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'Trying To Prove Something:' A WWII Vet Remembers His All-Black Battalion

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Robert P. Madison served in the 370th Regimental Combat Team, 92nd Infantry Division, the only all-Black division to see infantry combat in World War II.

On National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Robert Madison, a 97-year-old World War II veteran, recalls his time in battle. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Madison, who is Black, was attending Howard University in Washington, D.C. He left college to fight as an intelligence officer.

Black soldiers were segregated and marginalized, and Madison remembers a profound moment when a white general acknowledged his all-Black battalion.

It was, he says, "the first time anybody had recognized that we were there to fight."

Click on the audio button to hear the interview with Madison.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Kelley Dickens
Wynton St. Clair
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