In 1959, George Brooks (from Detroit and Black) and I (White from New England) first met at Fort Sam Houston’s training center for medics, then together made it through jump school, and were both assigned to the 82nd Airborne’s Medical Company at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.
Though President Truman had fully integrated the U.S. military in 1948, everywhere off-post was strictly Jim Crow racial segregation in Dixie a decade later.
The February 1960 Woolworths sit-in by four A&M students in Greensboro 60 miles north of Bragg electrified Brooks and me, and as the sit-ins raced across the South, we followed them intently during excited talks over beers in the Enlisted Men’s club.
As the Congress of Racial Equality’s Freedom Rides roared through North Carolina in 1961, Brooks and I had front-row seats again, and more conversations.
We toyed with volunteering for going on a Freedom Ride together—two paratroopers, one Black and one White, wearing our dress uniforms with bloused jump boots, All-American Division shoulder patches, and jump wings—but this wild notion never survived our EM club conversations, and anyway, CORE most likely would have turned us away.
So when it happened, our sit-in was an accident.
On summer divisional maneuvers South Carolina in 1961—and hot, lost, and thirsty as hell in a three-quarter-ton truck on a meandering sandy track though pine woods—Brooks, Willie Johnson (also Black), and I rolled up to a shabby country café near Cheraw.
We clomped in, clattered down at a little table, and asked for three Falstaffs.
“Go outside and around back,” we were told.
“No way!” declared Brooks, scowling around that beery backwoods den. “We’ll drink them right here! And right now!” So commenced our sit-in.
There we were, three American privates in full field gear, medical brassards, helmets and jump boots, and armed with carbines. Not to be removed, we were served three icy tallboys at a little table in that dark cafe amongst rednecks and loblollies.
Miles from any Woolworths or interstate Greyhound, unsought and unexpected, it wasn’t non-violent direct action Dr. King-style, but we were served our beers, no one was hurt, and no one was busted.
Brooks decided to re-enlist and I was discharged in 1962, and so we parted. When President Johnson signed the public accommodations act two years later, I found myself in Mississippi helping Black folks register to vote.
