see black generals, which I didn’t think would ever happen in the Marine Corps.” Back in 1946, Boone understood what he was getting into, partly because his mother and aunt, who had grown up in Georgia, gave him ample warning of what he could expect in the Jim Crow South. But, Boone says, “nothing that was said to me deterred me, because the only way I could go to college was the GI Bill.” While college leaders feared that this landmark legislation would open their hallowed gates to the rabble and thereby debase U.S. higher education, the GI Bill had just the opposite effect: Veterans-turned-students from all walks of life, instead, brought new vitality and ideas to the U.S. academy. Indeed, Boone says, “I think it’s frankly one of the best things the United States ever did because it developed a middle class and it allowed a lot of individuals to go to college” who otherwise never would have. Cultch and all, Bates prepared him well for law school, Boone says — he put himself through at Boston University by scrubbing floors in a restaurant — and for a long law career in Hackensack, N.J. Even though Montford Point and his Marine Corps career got Boone the college education he wanted, the medal is a welcome recognition of both the trials those pioneering black Marines went through and their contribution to a country that, at the time, was hardly gracious about it. “I’m honored to receive this award,” says Boone. “I did some research and I found out some of the people who received this award” — a list that starts with George Washington and
goes on to include other presidents, war heroes and such notables as Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Native American “code talkers” who used their own languages to encode military messages during World War II. “I’m in fairly good company,” he laughs. n Video about Nate Boone bates.edu/nate-boone-marine
Boone joined the Marine Corps because “the only way I could go to college was the GI Bill.”
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