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In a 2012 radio interview on WJCU, the John Carroll University station,
Madison told interviewer Yemi Akande that the 17 weeks of training at Fort Benning
with other black soldiers “was not a comfortable experience,” not because of the
rigors, but because of the racism. “But we expected it. It wasn’t new.”
In Arizona, the division was trained for the Italian Campaign. “No other state
would have us,” Madison told Akande. “We were 20,000 black men with guns.”
(Actually, from 1913 to 1933, Fort Huachuca was headquarters for the original
Buffalo Soldiers, the 10th Cavalry Regiment, which was formed in 1866 to fight in
the Indian Wars. The nickname was given to the soldiers by Native Americans, who
likened the soldiers’ hair to a buffalo’s.)
After Huachuca, they were put on a train that rolled through the deep south
on its way to the troop ships at Hampton Roads, Virginia. People threw rocks and
spit at them.
In Italy, Madison won the Purple Heart and several battle ribbons. “And the
people cheered us. Those people cheered us, while people in the U.S. spit at us.”
He grins, savoring the irony.
When he returned to Cleveland after the war, he decided to continue his
architectural studies at what was then Western Reserve University, prior to its
merger with Case Institute of Technology. When he applied, the dean, Francis Bacon,
flatly turned him down because of his color. As Madison says, WRU “didn’t have
enough black men to make up a basketball team.”
Madison was undaunted. “I went home, put on my uniform with my Purple
Heart and battle ribbons, and went to the dean of admissions, not to Bacon.
I showed him my work from Howard. This was 1946. So they tested me. “I got
admitted, but they gave me ‘flunk-out’ classes” – particularly in physics, meant to be
so difficult that he could not possibly pass them.
Pass them he did; that is, those he was allowed to take. He was awarded a
bachelor’s degree without finishing all the necessary coursework – that was how
badly the administration wanted him gone.
Madison poses with architect Frank Gehry
at the 2013 Case Western Reserve University
commencement, where Gehry received an
honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.