'Tribute past due' black veterans

Banquet will honor some unsung heroes of World War II

RALEIGH -- In 1945, Cpl. Durrell Rusher, one of 1 million black Americans to serve during World War II, became part of history while carving roads and building airstrips on the Marianas Islands in the Pacific.

Rusher, now 90, was working the day the Enola Gay B-29 bomber flew from a runway on the island of Tinian and dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

"I had no idea. No soldier had any idea that plane was carrying the atomic bomb," Rusher, who lives off Oberlin Road, said Monday.

Tonight, the Charles T. Norwood American Legion Post 157 will observe Veterans Day by honoring former soldiers like Rusher at their Veterans Day Banquet at the North Raleigh Hilton on Wake Forest Road.

Post 157 was named for the first black soldier from Raleigh to die in France during World War I. At tonight's banquet, the American Legion Post will honor local African-Americans who served their country during World War II.

Last year, Ken Burns' World War II documentary won praise from virtually every corner. But Joseph Holt Jr., a Post 157 member and a banquet organizer, said the film left little for black Americans to identify with or feel pride in.

Holt, who was inducted into Raleigh's Hall of Fame in 2006, said the film left the impression that few blacks served their country during World War II.

"America's mental picture of a World War II soldier was not that of a person of color," he said.

Millie Dunn Veasey, a retired St. Augustine's College administrator, enlisted in the Women's Army Corps in 1943. Veasey, of Rock Quarry Road, served in the only African-American women's unit to deploy in England and France during the war.

Now 90, Veasey -- ever the educator -- noted the banquet's theme is "a tribute past due: honoring our past to ensure our future."

War was hell, surviving soldiers said, and segregation didn't help.

Separate, unequal

Rusher recalled sleeping in tents while white soldiers slept in barracks. Hubert Poole, who joined the Marines in 1943, remembers the passionate editorials in black newspapers demanding that black soldiers be given the chance to fight.

"Segregation made us feel terrible," said Poole, who unloaded and loaded ammo for missions flying and sailing out of Guadalcanal and Guam. "But you knew you had a job to do, and you just did it."

A little compassion went a long way. Rusher remembered the day first lady Eleanor Roosevelt showed up at Tinian to have lunch with the troops.

"She ate at my table," he said.

As many as 10 black veterans are expected at tonight's banquet. Rusher bought his ticket months ago.

"Some of the veterans are now quite senior and old, but hopefully they will be present," Holt said.