On June 14 — Flag Day, and just in time for Father’s Day — two former Montford Point Marines will receive posthumous honors and replicas of the Congressional Gold Medal. 

Family members of the marines will accept the replicas on behalf of their fathers, Gunnery Sgt. Lewis Monroe Alexander Jr., who served in the Marshall Islands from 1942 to 1945, and Cpl. Willie Gus Talley, who served from 1943 to 1946 and faced combat in Okinawa. The ceremony will take place at 2 p.m. at the Veteran Administration offices at 3900 Woodland Ave. 

Alexander told his family about his time on the Marshall Islands, but rarely mentioned his training at the segregated Montford Point facility. Montford was located just a few miles from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where white Marines trained. 

Alexander’s daughter, Lewisene Jordan, of Lafayette Hill, said, “Being a Marine was very important to him. He was very proud.” 

Segregation in the Marine Corps

Between 1942 and 1949, nearly 20,000 Black men completed Marine recruit training at Montford Point. They broke the color barrier by enlisting in the last branch of the United States’ armed services to enlist Black recruits. 

For decades, the Marines refused to admit Black men. That changed following President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order, signed in 1941, banning race-based exclusion from service in the military and employment in defense industries.  

However, conditions for the Black Marines were deplorable, said Joe Geeter, the current president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Montford Point Marine Association, and a past national president of the organization.  

While in training, the group lived in prefabricated huts made of corrugated metal without running water or bathrooms. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order calling for Black and white Marine recruits to train together. The first integrated Marine boot camps began in 1949. 

The association was founded in Philadelphia in 1965. Like Geeter, many of its members are former Marines who did not train at Montford Point, but choose to support and recognize those servicemen that did. 

In 2012, the Montford Point Marines were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, which, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, are the country’s highest civilian honors.  

About 400 Montford Point Marines attended the 2012 ceremony in Washington, D.C. Geeter said there are about 200 surviving Montford Pointers in the United States and only four living in the Philadelphia area.  

He noted that two Philadelphia Montford Pointers, Corporal Leroy Artison and Corporal Abner Younger, both died May 27, and their funerals were held June 10. 

Divine intervention?

When the Gold Medal replicas were awarded in 2012, Alexander’s family received only a certificate acknowledging her father’s service, Jordan said. She was told that only living Montford Pointers could receive the Gold Medal replicas. Her father, born in 1912, died in 2010 at age 98. 

Jordan, a retired Philadelphia elementary school principal, said, “I was angry and I was disappointed that my father wasn’t alive to see the recognition the Marines received in Washington.” 

In early May, Jordan joined Grace Baptist Church of Germantown. About a week later, the Jordans attended a new members’ meeting via zoom. One of the ministers, Rev. Clifford L. Stanley, was a retired Marine. When Jordan told him about receiving the certificate, Stanley replied, “Your father will get his medal.” 

Alexander was born in Georgia but living in Jacksonville, Florida, when civil rights activist Mary McCleod Bethune recruited him to attend Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach on a scholarship. During his four years there, Alexander worked as her driver. At times, he drove both Bethune and her friend, Eleanor Roosevelt. 

After graduating, Alexander enlisted in the Marines and subsequently moved to Philadelphia where he and his wife, Thomassena Rollins Alexander, raised Jordan and her younger sister, Linda Henderson, in West Philadelphia. 

The former Marine not only worked for the post office, but he and his wife served as block captains for the 1300 block of Wanamaker Street. 

“My father was quite a character,” Jordan said. “He was a wonderful individual. Home and church and family were important to him. He was like a Superman for my sister and me.” 

Henderson now lives in Florida, but also plans to attend the June 14 ceremony. “He was the best dad, he was the best man,” Henderson said. “He earned a gold medal for the life he lived.” 

Jordan is still amazed at the turn of events leading to her family’s arrival at Grace. “We had been looking for over a year, traveling around to visit different churches,” she said. “I think it was divine intervention, I really do.” 

Willie Gus Talley’s story 

Dolores Andrews is also excited about the Gold Medal honor her father, Willie Gus Talley, will receive. 

Talley was born in Virginia and grew up in North Carolina, she said. He joined the Marines in 1943, was promoted to corporal, and served in Okinawa, Japan.  

“He fought, he shot a gun,” said Andrews, a semi-retired nursing administrator, who now lives in Sicklerville, New Jersey.    

She said her father loved to point out that he fought in the war; some Black Marines were relegated to taking care of munitions. He also argued with other members of the armed forces asserting that the Marines were the toughest branch. 

After his military service, Talley refused to live in the segregated south. He first moved to Ohio before arriving in Philadelphia where two of his sisters had settled. 

Talley and his wife, Carrie Marrow Barner, reared their four children, one daughter and three sons, in Roxborough. The former Marine was self-employed as a contractor, doing roofing, plumbing, and electrical work. 

Born in 1924, Talley was just 60 when he died. “We lived in Roxborough from 1956 until his death in 1985,” Andrews said. 

Because her father had little formal schooling — he left school after fourth grade — he pushed his children to focus on education. He was strict and kept them close to home. 

“We grew up with strong southern values. We didn’t run the street,” Andrews said. “I went to my senior prom, but I didn’t go to school dances. I was a kid from Philly who never went to the Uptown Theater.” 

Andrews and her brothers followed the rules. “We knew what was important and what was expected of us, she said.

The upcoming gold medal ceremony arrives at a time, Andrews said,  when some in government are removing important history from federal government websites. “It’s revisionist history, and they are doing their best to erase us.” She added, “The work is never done, and we need to write our own history. Our fathers fought just as well as the white soldiers.”