African-Americans and The Marines

The estimated 5,000 blacks, free men and slaves, who served the American cause in the Revolutionary War included at least a few Continental Marines.  For example, in April 1776 Captain Miles Pennington, Marine officer of the Continental brig Reprisal, recruited a slave, John Martin (also known as Keto), without obtaining permission from the slaveholder, William Marshall of Wilmington, Delaware.  Private Martin participated in a cruise that resulted in the capture of five British merchantmen, but died in October 1777, along with all but one of his shipmates, when Reprisal foundered in a gale.

Two other blacks, Isaac Walker and a man known only as Orange, enlisted at Philadelphia's Tun Tavern in a company raised by Robert Mullan, the owner of the Tavern, which served as a recruiting rendezvous for Marines.  Captain Mullan's company, part of a battalion raised by Major Samuel Nicholas, crossed the Delaware River with George Washington on Christmas Eve 1776 and fought the British at Princeton.  The wartime contributions of the black Continental Marines, and the other blacks who served on land or at sea, went unrewarded, for the armed forces of the independent United States sought to exclude African-American's

For a time, a militia backed by a small regular Army - both made up exclusively of whites - seemed force enough to defend the nation, but tensions between the United States and France resulted in the building of a fleet to replace the disbanded Continental Navy.  In 1798, when the time arrived to recruit crews for the new warships, the Navy banned "Negroes and Mulattoes," grouping them with "Persons whose Characters are Suspicious."  The Commandant of the reestablished Marine Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Will Ward Burrows, followed the Navy's example and barred African-Americans from enlisting, although black drummers and fifers might provide music to attract potential recruits.

The Marine Corps maintained this racial exclusiveness until World War II.  Its small size enabled the Corps to recruit enough whites to fill its ranks, but other considerations may also have helped shape racial policy.  Marines maintained order on shipboard and at naval installations, and the idea of blacks exercising authority over white sailors would have shocked a racially conscious America.  The Marine Corps, moreover, had a sizable proportion of Southern officers, products of a society that had held black slaves.  Not even the Northern victory in the Civil War, which enforced emancipation, could bring the races together in the former Confederacy.  Jim Crow, the personification of racial segregation, rapidly imposed his grip on the entire nation, assuming the force of law in 1896 when the Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson and in effect, isolated blacks from white society.