By Sam Roberts
Frank E. Petersen Jr., who suffered
bruising racial indignities as a military enlistee in the 1950s and was
even arrested at an officers’ club on suspicion of impersonating a
lieutenant, but who endured to become the first black aviator and the
first black general in the Marine Corps, died on Tuesday at his home in
Stevensville, Md., near Annapolis. He was 83.
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Alicia, said.
The
son of a former sugar-cane plantation worker from St. Croix, the Virgin
Islands, General Petersen grew up in Topeka, Kan., when schools were
still segregated. He was told to retake a Navy entrance exam by a
recruiter who suspected he had cheated the first time; steered to naval
training as a mess steward because of his race; and ejected from a
public bus while training in Florida for refusing to sit with the other
black passengers in the back.
In 1950, only two years after President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces, he enlisted in the Navy. The Marines had begun admitting blacks during World War II, but mostly as longshoremen, laborers and stewards. By 1951, he recalled, the Marine Corps had only three black officers.
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Source: The New York Times
From The G-Man salutes the legacy and life of General Frank E. Petersen with the following video tribute. May he forever rest in peace.
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