African Americans and ROTC

by Charles Johnson, Jr.

2002 · McFarland

This work covers Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) detachments at historically African American colleges and universities throughout the United States from the inception of the Student Army Training Corps to the advanced programs currently in place. The armistices following World War I allowed for ROTC programs to be set up, World War II saw a push for recruits, and American participation in Vietnam made use of black soldiers more than ever. Despite African American participation in the military in war and peace, it took nearly 60 years for black collegiate education institutions (around 1973) to fulfill their need for Army, Navy and Air Force ROTC programs producing commissioned officers. The book discusses the beginnings of the ROTC programs at African American colleges with the Student Army Training Corps and the establishment, expansion and reorganization of the programs that followed. The acquisition of Air Force and Navy ROTC programs are discussed and all the revisions to the various programs thereafter, including opening them up to women.

The Day They Hung the Elephant

by Charles Edwin Price

1992 · The Overmountain Press

There is no doubt that in 1916 a five-ton circus elephant was lynched from a 100-ton Clinchfield railroad crane car in the little town of Erwin, Tennessee. The details of the execution and the tragic events leading up to it, however, are clouded in nearly a century of oral tradition. From one retelling to the next, facts are distorted and embellished; legend, instead of truth, is often accepted as fact. This book is an attempt to bring together all the known facts about the hanging and to fill in with educated guesses the missing parts of the puzzle.