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VALB Member Speaks His Mine
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From letters by Benjamin Goldring, Esq.

March 21, 1979

Dear Bob:
We have been patted, and pat ourselves, very much on the back, not only for having had an integrated outfit, but also for having had Black combat commanders. Books on our outfit have stressed this aspect, not only in respect of Oliver Law but also Walter Garland.

Yet, since Walter died a few years ago, the Volunteer has carried no obit on him. The Volunteer has carried many, many obts. My understanding is that only 2, all these decades, have been on Black Vets: Joe Taylor; and one I wrote on Crawford Morgan. I knew and wrote of Morgan only as a VALB witness before SACB. I happen to have read and scanned many, many testimonies of witnesses before one or another cold-war inquisition. In my opinion, Morgan was one of the relatively very few such witnesses-- irrespective of color or status-- who were effective witnesses (contrary propaganda notwithstanding). This resulted from his own qualities and not because I happened to be his counsel.

That we do no know enough of Black Vets (after Spain), or know them enough, to be impelled and to be able to write an obit on their passing away, illustrates the detachment of our actual lives (of which obit-writing is simply one little reflection). In contrast, white Vets, frequently enough, have Vets close friends or associates who are able to, and do, write obits on them spontaneously.

I happen to have thought for years that treating our Black Vets no differently from other Vets was error, historically and otherwise. Despite the poetry, the impulsion for most of us to go to Spain was plentifully bright and urgent. But for Blacks, crushing Hitler etc. meant returning, nevertheless, not only to oppression to but degradation; and this was clear to us all along. In the face of this, a hundred or so Blacks from here volunteered to Spain. I happen to think that such depth of understanding marked them as a particularly special group; and I do not believe that this applies in quite the same way to almost any other group But, in VLB, they were always so greatly outnumbered by whites (living their own separate lives) that-- without a particular effort--they were bound to be wholly submerged in it in

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practical essence, irrespective of intentions.

When I returned from 7 years in uniform, my early obs then included analyzing the record of convictions in 2 Black cases to check if appeals were merited. A Mississippi ex-Marine had been convicted of going on an armed rampage against whites; putting the pieces together bit by bit, from the record itself, demonstrated in fact that the whites, all armed, had encircled his and his family's house, and that from it he, armed, had kept the besiegers at bay. In the other conviction, the court-martial record itself, upon close analysis, demonstrated in fact that the white soldiers had been the aggressors in any army race riot in occupied Japan, but the Black victims had been prosecuted and convicted. What--before any official cold war--awaited blacks after the crushing of Hitler etc. hardly needs such illustrating.

4-7-79

Dear Bob;
Your mission to Spain, to locate Oliver Law's burial place in the Brunete battle area, could be of large historical (& other) significance. It is alleged that Law was the first Black known ever to command in combat an essentially white American military outfit (above a fractional unit). (If so, he might be the first ever in Anglo American armies.) If true, he is marked for historical interest, and, in this connection, could be and become the most important single Volunteer of all the Americans. Oliver Law, then, is history, qualitatively beyond the unsifted young and old soldiers' tales, and memorabilia that have colored an extent of the Vets' concept of history.

[[image - In Memoriam OLIVER LAW Commander of the Lincoln Battalion in the July offensive Died on the Field of Battle]]