Courage in Full Color

Black Soldiers Get an Overdue Starring Role in the Cinematic Story of World War II

Inside the brick home on the corner sits a brave man. He once stalked Nazis across Italian hillsides, crunching through foot-high snow.

After his wife died, Joseph Stephenson moved in with his daughter here in Cheverly. He's in the living room, his tall body covering the navy blue recliner. Sunlight bounces off the hardwood floors. Three of his grandchildren are in another room, and their voices swoop around and over him like birds.

"Say what?"

The grandchildren have just called out to him about bolting for the local swimming pool.

"Okay, be careful," he yells out.

The old soldier is talking about the Germans and the bullets that came ricocheting down from the hills during the savage winter of 1944.

"The Italians were glad to see us," he says. "They were glad to see anybody pushing at the Germans."

Stephenson, 89, was a member of the highly praised, all-black 92nd Infantry Division. He was wounded that winter by a trip mine, and the explosion ripped into his thigh. He managed to come home, though, on his own two feet and carrying a Bronze Star. "For valor," he explains.

There followed years of raising his two kids and teaching high school. The old soldier attended many 92nd reunions -- black men striding through airports with canes and 92nd insignia. Cats talking about basic training and listening to Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael because Duke and Hoagy had been thumping during their war.

So much bravery; so much blood.

Then the dying began again, and there were coast-to-coast funerals.

The history books and documentaries and motion pictures about World War II are mountain-high now. The collective cinematic and literary output trumps that of every other modern engagement, including Vietnam. World War II, with its epic heroes and generals and nuclear bombs, has carved its own canon.