Robert Leece braved challenges both in the US and abroad
by Jazmine Otey
In 1951, Robert Leece was a member of D Company 516 Infantry 101st Airborne Division–one of the first integrated U.S. Armed Forces units.
Born and raised in Pearisburg, VA, Leece was a delivery boy for the Roanoke Times until he attended high school at Christiansburg Institute. In 1948, succeeding his high school graduation, he then went to Morristown College, a junior college in Tennessee, to study hospital administration. In 1950 he earned his degree.
Afterward, he began attending school at Hampton University but according to Leece, his family couldn’t afford to put him through college at the time. This made him choose another route – the military.
In March 1951, he was drafted and sent to camp Breckinridge, Kentucky for 20 weeks of combat training alongside roughly 150 African Americans and 150 Whites, a vast difference from when Harry Truman first authorized integrations of the armed forces in 1948 Leece explains.
He states that at first it was done on a “piecemeal scale.”
“They used to put two Black men into a unit that had 350 people or more and they did that for three to four years after he enlisted,” Leece said. “Obviously, that was not racial integration!”
Regardless of the improved ratio of Whites and Blacks during Leece’s first two weeks of training he was faced with aggressive racism.
“It was after dinner on a Saturday evening, they were sitting around running off at the mouth, then a Black kid from Baltimore hollered ‘Bob Leece, I want you to get over here and straighten out this mess for us.’”
At first, Leece was confused. Angered, the young boy from Baltimore told Leece that he and his friends had been called a racial epithet.
“So I said, ‘with segregation in the United States you gotta remember the White man out numbers us and that’s one of the reasons on a larger scale they’re able to do it, but in here we’ve got as many fists as they have. We’ve got 150 White boys and 150 Black boys.”
It took about 45 minutes to straighten out the issue, Leece said.
This moment of conflict now behind them, after 16 weeks of rigorous training at Breckinridge, he and about twenty others excitedly prepared to go to Korea.
“I was gung ho,” Leece said. “I almost couldn’t wait to get to Korea, it was a bunch of us like that.”
But shortly thereafter he was denied due to the Sole Survivor Policy, that at the time prevented siblings from serving in the same segments and the last surviving male in the family from being drafted.
Leece was in disbelief. What do you mean, after all this training and as good as I am at it?’”
He was then reassigned to do administrative work at Fort Raleigh, Kansas for roughly 20 weeks. There he learned how to type.
“When I came out of Fort Raleigh, I could do about 66, almost 70 words a minute,” Leece said. “They had one of the best programs.”
According to Leece, their final examinations took place in one of the biggest field houses he ever saw. There were desks scattered everywhere, each represented an army unit. They were worked hard physically as well.
“They ran us to death,” Leece said, and by his eighth or tenth week he could run roughly about 25 miles with a 40 pound pack on his back.
After serving in the military, Leece has led a highly successful life. Directly following his term, he worked for George Washington University. In 1969 he worked at the VA hospital in Chicago as an assistant medical records administrator, where he met his wife, Barbra Leece. Then, until 1997 he worked for the government.
Currently, the 87-year-old veteran continues to have a great memory of his experience in one of the first integrated U.S. Armed forces units.
“They didn’t mess around. Whenever I actually tell somebody what we went through after a few drinks at a bar, nobody believes me. They say ‘they wouldn’t have humans doing that’ I say, they had us doing it everyday,” Leece said, laughing to himself.
