[BR]
The museum will "always honor the memories shared with Lawrence Brooks," museum director Stephen Watson said in a press release.
"He was a dear friend, a man of deep faith and great kindness, an inspiration to anyone who was close to him," he added, noting that at 112 years old, he was the oldest of somewhere around 240.000 American World War II veterans still alive. Born in 1909 in a Louisiana village at the height of racial segregation, to an African-American family with 15 children, Lawrence Brooks joined the Army in 1940 and became a member of the 91st Engineer Battalion, a unit where mostly African-Americans were sent.
He served in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. He was a cook for the white officers of the battalion, therefore away from the front lines, but twice narrowly escaped death: a first when the food transport he was on ran out of fuel over the ocean, a second when a Japanese sniper shot dead a fellow soldier within a few feet of him.
After he was discharged, in 1945, he did not take advantage of the GI Bill, a law that allowed war veterans to get a free college education, as African Americans were excluded.[/B] He became a laborer on public works projects. Later, he would describe his war experiences at the museum in New Orleans, a city where he had become a figure: every year, his birthday was celebrated there, with military honors and music by jazz bands. In the last two years, because of the pandemic, the honors were held outside his home. In his testimonies recorded on film, the veteran had recounted how he was amazed at the lack of any racial segregation in Australia, while the practice was ubiquitous in the ranks of the US Army, with black soldiers unable to share the same tent or dine at the same table as their white fellow soldiers.
"I was treated much better in Australia than by my fellow whites," he would declare."
Source: CNA
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