"In many places, the Army instituted a policy whereby white troops could go into town Monday, Wednesday and Friday and Black troops could go Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays - to keep them apart," says Gregory Cooke, a Black historian and educator from Philadelphia who helped make a 2013 documentary called Choc'late Soldiers from the USA, about Black U.S. Military police were tasked with enforcing segregation rules - even while deployed abroad in the United Kingdom. Before that, the military largely kept white and nonwhite soldiers apart. government banned segregation in the armed forces. It wasn't until 1948 - after the war - that the U.S. Smith, shocked by what colleagues told him about the origin of the bullet holes he'd spotted that day, vowed to change that - and has spent the past 40 years doing so. But because of wartime censorship, the battle was virtually unknown outside the tiny English village where it happened. It horrified the mostly white local villagers, who were unaccustomed to segregation and had befriended their Black guests. The Battle of Bamber Bridge - which took place 80 years ago this weekend, on June 24-25, 1943 - was a precursor to battles that would unfold on American streets for decades to come, during the Civil Rights era. And when Black soldiers stationed in Bamber Bridge stood up to the racism and discrimination, one of them was shot dead, and more than 30 others were court-martialed for mutiny.Įighty years later, they have yet to be exonerated. When American troops deployed to Europe to fight Hitler, they brought Jim Crow with them. What surprised Smith most was that this battle wasn't against the Nazis. They were bullet holes from a deadly World War II battle in Bamber Bridge, a tiny village in the northern English county of Lancashire. "And they looked at me with complete dismay and said, 'No, they're not termite holes, lad - they're bullet holes.'" "I flippantly said to my colleagues, 'You've got big termites!'" Clinton Smith, now 70, recalls.
Crawford of Detroit, Michigan, as the Regimental plans and training officer, is giving his men instructions in combat maneuvers.īAMBER BRIDGE, England - In the early 1980s, a Black maintenance worker in northern England noticed what he thought was termite damage in the wooden facade of a bank.
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