John Bollin, Jr., joined the army in 1940 to escape segregationist life in Richmond, Virginia. The army wasn’t much better, labeling black soldiers as "careless, shiftless, irresponsible…untruthful." [1]

After it sent Bollin's and three other all-black regiments to Alaska to cut a 1,500 mile road through uncharted wilderness to British Columbia, white soldiers usually got the bulldozers while blacks often relied on hand tools alone. [2]

"When you have generals trained to believe you can’t do anything," says Bollin, now of Pikesville, "it becomes part of the coat that the army wears, and you can't unbutton that coat. It's taken 63 years for those people to realize they had the best crew of men that they could’ve selected."

In fact, Bollin’s all-black 93rd engineer regiment and the three others—some who had never seen snow—helped finish the highway in just eight months. They did it bundled in two pairs of everything from socks to coats, living in tents at 40 below zero, and forbidden to mingle with whites. [3]

"Every soldier knows himself," says Bollin stoically, "and knows what he can do and what he can't do. You make the best way you can."

Source:

1. American Experience Building the Alaska Highway, 2005, retrieved from PBS website 5/2007, Interview with historian Alvin Schexnider, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/alaska/sfeature/sf_excerpts.html#g.

2. Ibid, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/alaska/peopleevents/p_men.html.

3. Ibid.