Albert Grillette Wood

Baltimore, Maryland

Many of Albert Grillette Wood’s friends back home in Baltimore schemed to flunk their Army induction medical exam. Not Wood, even though he was terrified of being shipped to a training camp in the Jim Crow South. He had heard stories about black men arrested on false charges and forced to work on chain gangs. While he never confronted that horror, the daily racism he experienced during his years in the Army left him bitter, particularly after entreaties to fight in the name of freedom.  "Discrimination hurt me more than anything in the world,” he said. "And I had to fight for these sons of bitches?" 

Albert Grillette Wood in 2012
Photo: Linda Hervieux

Albert Grillette Wood holds his wartime portrait. 
Photo: Linda Hervieux

Floyd Siler

Bennett, North Carolina

Floyd Siler landed with the 320th on Utah Beach on D-Day. He would never forget it the horrors he saw that morning. “The beach was covered with dead soldiers and you were stepping over them to get to dry ground,” he said.  Siler endured vicious racism during the war but growing up in North Carolina, his best friend was a white boy.

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Floyd Siler in 2011
Photo: Linda Hervieux

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After the war, Floyd Siler trained as a tailor under the GI Bill but found it difficult to find a job. He retrained and and spent his career working as an fire alarm specialist for the Secretary of State’s Office in Washington, D.C. until his retirement in 1982.
Photo: Courtesy of the Siler family

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Floyd and Helen Gill Siler were married for 48 years. They raised four children in Washington, D.C., before moving back to High Point, North Carolina in 1991.
Photo: Courtesy of the Siler family

Leon John Reed

LEXINGTON, Kentucky

Lt. Col. Leon J. Reed was the commanding officer of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. Although a son of the South, the Citadel graduate treated the black troops under his command with respect. He was unique among southern white officers in his avoidance of racial slurs, which he detested. In the words of one of his men, Reed was “a hell of a fine fellow.” Reed was proud of his war service, and kept newspaper clippings of the accolades his battalion received during the war. He died in 1989 at age 81.       

Leon J. Reed
Photo: Courtesy of Charlotte Reed

Lt Col. Leon J. Reed was stationed at Camp Tyson, Tenn., when he married Paula Evelyn Lake in October 1942. They had two sons,  John and Michael.
Photo: Courtesy of Charlotte Reed

Grant Gordon

Grant Gordon
Photo: Courtesy of Geoff Gordon

PONTATOC, MISSISSIPPI

First Lt. Grant Gordon of the 320th was the only African American in his officer training class. Limited by quotas and shut out of the top ranks, black officers had no choice but to accept the Army’s Jim Crow system. He was 27 years old when he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day with 70 men under his command. "We were all scared," he said 50 years after the invasion. After the war, Gordon settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he and his wife, Lucinda, raised two children. He was the first African American school principal in the city's public schools, where he worked for 35 years. He was active in the NAACP and the Urban League. He died in 2003 at age 86.