The United States has no shortage of famous military units, from the Civil War’s Iron Brigade to the 101st Airborne, but one would be hard pressed to find one that had to go through as many hardships off the battlefield as the Montford Point Marines, a group of African American soldiers who overcame Jim Crow at home and official segregation in the military to serve their country in the final years of World War II.

In the summer of 1942, the first group of African American recruits stepped off a bus into the pine woods of North Carolina, bound for an experiment the Marine Corps had long vowed never to attempt. Their destination—Montford Point, a hastily constructed satellite to the new Camp Lejeune—was more than a training ground. It was a compromise with democracy, a segregated doorway into an institution that had defined itself for generations by who could not enter. The Corps’ exclusivity had a racial edge: unlike the Army, which had long employed segregated black regiments, and the Navy, which at least allowed African Americans to serve as stewards and messmen, the Marines had barred black men outright from 1798 into the Second World War. (Nalty 1995)

Between 1942 and 1949, nearly 20,000 black men trained at Montford Point. They endured tar-paper barracks that baked in summer heat and leaked in coastal storms, learned to drill to the cadence of instructors who sometimes doubted their right to wear the uniform, and mastered skills that would carry them to the beaches and supply trails of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Their story illuminated the paradox of wartime America, a republic that preached freedom abroad while policing hierarchies at home.

In the process, Montford Point became both a threshold and a proving ground.