NGA Spotlight: Walter Maddox
Montford Point Marine and ACIC Cartographer
In May 1943, a Boy Scout left his hometown of St. Louis for Montford Point, N.C., for basic training. Walter Maddox was on his way to join what became known as the Montford Point Marines, the first African-Americans to serve in the Marines in more than 160 years.
Maddox, who would later in his career became a cartographer for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency predecessor agencies, was part of a pioneering group of Marines who showed the way for others during World War II, and well beyond.
The first black members of the U.S. Marines served in the Revolutionary War: John Martin, Isaac Walker and a third simply known as “Orange”. Martin was an enslaved person who joined the Marines without the knowledge of his owner. He died aboard a U.S. ship when it sank off the coast of what is now Canada in 1777. The second two Marines — Walker and Orange — fought in the Second Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Princeton.
After the Revolutionary War, the U.S. banned the recruitment and enlistment of African-American Marines, and the ban remained in place until 1941, when an executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt compelled the Marines to enlist African-American recruits to assist the Allied cause during World War II. More than 20,000 African-Americans trained between 1942 and 1949 at Montford Point.
Among the Marines arriving at Montford was Maddox. He had enlisted in 1942 at age 17, which required parental permission because he was under 18. “My mother, she was dead set against me going in the military, and she wouldn't sign for me to join the Marine Corps,” Maddox told the University of North Carolina-Wilmington in a documentary interview. “But my dad and I went down anyway, without her knowing it, and he signed, so I could sign.”
But at the time Maddox enlisted, there was no place for him to train. With the military still segregated, the new African-American recruits could not train at the Marines’ established facility at Camp Lejeune. Maddox said the Marines told him to “go on back to high school, and they'd let us know.”
In May 1943, they let Maddox know, and he boarded a train to Atlanta. But he missed his connecting train to North Carolina, and had nowhere to sleep in Atlanta. Because they were Marines, Maddox said an area YMCA director promised to find room for them. What he found was an empty pool table. “The guy went up and got us sheets and a pillow,” he said, laughing. “What’s a sheet and pillow going to do on a pool table?”
After an uncomfortable night, Maddox arrived at Montford Point and began basic training. “I had just got through playing high school football,” Maddox said. “I thought I was in good shape, until I got in boot camp. I went in the Marine Corps weighing 207, and came out of boot camp weighing 175. It just knocked all that fat off of me.”
After boot camp, Maddox said, it was “school, school, school”. He learned how to operate the radio, telephone and switchboard. His unit was deployed to the South Pacific in January 1944. “We were gung-ho,” Maddox said. “We were Marines.”
After fighting on several South Pacific islands and the surrender of the Japanese, Maddox said he returned home and left the military in 1946. After working for the U.S. Post Office and U.S. Army Finance Center, Maddox joined the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center in January 1953. “I became a cartographer, a map-maker,” he said. “I did 37 years and 5 months of map-making.”
And Maddox made a lot of maps. He started at ACIC as a statistical draftsman and then cartographic compilation aid. By 1958, he had been promoted to cartographer, and he worked in that role as ACIC made the transition to the Defense Mapping Agency in 1972. He retired in 1990, with a career of federal service spanning from World War II to the eve of Operation Desert Storm.
Maddox calls his years as a U.S. Marine “one of the rocky roads you have to go through in life.”
“It made me a survivor,” he said. “You're what you are today because of what you went through then.”
Maddox passed away in 2004. A memorial to the Montford Point Marines was dedicated in 2016 Lejeune Memorial Gardens in Jacksonville, N.C.