“When we get up to where we are now, American history is American history and then you have black history, which I resent. I resent it greatly.” — Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman emphatically makes his point in the new History documentary, “761st Tank Battalion: The Original Black Panthers,” which opens with a D-Day battle clip from the 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan.”Freeman
“History tends to overlook this,” said Freeman, who hosts the documentary and interviews Robert Andry, a 98-year-old survivor of the 761st Tank Battalion, and“When we get up to where we are now, American history is American history and then you have black history, which I resent,” Freeman said. “I resent it greatly. I don’t even want to be called African-American because I’m not African — and haven’t been for many generations.
“Going into battle killing, and being killed is not normal,” said Freeman, who served in the US Air Force from 1955-1959. “When we do it under extreme stress and when we come back from that extreme stress, most of the time we don’t even remember it, and it’s certainly not something we talk about. Part of the soldiers’ story is the discrimination they faced once the battalion was formed — training for two years in segregated Camp Claiborne in Louisiana under many racist white Southern Army personnel — and the post-war racism and intolerance the battle-scarred heroes encountered after returning from Europe in 1945.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Roland L. Freeman, photographer who documented Black culture, dies at 87Mr. Freeman, who lived in the District, found a special interest in photographing and collecting quilts from the rural South.
Read more »
Frankie Muse Freeman, NAACP legend and civil rights advocateFrankie Muse Freeman was a civil rights attorney, and the first woman to be appointed to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
Read more »
James Freeman — Assistant editor, editorial page at The Wall Street JournalJames Freeman is assistant editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and author of the weekday Best of the Web column. He is the co-author of 'Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi,' recognized as a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Financial Times Business Book of the Month. He is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and a host of 'Deep Dive' on Fox Nation. Before joining the Journal in September 2007, James served as investor advocate at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where he encouraged the transformation of financial reporting technology to benefit individual investors. He is a graduate of Yale.
Read more »
'Killing It' Is One of TV's Most Criminally Overlooked ComediesThis Peacock series starring Craig Robinson and Claudia O’Doherty as American dream-chasers from the Brooklyn Nine-Nine team is so damn funny
Read more »
People Are Sharing The Cooking Tools That Are Often Overlooked But Actually Life-Changing'If you don't want to heat up the kitchen or your whole place when it's already hot, I highly recommend this.'
Read more »