna do that.

And then the third was join the military.

So the next day, I went and joined the Marine Corps and came home and said, "Mom, I joined the Marine Corps, what you told me."

And she goes, "Nope, that's not what I said.

I said join the military.

I meant the Army."

So, but I ended up going into the Marine Corps right out of high school, so.

(dramatic affecting music) - I am Avery Hutchins, the host of "Where Stories Live."

In this episode, we will delve into the numerous challenges and hardships that African American veterans encountered throughout and following their individual tours.

We will also take a deeper look into how they and their families managed to overcome these obstacles.

Major Rodney Lamberson and Walter Buck, Sr. found a career serving in the military, which also offered a supportive community for their families.

- I decided to take a military career path, initially based on the fact that I needed work.

I needed a job, and then my family had served in the military previously, and so that was part of my thinking process as to what I would do next or how I would, one, get...

I was working construction work, working outside, and I hated that.

And I said, I need to find me a job where I can work indoors.

Well, I wasn't qualified to work in indoors in any, you know, executive-type setting.

So I said, you know what?

The Navy has ships, and they don't go outside a lot, so I'll do that.

(chuckles) But that was my thinking process as to why I decided to join the Navy initially.

- I grew up here in Cookeville and Algood, so I was just back and forth between the two.

And my childhood was great.

You know, got to meet great mentors along the way, like Tom Savage, a bunch of my football coaches, baseball coaches along the way, Miss Johnnie Wheeler.

She was around for a lot of my growing up and helped out where she could with our family and everything.

But it was just a great childhood.

It was great to be here and, you know, being Black in Cookeville, it was, you didn't have a lot of the opportunities that other kids had, but they made sure we had those opportunities as well.

- The division of military that I served in is the United States Navy, and I am a Vietnam War veteran.

While serving in the Navy, I was an aviation hydraulics man.

Growing up right after the Civil Rights Movement, I, too, came up pretty tough in Livingston, Tennessee, looking for a way out.

And I saw that the military was the best way to go.

- I always remember, excuse me, growing up, that the military took care of our family as a kid.

So I'm like, well, if it took care of all of us, I'm sure it'll do just fine for just me by myself.

My bootcamp experience wasn't the greatest in the beginning.

I had some emotional troubles there, where I was wanting to go home.

(laughs) Because I didn't know what I was getting into.

You know, that wasn't the days of YouTube and social media where I could watch what I was gonna go through.

I just had a VHS tape that I watched, and obviously they're gonna show you the nice parts of it.

And I remember getting there, and within two days, three days, I was trying to go home.

I was calling, trying to call to go home, go home.

And as a kid, my father used to always allow me to pretty much do what I wanted as far as, like, playing sports, trying new things, instruments, or whatever it is that I wanted to do.

And when I didn't wanna do it anymore, he would always tell me that, if you don't like it, you know, just give it a try, and if you don't like it, then we'll find something else to do.

And not knowing what that meant to me as a kid when I joined the Marine Corps and that day that I was trying to leave and go home, you know, not recklessly, I just wanted to call and go home, you know, I remember the drill instructor telling me that, "Well, just give it a few more days, and if you don't like it, we'll send you home."

And something about that, when he said that to me, made me feel like I had an option, or a choice, and I was able to finish my whole bootcamp with no problems after that.

- Being a military wife was like being in a family group.

Everybody was family.

And it was a lot of opportunities for the wives to participate in whatever activity was going on.

And especially being a wife of an 82nd Airborne person, that was a lot of activities going on.

- It's intimidating sometimes because, you know, he goes into the military, you don't know exactly what you signed up for, essentially when he's signed up to serve.

But Johnnie was right.

It's a family.

- It's important to acknowledge the sacrifices that African American soldiers made in service for the freedom we share today.

And being able to share these stories with our children is how we continue to honor their contributions and understand their lasting impact.

Despite the significance, Dr. Krystal highlights the injustices that these veterans have endured throughout history.

- I think we do a great disservice to our forefathers and foremothers when we don't take time to actually stop, recognize, study, and appreciate their struggles, their efforts to make the world different.

Certainly, the world that my grandfather served in when he was in the Korean War of the United States, of which he was a part, is different from the one that we live in today.

So there are reasons to celebrate these struggles.

We can look at the military and see Black men and women in leadership in a variety of capacities.

People can join the military because they want the GI Bill, 'cause they wanna serve for a while and come back.

It doesn't have to be as weighted with political tension as it had to be in years prior.

So that liberty to decide if they wanna serve or how they wanna serve or for what reasons is something that people like my grandfather and my father who served in the Air Force passed to the generations today, who can decide if they wanna go without the burdens that they carried.

And so we need to do our job to appreciate the work of people in the military now and to encourage them to do all that they can so that as we go forward, the United States can have secure forces that we can embrace with pride and appreciation.

- African Americans have been serving in the military, to my knowledge, they started within Jim Crow, and so that takes us to World War I and World War II and to the present.

They were given the opportunity to enlist and serve in the military.

I would think, during World War I, the First World War, the draft automatically put 'em in there, so they had no choice if they passed a physical, but starting in World War I, deep into Jim Crow.

- One really vivid example of mistreatment of soldiers happens when they come home, especially during World War I, for example, when during the Red Summer of 1919, 10 African American soldiers are lynched in uniform.

What kind of message does that send?

You might have fought for the country, but here, back on these grounds, you're not a full citizen.

So that's going to rally people all the more to fight to see the United States become what its promise says it can be.

- I like to honor them by talking to my kids at school.

I tell 'em, my uncle before me, my cousins before me gave me the opportunity to be here for you guys.

I said, now I'm giving you the opportunity to go and be there for your family coming up.

And I said, as long as you keep the wheel rolling, you're gonna have success down the road.

And if it wasn't for them, like I said, I saw what they had done, and it kind of helped pave the way where I was gonna go when I made the choice.

- African Americans participated in every US war in the nation's history.

We see them aim to do so often to display their patriotism.

And before freedom comes, it's certainly a war for freedom every time African Americans fight.

We see this with the American Revolution.

When Lord Dunmore, who sat outside of the Yorktown Harbor in Virginia, who was pushed out because of the patriots' war efforts, he issues what's called Dunmore's proclamation in history.

And that's an effort to raise his troops.

So he's a British leader.

He has about 300 men on his ship.

And he says, anybody who is willing to come, servants, indentured servants, which would include European colonialists, slaves, come on over, free Black people, come to the British side, and fight.

And they're gonna come if that is going to mean that they'll be able to have access to freedom.

Prisoners of war, treated more fairly than Black soldiers, who would have to still be segregated from prisoners of war who were in the enemy camp.

They might not get the same amount of pay.

They also would not have the same amount of supplies and very often not have the same amount of training so that when they did get into situations where they needed to use the training, they didn't often have it.

And we especially see that in the earlier wars, like the Civil War.

- Despite the challenges that persist within the military, significant progress has been made in promoting diversity among its ranks.

- It's interesting to think about the types of shifts a family of military service people might see from the years of World War II into the Korean War, into the Vietnam War.

That period, the 1940s, '50s, into the '60s and '70s, brings a lot of change in the military.

So as I have noted, in 1948, we see desegregation happen.

It's not until the Korean War that we have a war with an integrated force, but it's really not until the Vietnam War when we see an integrated military with Black men placed as officers throughout the staffing of the military.

And one interesting way to think about what happens in the Vietnam War is to reflect on the Double V campaign with victory abroad and victory at home that was waged during World War II, and compare that to what one author called the Double Battleground, arguing that Black soldiers who were in Vietnam had to fight the forces that were the enemy of the United States in the war, but also had to fight within their own ranks with soldiers who were discriminating against them.

And they're in close quarters, no longer fully segregated.

And so then what happens in the Vietnam War is there's a lot of tension, there's a lot of infighting, but the battlefield itself creates this type of new opportunity for people to have to see one another in ways they had not before.

- That's very important, to have diversity in the military, what it shows when we go to these other countries and stand up, that they see that we have different races, different genders in our leadership roles.

Serving in leadership roles as an African American, it did show some of my soldiers growing up that, hey, you, too, can be a leader.

You can stand up and go to college, and become an officer as well.

One of the biggest ones I remember was a soldier had been in the army four years, came to Korea, was in my command, and he looked at me and kept looking at me, and he started crying.

I'm like, "Why you crying?"

And he goes, "You're the first Black officer I had ever seen."

In four years, he had never seen a Black officer.

So it meant something to him.

He asked me could he take a picture and send it home to his mom so she could understand that he, too, could be an officer.

So I think that sets the path for young men and women to see that, that they can also become leaders.

- I think that we're in a good place.

I think that if you look at the military, you see the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Austin, who's a retired Air Force person, and you can reflect back on Colin Powell.

You can see diversity throughout the ranks.

And it's not a new story to people that look like me.

They see that it's not uncommon in the military anymore that we just look one-sided.

And they see the good works of those that are in the military.

And I think that's very positive, and that gives us hope.

And people naturally, I think, gravitate toward diversity.

- One of the things that I think about is being a minority, being Black, and that, and then when we were put in, placed in this setting, you know, most of the Blacks usually stuck together.

We worked together.

You know, we hung out together socially.

And the racial tensions were there, but one of the things that is different about the military, and as far as the Navy and the way I viewed it, we always had to work as a unit.

There was no, I mean, the ship didn't run without the mechanics.

The mechanics didn't work without the food, and all of those sort of things.

So we were basically forced into a environment to where we had to work together.

And socially, it was different, you know, I mean, of course, because we lived in America, (laughs) and that's the way life is and was.

- Over the course of military history, African American soldiers faced prejudice when it came to being promoted.

This type of discrimination would impede their career advancement within the military hierarchy.

Fortunately, progress has been made with a significant increase in the number of Black soldiers being promoted today.

- To describe how it was like during segregation in the military, I would say it was being a servant.

Your job that you would do more than likely would be custodial jobs, driving leadership around, working in the mess hall, as they would call it, or cafeteria.

It would be that type of job, service jobs.

Why do I think it was that way?

It was because of segregation.

- One of the things that I recall, it stuck with me, was a friend that I met when I was serving on the USS Saratoga beat actually, and his name, I thought his last name was Williams.

And so his first name was a Hispanic name.

So I asked him, I said, "Well, is your dad last name Williams?

Or how did Williams come about as your last name?"

And he told me, he said, in order to be promoted, because of the system that the military has for a promotion, he felt like that him submitting his name, as a Hispanic name, that he would be prejudiced against as far as being promoted.

So he literally changed his last name from a Hispanic name to Williams to help himself get promoted to the next rank.

So that story always stuck with me because it was, I thought it was very interesting of the challenges that we faced.

At the time, it wasn't odd.

But then when I think about it now, I was like, wow, that's some of the things that, hoops that we had to go through in order to get advancement, into the extent that you would even change your name.

The higher ranking officers and that sort of thing, of course, we noticed more of a divide, if you wanna look at it that way, from that that perspective, you know.

We noticed because those were the people that we had to go through to advance.

And so our social connections with them was not generally, it didn't exist basically.

You know, your immediate supervisor, or, as we call 'em, the chief or whatever, those were the people that we mostly communicated with, and those were the ones that we had to develop a relationship with of sorts.

- It was definitely more political, kind of corporate style of racism that was not so directly in your face.

It was done paperwork-wise.

It was done promotional-wise, but not straight to my face.

No, I never seen it that way.

- Certainly, there was controversy about the integration of the military, and I think we should distinguish integration versus desegregation.

So even when the military is desegregated in 1948, it's not fully integrated until about the Vietnam War.

But there are challenges within the military who say to president, military leaders say to President Truman, don't do it.

Don't desegregate the military, because of the racial tension that exists in the country.

Prior to desegregation and even after desegregation, we have concerns about Black officers and their training and their treatment.

In wars like World War I, Black officers were not allowed to have white soldiers under them.

They could complain and have their overseers removed.

So there's controversy just with the military leaders being concerned about the ability to create unity within their units, considering that there is still racial animosity among the soldiers.

- You know, when you're in the military, we're all a team, and I know we say that a lot, but I don't think civilians understand how much that applies and how real that is.

We are all focused on the same goal.

We have this mission, and we do this mission, and that's the way we operate.

- Tom Savage and Walter Buck, Sr. highlights the importance of Buck Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery in Putnam County.

This cemetery holds the remains of numerous American veterans and is considered one of the oldest in the area.

Through their discussion, we gained insight into the significance of preserving the cemetery grounds and the meaningful act of paying tribute to those laid rest in there, which brings solace to the families.

- The relevance of this cemetery means so much, and that is, we have veterans in this cemetery, but to know that 23 or more Black veterans at this particular cemetery, which is an all-Black cemetery, it's basically a segregated cemetery, we wanted to target those veterans, get their name and get their rank, and what war they participated in, and honor them and let everyone know that there's veterans in this cemetery.

They did their part.

They would've done more if they could have.

And I think it's only fair that we honor all the veterans throughout this region.

- For years, let's see, my dad was buried there in 1979, and, of course, I wasn't around, I was in the military and I had gone away, and I come back.

When I came back, and I saw the condition of the cemetery.

I mean, basically, we'd clean around my dad's grave, and my grandmother's grave and her sister, my aunt's grave, and that would be, you know, it would be obvious that someone had taken care of that area.

10 years or 12 years ago, the city took over the cemetery, and it's immaculate compared to what it was.

When they took it over, I mean, there was gravestones turned over, there was trees on graves, and it was just really, bushes and that sort of thing.

But they have since taken it over, and I think the county has cleaned it.

And we just recently had a flagpole erected.

There's a Buck Cemetery sign out front and that sort of thing.

So that is something that I'm proud of as well.

- At first, I didn't understand it, you know.

I've been focused on myself and my healing a lot since the military, and it's gotten tons better.

My dad would say I recovered, and I'm just like, well, not all the way yet, Pop.

I still got some things in there.

But it means a lot.

What means a lot to me is how proud my father is of the things that are related to our family, as Bucks, as service members.

I think that is what's the most important to me, how proud my father is of his name, of what he's done, of the children that he's raised, of his career in the military.

And I claim more to that than I do the, I would say, I guess, I don't know how you would say it, but the idea of a Buck Cemetery in the sense, if that makes any sense.

I'm proud that my father is who my father is, and I'm proud that he stands on his beliefs, his religious beliefs, his convictions as a man of God, as a father, as a husband, and his desire to serve his community and to shed light on what would be considered injustice towards, you know, Black service members, African American service members, or just African American men in general, in any community, and he stands on that.

So the fact that it's doing what it's doing, and to see my father in the papers and stuff like that, and even my grandmother, his mother, is just awe-inspiring to say that, "Hey, that's my father."

You know, most people would do that if they were a sports figure or a movie star, and that's wonderful.

I would be proud of that, too.

But to see what I would call, what most sons would call their hero doing something, and then my hero just happens to be my father, in the community, and making an actual difference, it's more, there's nothing parallel to that.

So the cemetery being there is wonderful.

It's amazing.

Obviously, I'm a Buck, so it's great to have that, but I'm more focused on the fact that my father has that type of heroic mindset to do what's right and make things right that need to be done right.

- Despite the ongoing challenges, it remains crucial for us to persist in breaking down the barriers and working towards a military that values inclusion and diversity, both now and in the future.

I trust that this story has inspired you to push for positive change in your own life.

Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to seeing you next time when we go "Where Stories Live."

(gentle affecting music) (bright upbeat music) - I am Mike Galligan with the Law Offices of Galligan & Newman in McMinnville, Tennessee.

I support WCTE, the Upper Cumberland's own PBS station, because I believe it is important to create entertaining TV programs that also promote lifelong learning and understanding.

When I support WCTE, I know that I am helping our Upper Cumberland community for generations to come.

- [Announcer] The Law Offices of Gallagan & Newman provide clients with large firm expertise and small firm personalized care and service.

(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.