Gordon Shumway
Banned
ABC News said:The faded, type-written piece of paper was buried in a box of 70-year-old documents at a presidential archive, but after it was recently unearthed, the fragile paper shined a spotlight on what a history detective called an injustice that lingers on from the Second World War that of some black heroes who fought, but were forgotten.
Here is a Negro from Philadelphia who has been recommended for a suitable award... This is a big enough award so that the President can give it personally, as he has in the case of some white boys, stated the 1944 U.S. War Department memo to the Franklin D. Roosevelt White House.
The memo was written about Army Cpl. Waverly Woodson, Jr., and the suitable award important enough for Roosevelt to consider personally giving Woodson was the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nations highest military award given for valor. It would recognize his heroic actions as a combat medic on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944, during the first hours of the Allies' D-Day invasion of Europe.
But Woodson, who was black, never received the Medal of Honor or the Distinguished Service Cross, the militarys second-highest honor. Now his family, with the help of the author of a new book on his unit and a sympathetic congressman, are trying to restore and highlight a page erased from the history of the Greatest Generation by requesting the Medal of Honor be finally given to him.
"It's never too late. It's always possible to right a wrong. We need to let the future generations know what happened in World War II. The younger generation doesn't even know what World War II was," Woodson's widow, Joann, told ABC News in an interview on Tuesday, two days before President Obama is scheduled to bestow a Medal of Honor on a veteran of the War in Afghanistan.
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