Olde Hornet
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He was the first Black officer to lead a Marine Corps infantry company into combat. He later became an Alabama state lawmaker and an assistant secretary of the Air Force.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/j-gary-cooper-dead.htmlGen. Jerome Cooper in Da Nang, Vietnam, in 1966, when he was a captain in the Marine Corps. He was told he would be a supply officer but bristled at that role and, after demanding a sit-down with his division’s commanding general, was given command of an infantry company.Afro American Newspapers, via
J. Gary Cooper, a two-star general and the first African American to lead a Marine infantry company in combat, who later became an Alabama state lawmaker, an assistant secretary of the Air Force and an ambassador to Jamaica, died on April 27 at his home in Mobile, Ala. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Joli Claire Cooper.
General Cooper, who grew up in Alabama in the 1930s and ’40s, overcame the harsh segregation of the Deep South to attain leadership roles in the military, corporate America and government, a sweeping arc that paralleled the paths of a generation of African Americans that pushed open doors during a time of profound racial change in the United States.
General Cooper was raised in Mobile in a rarefied world: the Black upper class of the pre-civil rights era. His family owned an insurance company and a funeral home. But money did not insulate him from the strictures of Jim Crow and its long racist shadow.
When his father tried to send him to an all-white Roman Catholic school, the local bishop barred him. When he returned to Mobile to run the family business after 12 years in the Marines, the Junior Chamber of Commerce rejected him as a member. And in 1973, when General Cooper went to the Mobile County Courthouse to obtain a marriage license, he was humiliated to find that Black couples were made to sign a “colored” register, separate from the one for white couples.
The next year, elected to the state House of Representatives, he blocked a bill to fund the retirement of the probate judge who had kept the separate license books until he ended the practice.
General Cooper’s initial escape from the segregated city of his youth came in 1954, when he won a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame. He was one of only a handful of Black freshmen in a class of 1,500.
“On campus there were no ‘colored’ or ‘white’ signs on the drinking fountains or bathroom doors,” he wrote in a reminiscence published in Notre Dame magazine in 2014. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
A finance major, he joined the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps and on graduation was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He arrived in South Vietnam eight years later, in 1966, as a captain.
He was told he would be the supply officer for an anti-tank battalion. But he bristled at that role; he wanted to lead an infantry company. He found the Marines’ habit of giving Black officers roles in support units, rather than in combat, to be racist, according to “Ten Stars” (2016), a biography of General Cooper by Kendal Weaver.
Then a captain, he demanded a hearing with the commanding general of his division, an unusual and risky move that could have invited retaliation.
But he got his wish: Captain Cooper was given command of M Company, Third Battalion, Ninth Regiment. He was the first Black officer to lead a Marine infantry company in combat, Gen. George H. Walls Jr., a retired Marine brigadier general who met General Cooper in Vietnam and remained a lifelong friend, said in an interview.
“The best way to describe Gary is, if he could be quiet and be effective, he was — and if he had to make noise, he would,” General Walls said.
