"Walter-Morris" (January 23,1921-October 19,2013)

He was the youngest and only male of seven children.After high school Walter began an apprenticeship as a bricklayer,he found construction work was sparse during the depression.He joined the Army as a one-year volunteer in January 1941.After the  Japanese attack Pear Harbor that December.Walter continued his army service as a clerk.In 1943 he was "washed out"of  Infantry Candidate School on the 12th week of a 13-week program.He was relegated to guarding the parachute school at Fort Benning,Georgia.,with fellow African American soldiers from 4 p.m.,when the white paratrooper trainees left the field,until the morale returned at 8 the next morning.At the time the moral  of the African American was miserable.The post was largely segregated,including its movie theatre and exchange.In 2013,he told the Daytona Times newspaper in Florida,"When walked past the post exchange,we could see the German and Italian prisioners sitting at tables...drinking and smoking,and we,in the same uniforms,could not go in."


Under Walter's command,the men voluntarily began a daily regimen of  strenuous calisthenics similar to that of white paratroopers.He throught I knew how to lead men,because he had just missed becoming an officer in the United States Army by one week."His commanding officer Lt.General Ridgely Gaither,of the parachute school,drove by one day and saw "50 African Americans soldiers jumping up and down shouting,One thousand two.'He didn't  know what to make of it,so he called me to his office."Ridgely then confided in him that a new,all-African American parachute company was being formed,and the general invited Walter to be the first sergeant in that outfit.Walter completed O.C.S.in August 1944 and was the only African American student at Adjutant General School.During World War II,Walter became one of the first  African American paratroopers in the Army an original member of the all-African American 555th Parachute Infantry Company,was activated December 30,1943.


Toward the end of the war,they were tapped for a secret mission called Operation Firefly.While on westbound train in May 1945 from Camp Mackall,North Carolina,then-1 1st Sargeant Morris thought that he and the men under his command were headed to the Pacific, perhaps to join up with General Douglass MacArthur.Instead Walter,played a pivotal role in a little-remembered theater of war:the Pacific Northwest.As a smoke jumper,he parachuted out of airplanes to extinguished forest fires in remote areas that would take days by foot.The weapon most used was a shovel,to dig trenches to control or stop the spread of deadly fires.The Triple Nickles as they were called  became the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion.They responded to more than 30 domestic fires and made more 1,000 individual jumps between 1943 & 1947.They were augmenting the U.S. Forest Service's smokejumping program,which had been in effect for several years.Walter noted that,"None of the commanding generals wanted to accept the black battalion because it meant integration,which had never been done."By the time the 555th arrived in Oregon,the threat of Japanese incendiary "balloon bombs" had largely ceased by trade winds.A small portion reached the United States.A balloon that exploded May 5,1945,at their picnic site near Bly,Orgeon,killed five children and a minister's wife.Mostly,Walter and his men leapt out of planes to quell fires started by lighting,thoughtless,campers,or arsonists.They underwent rigorous training,learning how to use demolition equipment,how to climb trees and how to get out of a tree if a jumper got tangled with heavy gear during the descent.There was also training in how to avoid ugly encounters with bears and rattlesnakes,which vied for the food dropped into wilderness by parachute.


He married his first wife,Ruby Lovette in 1944.Lieutenant Morris honorably discharge in 1946 and headed to Seattle to continue his apprenticeship of  bricklaying for his daddy's business.In 1948,three years after the war ended,President Harry S.Trueman signed an executive order desegregating the military.Morris told the Associated Press decades later,"We didn't win any wars,but we did contribute,what we proved was that the color of a man had nothing to do with his ability." In 1950,he worked in New Work as a union bricklayer and forward,a foreman in 1965,supervising 15 to 25 bricklayers to put up school and libraries.As part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corportion Project,initiated by Senator Robert F.Kennedy in 1976 to restore Brooklyn inner city housing,Walter was appointed construction supervisor.He was involved with all trades for completing the 104-unit apartment complex,as well as the Restoration Mall for the offices of  Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.In 1979,Walter married Irma Page.She died in 1999.


He, spent  his postwar career as a bricklayer in North Carolina and then a construction project supervisor in New York,settled in Florida in the mid-1980s.Walter had four children and was a resident of Palm Coast,where he died at a hospital the cause of death was cardiac arrest.