Jonas Bender, one of the America's first black Marines, dies at 94 [View all]

A visitation will be held today for World War II veteran Jonas Bender who was one of the first African Americans to join the U.S. Marines.

“At the time of his draft, the Marine Corps was an unequal and segregated institution,” according to his obituary. “He trained at the segregated Montford Point in North Carolina and went on to serve in the Pacific as a radar operator during the war.”

Bender, 94, of Yellow Springs, passed away on May 30.

He was drafted at age 18 and served as a Montford Point Marine from 1943 to 1946.

Jonas was among 200 surviving Montford Point Marines to be honored for their service in 2012 when they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

“The central thing about all this is that the Marine Corps didn’t really want us, didn’t believe we could do the job and grudgingly moved every step of the way,” Bender said when he was profiled in a column by News-Sun columnist Tom Stafford a couple months before the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony.

Bender told Stafford his drill instructors were relentless because they were determined to make sure the black recruits measured up. Still “because of lingering prejudices about blacks’ ability to perform in combat, ‘we were doing all that kind of grunt stuff,’ Bender told Stafford.

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