Loud As The Rolling Sea is a WYSO series that began with a community oral history project in Yellow Springs over a decade ago. It highlights the stories of Black people in Yellow Springs who were born in the 1920s and 30s.
In honor of Black History Month, we aired a new episode of Loud as the Rolling Sea every Friday last month.
Today, we’ll hear the story of Jonas Bender, a former Yellow Springs resident who became one of the first Black Marines. The U.S. response to World War II highlighted the racial inequities within the military. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the subsequent draft, the Marine Corps reluctantly began accepting Black recruits for the first time.
The following transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Note: Loud As The Rolling Sea is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio version of this story by clicking on the blue "LISTEN" button above, which includes emotion and emphasis not on the page.
Jonas E. Bender
Kevin McGruder: In 1942, Jonas Bender had completed his first year at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, when he was drafted and entered the Marine Corps.
Jonas E. Bender: So I report in September to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Camp Shelby, and went through all that boot camp, which was rigorous, very rigorous, and it was Black drill instructors by the time I got there. And they were tougher than the white drill instructors, honestly, because they committed themselves to seeing that we succeeded, and they gave us hell, excuse the expression, but we survived.
And then it's January of '44, and I'm on the way overseas to Funafuti and the Ellice Islands and then Enewetak in the Marshalls as a radar operator.
But the thing about that is that we were never, during those times, fighting; we were relegated to sharing ammunition boxes, lifting heavy loads, and doing what they call the 'grunt work' on the theory that Black men could not be good combatants.
McGruder: But battles in the Pacific on Saipan Island in June of 1942, and on the island of Iwo Jima in mid-February through March of 1945, would change people's minds.
Bender: And then when the fellas who got involved on Saipan and Iwo Jima doing those lifting jobs, only because we were not trained as infantry, and the bullets start flying and the situation gets difficult. These Montford Point Marines, and I never saw Combat myself, acquitted themselves beautifully in helping to win Saipan and Iwo Jima, despite not being trained.
Those two battles started the turn of the Marine Corps seeing that Black people could be good Marines. In fact, the Marine Corps history will show that those two battles and some individual stories of a Black marine saving the lives of white Marines and contributing to the success of the battle was started with with those events. And it was from that point on that the process began that we started becoming fully integrated as Marines based on that performance of those guys.
We did the job, not wanted, not respected, but we did it. And I'm proud of being part of all of that.
McGruder: After the war, Jonas Bender joined the staff of the Urban League in Dayton in 1965. He and his wife, Ethel, moved to Yellow Springs, where they raised their daughter Jerri and son Michael. The World War II Monfort Point Marines received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2012. Jonas Bender died in 2020.
Support for Loud As The Rolling Sea comes from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation. Loud As The Rolling Sea is produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
