All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio. I am Jim Fossone. I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you. I think you'll find very interesting.
We always want to remind you you can find more about Veterans Radio at its Facebook site or at the web.
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Where we're on the web 24-7, you can find a lot of our podcasts there as well.
We post new ones every Tuesday, so you can get a new story, a new interview,
something you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
And before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.
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We're going to recognize today on VeteransRadio. This is Black History Month.
We've got a couple of good interviews to talk about some of our African-American military members.
You know, this is about 19, I think, percent of the military are African-Americans.
And, you know, kind of, we all remember, I think, General Colin Powell, a four-star general.
What he did in his time in the service.
And even today, we've got a Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who is an African-American,
a four-star general in his time.
And he's now been appointed to lead all that as the Secretary of Defense.
In the last year, we've had a two-star Marine general, Lorna Malak,
an African-American woman, elevated.
Her area of expertise is cybersecurity. Very interesting.
And, you know, some of this is recent history, some of it's convolver history.
The first black female Brigadier General and Army nurse, Hazel Johnson Brown,
received her stars in 1979.
We've talked about all that long ago. So we've got a rich history here.
We want to talk a little bit about it.
We're going to first up talk with Marine Gunny Sergeant, Retard,
as a representative of the National Association of Black Women Veterans.
They're going to talk about an issue that they're interested in,
and that is the ability for the service academies to use race in consideration of admissions.
Because the point that is being made here is you ought to have an office of core
that reflects your enlisted core, and we don't have that.
We don't have a big component of black officers,
and that really starts with opportunities at West Point.
As I may have mentioned, Secretary of Defense, former four-star general Lloyd Austin,
was a West Point grad.
So that's an interesting conversation.
And then we're going to reach back and talk a little historical context.
So stick around.
We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today,
Marine Retard, Gunny Sergeant, Twyla Rochelle Cawthon.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you so much. I'm a Marine veteran. That's fine.
Thank you.
Well, you're always Marines, right? It never really ends.
And you actually have a tremendous legacy of service.
Post-active duty in the Marine Corps, your retired educator.
You're very active with the American Legion.
You're very active with Girl State.
You're a member, an active member of the East Coast Marine Corps Drill Instructors Association.
And you're a Steelers fan, so we could talk about all of those things.
Oh, that's cool.
But what we're going to talk about is your relationship with the National Association of Black Military Women.
You're the chaplain for the Brooklyn, New York Division of the National Association of Black Military Women.
But before we get into that, how did a nice kid like you from Ohio and Pennsylvania area, I think,
end up in the Marine Corps?
Well, I had finished all my credits for school, and all the colleges that were trying to reach out to me were colleges that were out of the state.
My father has one child on this earth, me, and he wasn't going to let me leave all the state.
And I was a student that was active in school, and I had held a host event every year at the school,
where we had different people come in and talk about careers, and I was actually friends with the Marine Recruiter downtown.
Now, the Marine Recruiter had no idea that I was going to come down there.
I actually went to the Army Recruiter, but he wasn't talking right.
So I ended up joining the Marines when my recruiter was Jesse Frierson, the third one, the best recruiters ever, because he didn't lie.
Well, it's really surprising how many people I talked to who had good recruiters, and remember their name and stayed with them the whole time, stayed connected.
Now, how long did you serve in the Marine Corps, Gunny Sergeant?
A few months of 12 years. I went in in 1979, and I got out in 1991.
And as I said, you've had a really impressive career post-service. Give us a little thumbnail, maybe flesh in some of the things I mentioned that you want to highlight.
Let's see. As you mentioned, I'm a retired educator. I was former police officer. I'm a decorate police officer in Akron.
I had two life-saving missions that I actually received accommodation for.
Let's see. I belong to the American Legion. I am the past Department Commander in Washington, D.C.
I am the National Chaplain, which is the sky pilot for the 24th, which is the American Legion Women's Honorary Society.
I'm the first graduate of the National American Legion College from the District of Columbia. I belong to AmVet's DAV Women's Veterans Alliance,
Micro Point Marines, National Association of Black Military Women, of course, but National Black Veterans, NAVVets, and just a host of, I can't even name, all the different things I belong to, and I actually put time in them.
It's not just the name on the rolls for them. But yes, we do a whole lot of advocacy for homeless veterans.
I deal with trying to sculpt out pieces of executive orders or to try to get a focus on military sexual trauma and PTSD, and not just that for the veteran,
but some therapy services for the veteran's family members who are also disaffected, because that's the population that people are ignoring.
The children that live in these households. It's just a whole lot of things. Homelessness with veterans, homelessness with women veterans is on the rise.
In fact, we're the largest population of homeless women on the street are women veterans. They can't take their children in the shelters with them.
They can't take their, oftentimes they can't take their spouses. Their spouses were not veterans as well.
This is a whole lot of things. So this is a whole lot that we're dealing with and we try to do piece by piece and National Association of Black Military Women.
That's really what it is. It's focusing about trying to make veterans whole.
Well, it's such an important organization because there is an increase in women in the military, thus an increase in women veterans.
There's certainly a high percentage of African Americans make up the military forces today. I think it's something like 19% of the troops and women make up about 16% of the troops.
But there's a disparity in the number of officers, black officers. I think it's 9% as compared to 19% of the troops.
So there's still a whole lot of work to do and you've probably seen that progression since you joined up in 1979.
But talk about some of the work that still needs to be done and that the National Association of Black Military Women are working on.
You need to increase the input of qualified young black men and young black women to join the military and join officer ranks as well because where you might have numbers coming in on the listed side,
officer ranks start getting thin after they are 03s. And by the time you come to the field grade or general grade, you can count them on one hand.
And I thought that I would see an increase in the Marine Corps as far as overall officer improvement of minorities period.
And there's an increase, the largest increase for Hispanics, but blacks and Asians, the numbers went down.
And some of this is just getting enough folks in the funnel, but then as they go up in years, as you say you stayed till 12 years,
those next eight or so are the ones where you've got to get the right kind of assignments and you've got to know the right people.
It is a numbers game, but there's clearly also a bias that exists in life in general, but also in the military, isn't there?
It's true. As a matter of fact, the officers that were black that I served with, and one of them was actually Arthur Ash's brother, Johnny Ash.
He was a captain at Camp Lejeune who couldn't seem to get past captain, and ended up getting out of the Marine Corps as a captain along with Captain Larry Ray Simms.
And I'm calling these persons out by name because these are phenomenal black men who had excellent quality degrees from upper echelon schools and high scores,
but they could not seem to get past that wall. And there was a study that was out some years ago where black officers were interviewed and asked about black Marine officers.
And they said that the biggest thing is that I'm asked to be twice as good or three times as better as my peer.
And I'm also asked that I have to assemble, I have to acclimate, I have to make all the adjustments in life in order to even be considered.
And so that was tough. And for me, being where I worked in every place I was assigned, even though I was enlisted, we as enlisted people were able to help the black officers better than they could actually help us.
And this is a problem that exists in the country as people don't necessarily appreciate the work and the quality of individuals.
But let me go back to a comment you made about enough qualified young black men and women entering the service.
And I ask a lot of folks this question because we have a current recruiting crisis in all of those services, maybe Marines a little less,
but otherwise we're kind of falling short of our manpower goals.
And are we doing enough to encourage qualified young black men and women to see the opportunities that existed in a military service?
No, we're not. And that's because there's a lot of factors.
One, corporate America offers higher salaries and better opportunities in a lot of ways.
You have a lot of people who might have family members that were service members and they see their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who try to apply for their disability cases
have to go through all types of red tape only to be denied year for year for year.
And so they're kind of chagrin as to wow, so you give this time of your life and this part of your life to the military.
This is how they do you. And that's just across the board as well because that's not only just the experience of black, civilian men and women, but everyone.
And then the climate of this country, the question is what does it mean to be patriotic?
We're in a, and we have been, I'll say, for the past, I'm going to say probably about 14 years in a great divide as far as loyalty and patriotism to this country
and what that really means because there's so much of divide between the political factions, extreme ideologies on both sides, the biases that we see in media reporting.
And the overall prison of pipeline system that's taken our young people at an early age and no correction in sight.
When you can't get qualified urban, and I was taught in the urban community and I was thinking about how many students I actually taught that by the time they got out of high school within the next year
were eligible to have even considered applying for the military and the numbers are low and short, some because they couldn't have passed the test or passed numbers so low,
others because they wouldn't have passed the psychological because they are traumatized.
They're not trauma services for the communities when, and when tragedies occur.
How do you think a child feels if in the summertime someone gets shot on my sidewalk in my house, or in my house, or in the sidewalk in my neighborhood
and I have to walk back and forth this same sidewalk in the fall to school and I have to deal with that thinking, am I going to get shot going to school?
I'm going to get a straight bullet going to school or just any number of things.
I'm at home in the house and the straight bullet comes in the house and hits and kills one of the persons in their household.
There isn't any trauma therapy for these people and this is where we are recruiting supposedly the next generation of service members and this just not happening.
Yeah, it really is. There are a lot of factors as to why the recruiting goals are missed and those are certainly some of them and,
but you posed the question and this is certainly an American Legion statement coming out of you I think when you asked, what does it mean to be patriotic?
Because that's sort of at the core of it all. Do you owe something to the country? Does the country owe something to you?
What do you view as, what's your answer, Twyla, to the question of what does it mean to be patriotic?
For me, it's loyalty to this country even if I don't agree with all the policies that are in place.
I've seen enough places in the world to know that this is the country that I want to live in. I was born here, I live here.
I like to travel outside of here but this is where, this is it for me. I've seen other systems and other places.
I think that we have not progressed as far as we should have with certain groups of people in this country and that makes it hard when you're trying to
translate this idea of patriotism to other people but I think that it starts in your household.
You have to come from a household where people actually have a view of this country that in spite of, we still got to work, we still got to,
and the historical context of the people who laid the groundwork for us before.
I stand on the shoulders of the women from the 6888. I stand on these women's shoulders.
That's an incredible story and veteran radio listeners, if you don't know about the 6888, I've got a podcast interview on that.
Go search it. It's an incredible story from World War II.
Yes indeed and the fact that if these women had not sacrificed in spite of how long it would have taken for black women to be able to serve this country in any branch.
But my father was a veteran and all of my father's male siblings served in some capacity in law and then were in the Army.
So it was for me something I grew up with. I grew up with it and it was in the household, it was in my community.
But of course now coming through an era where you see these Vietnam service members, it was a conflicted time, but I also had relatives that served in World War II.
I will listen to the banter between the two groups. To be a patriot means that you're not here to harm your community or harm the members in your community in any form of fashion or those in society.
To be a patriot means you need to be a law abiding citizen, law abiding.
To be a patriot you need to be productive. Whatever your intelligences allow you to do, whatever your physical capabilities allow you to do, to be a contributor to the success in your household, in your neighborhood, in your community.
To me that's patriotism, being patriotic because I'm not here to say that I agree with everything in our government and there are times that one party says something and I'm just cringing and I'm really just clicked out in different directions and opposite side as well.
I don't think any party left or right, A, B, C, or D has all the answers, but I do make my point to stay involved with seeing what issues are at hand and although I can't do the correction at maybe at the national level, what can we do at our local levels?
And that's where I think the mark is being missed. People don't understand the importance of local government.
Yeah, Gunny, I think you're right. It starts in the home and local communities. If your local community doesn't recognize and support military service, as you say, being law abiding, then it's unlikely that the community is going to be supportive of military service.
You went from being in the Marines, career in policing, career in education. Did you get the opportunity to use the GI Bill to get some of your education?
Unfortunately, and this is where information doesn't get passed well. When I joined, they had stopped the GI Bill and they had this program called the VEEK program.
Oh yeah, that was a horrible one.
Very, very much so because I could not benefit from it, although if you paid the amount, what happened was that when I went to college, I was fortunate enough to get a lot of scholarships.
I got all kinds of scholarships for academics. I got a ton of scholarships. I got a scholarship for broadcasting. I had all kinds of scholarships because when they used my education benefit, what they did was they sent me a $114 check a month.
I was not able to access the other benefits that they had put in, although I found out afterwards that I should have been able to cross over to, I think, with the Montgomery GI Bill.
It was, yeah, that was next. Montgomery was next, yep.
They did not tell us. Some of the units did not tell you. They did not know. My chagrin is that the VA does not allow you to go back and grandfather the people who did not get the word.
We didn't get the information.
That's really why it's important that the work that the VSOs do, such as the American Legion's VFW, DAV, because it's a complex set of benefits that veterans have, and it changes over time. And what didn't work at one point might work later on, and you need somebody who knows what they're talking about to help guide you.
And the other thing I find is, you know, when you tell an 18-year-old or a 24-year-old kid what his benefits are, they're not even hearing you.
So it's really important when it's time to really look at these things to go back, and that's why your work with the American Legion and some of the other groups you've mentioned is so important, and I suspect you feel the same way.
I do feel the same way. I just wish that we would see more productive turnaround for claims because they're swamped. I mean, they are swamped, and they're swamped for any number of reasons.
I wish that when a person says that I have been sexually assaulted that they don't have to go through so many people to continually be, you know, to tell the story over and over again.
I've had women who, and men, whom have been traumatized, and then afterwards they get triggered by telling this person who's typing this stuff out of listening, and then I have to go.
I don't have to, but I go to the hospital and I visit them or I take them there or talk them down so that they don't go back in that deep place.
I wish that we had more physical access locations for some of these veteran service organizations to have, you know, physical structures.
I think that if we had communities that really were focused more on veterans affairs and dealing with the veterans, veterans organizations, National Black Military Women, American Legion, we have tenants that we actually do community work,
and but to try to purchase buildings and maintain buildings and, you know, it's hard. That means that we're all stretched out trying to come together for common cause and common goals.
And where we do, the idea is that you have all these vacant buildings in these locations where we're now proper organizations, and there's a whole lot of benefit a community will have by allowing organizations to have these structures,
and that is rehab them and use them so that we purposeful for the entire community.
And one of the things that can be done with an association like the National Association of Black Military Women or any of the VSOs we've been mentioning is that you have a voice in those associations.
It's much powerful, more powerful than the individual's voice because it's a collective voice and it's heard more at in Washington or the state capitals and what have you.
Certainly. When you talk about the makeup of the military, our United States armed forces should be a microcosm of our society.
And if our society is made up of 13% of one group, then the military should be 13% of that same group, at least to hit that mark.
And when you have students that want to go to Harvard or University of Michigan or the University of Akron, you sign papers, you pay the tuition, you go to school, you get your grades, and you get your diploma.
That's what I do something you do something in return.
In the military, when you go to these military academies, it's a little different.
And this is why the race must be because the mission of the students who attend military academy goes beyond the walls of academia.
The persons who sign up to say that I'm going to go to military academy are saying I'm also signing up to give X number of years of my life in service.
When we look at the numbers of persons who serve, we notice that there's a difference.
I can speak heartily to this when you find at least one face that looks familiar to you versus being in a whole base and none.
I know that when I was in, General Peterson was a gentleman that I worked for.
He was the first black general in the Marine Corps, first one.
General Peterson, I met up with him at Quantico and every person who was attached to Quantico as a general knows that they're the base commander.
That was their twilight tour.
And as great as he was, he knew that he was never going to be promoted beyond that.
And his chances of ever becoming the commandant of the Marine Corps were ditched.
For 246 years, the Marine Corps never had a black person as a commandant of the Marine Corps at all or the assistant commandant.
This is 2024 now.
That's just unrealistic to think about.
But even now, you only have one person that could ever be there.
And that was the gentleman who was the Marine that was promoted two years ago.
The military academies must factor in because their obligation is to ensure that the military looks like society and that the military must function in a way that a student coming out of Harvard doesn't have to deal with,
student commissioners have to deal with.
If I go inside of a Wal-Mart or Walgreens and every pharmacist is Caucasian or Indian or whatever, it's not going to affect me when we're in next because they give me medicine.
I'm going home. I'm leaving out.
But in the military, I'm having to have a sense of comfort about the person dealing with my life and my hands.
And you don't want to have people in places where they don't see that they can ascribe to be at that level.
The military academies assignment is different. Their mission is different. The focus is different.
And therefore, you must at least know who you're getting coming in.
I know that it's not the main issue. I know it is not the overall arching issue.
But it must be considered because the military is not the civilian society.
No, it has an obligation to protect the entire country.
That's right. That's absolute.
However it's made up. And one of the things the National Association of Black Military Women is doing is supporting some federal lawsuits that are calling for clarity on this issue of affirmative action at the service academies.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out because it has big social political issues related to it.
I'm going to stop the interview here. We have the full podcast up on our website, veteransradio.org,
because I wanted to bring in a little piece of information that's developed since two weeks ago or so when we made the interview
and that the lawsuits that the National Association of Black Women Veterans is involved in, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to block the U.S. Military Academy at West Point
from considering race as a factor in admissions while the legal battle down below proceeds in the lower court.
People were arguing, hey, don't use race this coming year of admissions. And the Supreme Court said, hey, stay down below. You're in the trial court.
You're in the Court of Appeals. Develop the record. We'll look at it at a future point.
So that's a very recent development that we wanted to pass along in conjunction with this interview, which I hope you enjoyed and understand the perspective of the National Association of Black Women Veterans.
Let's have a few words from our sponsor and then we'll get to the other side.
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We're going to move now, I said earlier, to something a little more historical, and I thought this would be interesting for folks here during the Black History Month.
We got to talk to an author, Jill Numark, who wrote a book that focused on the African-American surgeons during the Civil War.
I think it's a great book that gives you this sort of whole look at how difficult it was to become a surgeon in the military at that point in time
and the struggles that folks had to go through. So, listening to this, I think you're going to find it a slice of history you really haven't heard before.
We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Jill L. Numark, an author, has written a fascinating book. Jill, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about my book, especially on VeteransRadio.
My father was in the service for a long time as well as a lot of his relatives.
Well, not a long time. He spent 37 years in the United States Air Force and was a chief master surgeon.
So, you come from that kind of upbringing and your book, Without Concealment, Without Compromise, The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons, is really kind of unique.
I don't think we've ever talked about anything close to this on VeteransRadio, which is why I said, oh, I got to talk to Jill.
This book apparently has its roots in some work that you were doing for the National Library of Medicine back in 2009, and you stumbled on one of these stories and said, I wonder what's going on here.
But it was like a 15-year odyssey to put this together, wasn't it?
Yeah, from that time until the published book, obviously, it takes a little time. That exhibition just piqued my curiosity, as you mentioned.
I was on my way. Just like any kind of genealogist, when you're doing a biography, you can keep going and going and going, and you keep trying to find these little pieces and trying to put them together.
So whether the story is ever really completely told, there's always new things to find.
But it was a journey of discovery and exploration, and I hope that it will bring these stories to light on these accomplishments of these Black surgeons.
I think it really does, and I think it should be of interest to civil war buffs, to medical history buffs, surgeons, to those interested in the civil rights issues, and veterans in general, because I found some themes that kind of run down all the way to today with all of these men.
And one of them was, they all had an overwhelming desire to practice medicine, and nothing was going to stop them. It wasn't easy, was it, for them to become doctors?
No, it wasn't easy. At that time, becoming a doctor was a little bit different than today. You could do an apprenticeship with a physician for five, six, seven years, and then go ahead and practice medicine.
It did not necessarily require a medical degree, but for these Black men, in order for them to be seen and recognized as physicians, they really did need to get medical degrees.
And it was because of the fact they had medical degrees that they were allowed to eventually serve during the Civil War as surgeons to the United States Colored Troops and to Black civilians.
And we have to put in some context to really understand the story that the Civil War was 1861 to 1865, April of those years, for the first year or so Blacks could not join into the military.
Finally, in 1862, you have the signing of the D.C. Emancipation Proclamation and in January 1st of 1863, Lincoln signs the Emancipation Declaration, and Blacks are more welcomed into fighting for the north, if you will.
And you mentioned the term that I think today would jar somebody's ear, but it was the term used at the time, which are the Colored Troops.
Yes. And I have to say that I don't know necessarily if they were so much that they were more welcome.
I think what happened is, as the war went on and they used all their resources, there were fewer white men to serve, and that goes for the Confederacy also.
But in the Union Army, and I think that they realized that they needed to recruit Black men who were anxious to participate and wanted to participate, and they knew that they would not be successful in winning the war unless they recruited and used Black troops.
And at the time, when they started to, after the, in January 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, it really, a lot of people think it freed all the slaves. It did not. It freed all the slaves in the rebellion states.
And so, but as a result of that, they formed the United States Colored Troops when they realized that they really needed to recruit more soldiers. I think there were almost 200,000 Black soldiers that served, which was about maybe 10% of the U.S. Army at that time.
And at some point, it also became obvious that they needed Black or colored surgeons to address the colored troops that were serving. But I want to back up to the apprenticeship and the formal education, because one of the themes that kind of runs through this is the difficulty all of these men had in getting that formal education at schools,
both in the U, primarily the problems within the U.S. But some of them went to Canada, some of them went to England. Again, going back to, if you really want to do this, they found a way to get that formal education. But it was not without problems, was it?
No, it was not. First of all, most of these men came from families that had some affluence. So that allowed them to be able to travel to places, gave them a little bit more freedom to do that. They were all born free.
But it was difficult. Alexander Augusta, who was the first African American commissioned as a medical officer in the U.S. Army, he wanted to go to medical school and had gone. He was from Norfolk, Virginia.
He went to Pennsylvania, where his brother lived, and he wanted to go to school there, but he could not get into medical school there. He had a mentor that worked with him, who was a professor at University of Pennsylvania.
But he was blocked completely. That was a little earlier than some of the others. But he ended up going to Canada, because that's where he was able to get a medical education.
It's also interesting that some of them have a career in front of getting either the apprenticeship or the formal medical education, whether it be a dentist or a barber. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yes. I think a few of them did have some other roles. For black men, being a barber was a fairly good job, because they could make some money.
I think that for Alexander Augusta, his brother was a barber, and I think he became a barber, maybe a surgeon barber. Surgeon barbers did other things like pull teeth and leech treatments where they put leeches on to draw blood.
I think that they did do that. I think for Augusta, this was a way to get enough money to get a tutor to teach him about medicine and also to go to medical school.
John H. Rapier Jr., who was, I think, maybe 10 years younger, he did some traveling before he went to medical school and he went to the Caribbean, to Haiti and Jamaica, looking really for a place where blacks could have a better life.
While he was there, he apprenticed with a dentist. That was his way of learning about dentistry, and he was going to be a dentist, and then he decided that he felt that being a doctor would be more prestigious and would give him more money in order to help support his father and his brothers and sisters.
So he did an apprenticeship with another doctor in the Caribbean, and from that he was able to go to medical school in the U.S.
But his story is a little bit more interesting in terms of his acceptance into a medical program.
He was rejected by the University of Michigan after he was accepted and then rejected because all the other white medical students got in an uproar.
Well, actually what actually happened was that there were two black medical students there at the time, and when John H. Rapier Jr. was accepted as a student there, they always want to know where you're from.
And what he did is he said that he was from Jamaica, so they looked upon him as a foreign man of color. There was another man named Alpheus W. Tucker, who was from Detroit, who also got accepted to the medical school there.
And he's actually the one that got yelled at when he attended the class by the way he got kicked out. And I think the difference was they saw him as a black man from Detroit, and they looked at Rapier as a black man from Jamaica,
and therefore he was a foreigner, and their attitude was a little bit different about that. But when they applied and they got into medical schools, it didn't mean they were accepted as students.
You can get in and you've applied and they've accepted you as a medical student, but you're not always accepted by the medical students.
Absolutely. Again, one of the themes throughout all of these gentlemen's stories is the express and subtle ways in which prejudice creeps into their life, whether it's in trying to get their education or practicing their profession.
But one of the things that also rings true through this is a theme is sort of the status that being an officer provided them, the uniform provided them in certain circumstances.
But I was surprised that this difference between being a contract officer and a commission officer. Can you explain that?
Yes. The difference was that at the time with surgeons, you were either commissioned into the military, Alexander T. Augusta and John Vance Erliedegras, there were 14 black surgeons, only two of them were actually commissioned officers in the Union Army.
The others were hired on contract by the Army as acting assistant surgeons. They were given a rank and they were given uniforms, but they were not formally in the military.
So they were just considered on contract with the Army.
And I believe that they did that. It gave the US Army and the US government a way of easily getting rid of them if they needed to, because if you're on contract, you can nullify the contract and out you go.
If you're a commissioned officer, it takes a little bit more to remove you from your position.
And again, that's one of those subtle forms of discrimination bias that they had to overcome to plie their trade.
And certainly this was a high profession as it is today, being a doctor, being a surgeon. At that time, they were at, as black surgeons in the military, contract or commission, they were sort of at the top of the social pyramid in their communities.
Yes, they were. And also, you know, within the Army, because they were getting paid, I think, $100 a month and $100 a month in 1863-64 with a lot of money.
You know, and so, you know, it was a question of, I believe that because of some of the difficulties that Augusta faced at the beginning and the way that the white surgeons complained, I think the US Army decided that they were not going to commission any more officers,
and they were just going to get them on contract. And that didn't stop them. A lot of times it was subtle, but in a lot of times it was not subtle at all.
One of the other things, you know, this is the prejudice I'm talking about, part of it is in their assignments.
Talk to us a little bit about the type of assignments these various surgeons received as compared to maybe what others did.
Yeah, sure. When you go through the federal records, all the assignments of these black surgeons, except for one, were all at black-only hospitals that served only black patients, both from the United States Colored Troops soldiers, as well as black civilians.
So either they were at hospitals that were for black patients only, or they were also assigned to recruiting stations examining black recruits when they were joining the United States Colored Troops.
The only one that was served in the field was John Vance early de Grasse, and his experience was very difficult. He faced lots of blatant discrimination, and eventually they brought him up on what I consider dubious charges of drunkenness and insubordination,
and they cashiered him out, so he was court-martialed out because of that. And if you do read all the court-martial transcripts, which are at the National Archives in Washington, it's pretty clear that they really didn't have much of a case.
But this was the way they could get him out.
Now, the other, Alexander T. Augusta was assigned, now you have to keep in mind John Vance early de Grasse was an assistant surgeon, so I think he was a lieutenant.
But when Augusta, who was the first, he was given the rank of major because he was a full surgeon, and when he, eventually, he was assigned as the regimental surgeon to the seventh regiment of the United States Colored Troops,
and when his troops mustered in, they rusted in with three other regiments of the Colored Troops, all of whom had white assistant surgeons.
And so Augusta was the ranking senior surgeon when he arrived there. They wrote a letter to President Lincoln complaining about being in a position, being subordinate to a black man, which they felt was unacceptable,
while they expressed their support for the advancement of the Colored people in the U.S.
But they couldn't stand for having him as the ranking medical officer, and although we don't know if Lincoln ever responded, Augusta was removed from that location and sent to examine black recruits in Baltimore.
The difference is that he was never removed as the regimental surgeon, so he remained that. They never replaced him with the regiment.
Your book does a great job of talking about de Grasse's charges on really what sound like made up drunkenness charges.
Yes, it was very clear because there were a few people that had written letters saying that they weren't going to join up again if this was the case and he should be removed.
And it's very interesting because one of the instances that they claim that he was drunk was at the Battle of Alesti, and the Lieutenant Colonel who was the commanding officer at the time was wounded at the battle, and the surgeon was treating him.
But what he did is he transferred the care of this commanding officer to de Grasse in order to accompany him to Jacksonville to get him on a ship to bring him north to like a hospital in South Carolina.
And it seems inconceivable that the surgeon in charge would have transferred the commanding officer's care to a doctor that was drunk.
But this is what they claim. Absolutely. And if he did, he should have been court-martialed. But again, it's some of that subtle discrimination that comes out of this.
It's interesting. And even today, you know, there are service members of every race and color and creed who say, I got picked on by my superiors, and this is one of the, you know, they gave me an article 15 or something.
This is one of the things they did to me. And again, these kind of themes run through here. One of the gentlemen, Dr. Powell, Jr., fought for 25 years trying to get his invalid pension and died before he was ever given.
And I can tell you as a lawyer working with veterans of disability, none of them want to go 25 years trying to get their disability payment or pension.
And when I read that, I got, oh my goodness, we still do some of the same goofy stuff today. Tell us about Dr. Powell, Jr.
Yeah, he was had a, his father was an African American and his mother was a Native American. They were from New Bedford, Massachusetts.
And his father was a staunch abolitionist and very well known. And he ran a boarding house for black sailors and part of the Underground Railroad, both in New Bedford and in New York City.
And so, Powell grew up with, you know, abolitionists and with all of this discussion in his home.
And I think his father and both his father and mother were, you know, were people that he looked up to and followed kind of in their footsteps.
So, he was determined to get a pension. You know, it's questionable.
Not because it was the right thing to do and he had had that core belief instilled in him from childhood that if this is the right thing to do, you keep fighting forever on it.
And he, as I said, he did for 25 years till his death in 1916.
Exactly. And he, you know, what he would do is he would get rejected and then the rules would change.
And then, you know, because at first it was you had to be injured, you know, during the war to be able to get a pension.
And then it changed to old age as pensionable. So, he would do this and he would get medical examinations and he would get depositions.
But you also have to keep in mind that a lot of the depositions came from other black physicians and or black people.
And at the time, people did not take depositions. They questioned the credibility of black witnesses.
So, that was something that came along. But it wasn't as if other contract surgeons, there were some contract surgeons that were white, that got pensions.
But there was definitely some discrimination going on there. And, you know, he was determined.
He felt that he had served his country and this is what was due him.
And he needed the pension.
We're talking to Jill L. Newmark, who wrote without concealment, without compromise, the courageous lives of black civil war surgeons.
And we won't have enough time to talk about all these gentlemen.
I want folks to read this. You're going to read about Dr. Anderson Abbott, who went to the White House reception with A. Ben-Mary Lincoln.
So, they're weaved into this are all kinds of interesting stories about going to Richard Green, the only doctor in this group who's not in the Army.
He's with the Navy, had a Yale education and then on to Dartmouth Medical School.
Every one of these guys, one's a preacher who became a physician, have very interesting individual stories.
But when you put them all together, as I say, these themes run through, I want to talk about Benjamin Boseman for a moment because I think he highlights post-service transition and success, which a number of these doctors had.
But again, kind of relates to people who get out of the service today, go on and do really successful things.
Tell us about Dr. Boseman.
Yes, he was actually from New York, from Troy, New York, but he joined when he went to medical school and he had a short term in the service in South Carolina where he treated wounded soldiers and six soldiers from the 21st Regiment of the USET.
But after the war, he stayed in South Carolina and he wanted, he was interested in improving himself, in moving himself up the ladder, social ladder and gaining some financial success and looked at different opportunities.
And one of those was that he became a member of the South Carolina legislature, which after reconstruction, there was the right to vote for black men and there was a lot of black men that wanted to become politically active.
And he served there, he maintained a medical practice, but then he went on to become the first black postmaster of Charleston.
Appointed by President Ulysses Grant.
This was a fascinating discussion with Jill Newmark regarding civil war surgeons, black surgeons.
And as I said, you could kind of feel some of the same themes our veterans face today, whether it be bias or prejudice, the challenges of being in service, the transition out of service, those sorts of things.
All very similar, rippling through time from the civil war all the way down to today.
So I hope you enjoyed that little bit of unusual history that you probably have not heard about before.
I didn't know anything about the difference between contract surgeons and those who had the commissions.
So that was sort of an interesting piece as well.
So that's what we try to do for you on Veterans Radio is bring you unique information about veteran stories, both present day and historically.
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One of those programs that I wanted to get on today's show but just ran out of time was an interesting discussion about how Sergeant Majors, black women have built a culture and they are now over, or they're roughly 50% of the Army's Sergeant Majors.
So very interesting story there with Eden Stradden.
You might want to go listen to that on our website. So just a lot of things we don't actually get a chance to bring them all to error.
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So until next time on Veterans Radio, you are dismissed.
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