DADDY'S TRIALS IN WORLD WAR II

Daddy's Trials in World War II Veteran's Day celebrations brings to mind my own dearly-beloved father, Elvis Mitchell Coleman, and the many trials he had to face and to overcome both before and after he met our late, much-lamented mother, Margie Dean Coleman. One very big trial for him was just serving in and surviving at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, in 1942, where area colored troops trained under loathsome confines and conditions of rigid segregation, a few years before my own birth in Canton, Mississippi in 1951. Daddy recalled his exclusively state-side wartime experiences rarely, bitterly, grudgingly, tersely, and usually with tears. A post on Camp Shelby yesterday on Facebook exposed its many terrors to me that black World War I recruits faced. So, by inference, I deduced that my father's World War II experiences could not have been too much better in Mississippi in 1942. Thousands of German and Italian POWS were sent to this camp, from North Africa where they had been captured, and being "white" they received better treatment there and elsewhere than my father and the other colored troops.http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/index.php?id=233 Daddy distinctly mentioned being segregated and confined to freight trains with colored US troops while white POWS from Germany and Italy rode in passenger trains. They enjoyed privileges denied to blacks.