Built on Honor. Driven by Results.

In the summer of 1942, a segregated training camp opened on the swampy, pine-covered shoreline of the New River in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It was called Montford Point — and it would become the proving ground for the first African American recruits to ever enter the United States Marine Corps.

For nearly 170 years, the Marine Corps had been closed to Black Americans. That changed in June 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in the defense industries. By 1942, the Marines — the last branch of the U.S. armed forces to accept African Americans — opened Montford Point as a separate training facility at Marine Barracks New River (now Camp Lejeune).

Between 1942 and 1949, approximately 20,000 African American men trained at Montford Point. They endured harsh conditions, segregated quarters, and white drill instructors who were later replaced by Black noncommissioned officers — legends like Sergeant Major Gilbert "Hashmark" Johnson and Sergeant Major Edgar R. Huff — who set an unforgiving standard of discipline and excellence.

They were told they would never see combat. They did. They were told they could never lead Marines. They did. They came home with medals, with wounds, and with a quiet, unwavering certainty that they had earned every inch of the title United States Marine.