2017 Interview by Lucy Bell with WWII Veteran, Joe Morgan, Colorado Springs, CO
Joseph Morgan
Born June 8, 1926, Died July 15, 2019
Served in US Army 1946-48, Fort Benning, Georgia
Joe sits on his shaded front porch facing Fountain Boulevard in the house he bought when Claudia and he got married in 1950. He’s a native, one of the thirteen children of Reverend Chester Morgan and his wife Anna, who founded the first Pentecostal church in Colorado Springs shortly after their arrival in 1918. Joe, 92 years old, still reveals the body frame of a natural athlete, who took part in sports all his life and was twice inducted into the Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame.
World War II? Oh, yeah. I was drafted like many other young men at that time. You know the draft extended through 1947. Troops were still needed as occupation forces. In 1943, my twin brother, John and I plus three other friends were sent to basic training at Fort Jackson, SC. He laughs.The newspaper did a story on the five of us, and said we were all cousins.
We weren’t there long when we got assignments for Korea. We made the bus trip across country to Camp Stoneman in California. But shortly after we got there, our orders were changed and we returned to Fort Benning, GA.
At that time the army was segregated. Blacks and whites served in separate platoons and had separate housing quarters. Most black troops were assigned to labor and service units. I did not look forward to peeling potatoes and other menial tasks, so I was happy when my application form showed my office skills and I became an administrative assistant, filing papers and typing out orders.
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The most enjoyable part of Joe’s tour of duty was yet to come. The army encouraged the formation of athletic teams.
An anonymous memo reads:
“Football is a body-toughener. Football lights the fighting spark in fighting men.
It develops aggressiveness, teamwork, stamina, physical and mental coordination
under active stress, and therefore it holds a foremost place in our national
wartime training program.”
Beginning in the fall of 1942, The War Department began to include team sports—football, basketball and baseball, as part of the training programs. Segregated, of course, but the black teams got to travel around their locations competing against teams from black colleges. Joe got on the basketball team. Their coach, Lt. Jones, was white as were most commanding officers. The team traveled to various black colleges in Georgia, Florida, Alabama and South Carolina. They slept on the classroom floors of other black colleges enroute, accommodations being strictly segregated at that time.
Joe remembers returning from a game, when the army bus was low on fuel, and they pulled into a small town with one gas station. The proprietor approached the bus, took one look at the occupants and with a toothless frown said, “No restrooms, no gas.” Lt. Jones pulled out the official Fort Benning payment pad and told the man, “This is from the army post at Fort Benning. It says that you will be paid for the gas. I sign on this line and you sign on the one below.”
Though still reluctant, the man obviously had been through the procedure with white troops. While Lt. Jones was signing his name, the man toughened his stance and shot a warning glance to those inside the bus to let them know were not welcome to get off the bus for any reason. Joe watched as Lt. Jones handed over the pen. With a grand flourish and a shifting of the pen in his fingers, he drew a large X. Joe shook his head in wonder. He wasn’t in Colorado anymore.
A more serious incident brought the point home even more. Returning home from a game in central Georgia, again with Lt. Jones in charge, one of the team, unexpectedly slumped forward in his seat. He was breathing but unconscious.
The bus driver pulled over to the side of the dark highway, and they lowered the player to the aisle, loosened his collar, and propped his head up slightly on his bag. Nothing they did seemed to revive him.
“How far are we out of Atlanta?” Lt. Jones asked the bus driver.
“About 20 minutes. Depends on traffic,” the driver answered.
“Go straight to the hospital,” Lt. Jones instructed. The driver followed the highway signs, finding the large metropolitan hospital easily and pulled into the ER driveway.
Lt. Jones explained the situation to the attendant who looked inside the bus and ascertained that the man on the floor was black.
“We can’t take him here,” he said. “You need to go over to…” and he named another hospital on the other side of town. He didn’t specifically say it was a black hospital, but it was understood.
“Where’s that?” the bus driver asked, and got a set of directions with various streets and turns described.
This time there were few road signs to guide the driver, and after several wrong turns, they finally found the hospital in the black neighborhood. It had taken another 45 minutes. A black attendant came on board the bus to examine the soldier.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This man’s dead.”
Again Joe thought of his home town of Colorado Springs, where restaurants, movie theaters and public swimming pools were segregated, but he couldn’t imagine the city hospitals turning away a dying man.
The next year, Joe got on the black baseball team and now enjoyed playing his favorite sport. One day, a white major came to Joe’s office and told his sergeant that he wanted to speak to Joe.
Joe, sitting at his typewriter, overheard the conversation, and thought, “Oh Boy, what did I do now?”
The Major addressed him, “Private Morgan, I’ve been watching you practice on the baseball field, and I wondered if you’d consider coming over to practice with the Company team.
Joe didn’t know what to answer. The Company team was all white. “I’ll think about it,” was all he could say. The major didn’t give up and on the third time, his sergeant got to Joe’s desk before the major did. “Enough of this hemming and hawing around. You give him an answer NOW.”
So Joe ended up being the only black player on the Company team. One memory still makes him a little embarrassed. Heisman Trophy Winner, Glenn Davis, part of the famed Mr. Outside/Mr Inside team at West Point, was sent to Fort Benning for advanced training. It was not football season, so he joined the baseball team for spring training. Joe was so star-struck he couldn’t catch a ball to save his life. Mr. Outside, an outstanding individual in more ways than one, realized what was happening. He went over to Joe, put his arm around him, and with a friendly smile and a pat, said, “It’s okay, just relax.”
Joe never traveled with the white team. That might have led to some problems on the road. But his discharge came up before the season started. Joe felt he’d seen enough of the South, and he did not care to re-up.
Joe returned to family and friends in Colorado Springs. He got married, raised a family and began a career with the US Post Office that lasted 37 years. He played on the all-black Brown Bombers baseball team that won the city championship in 1949 and 1950. The crowds loved the way he would leap into the air, catch the ball and land doing the splits. In 2004 he was the first black umpire to officiate at a college state baseball championship.
Joe leans back against the porch chair. I guess one good thing you could say about the service—you get to see the world. When people ask me if I went” overseas,” I say “Sure did.” Then they ask, “What part of the world did you see?” Joe grins. I tell them I saw Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama.”
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Lucy Bell, former writing consultant and published author, is inspired by James Baldwin who said: One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Lucy mines her own experiences with a preference for the humorous. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Most of It Was Fun.”
