An Oral History of African-Americans and the Development of Radar Defense Technology at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey 1940-1959

Edited by: Robert Johnson, Jr. Associate Prof. of Communications Framingham State College 100 State Street Framingham, MA 01701-9101

Mr. Tate was born May 10th, 1919 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, to George and Annie Tate who were domestic workers. He had five brothers and two sisters.  One sister and two of his brothers are deceased.

 Mr. Tate's parents always kept plenty of books around.  He describes them as keeping, "lots of physics books and things like that.  That's what got me interested in science.  That, and I always tinkered with scientific equipment when I could get my hands on it."

 Mr. Tate attended Dillard High School in Goldsboro.  This was a very segregated school but he found a mentor in U. Victor Brown, the school's principal.

 Mr. Tate didn't go to college on his own because of the Depression and the lack of financial resources.  However, "it was my tinkering around with electricity that got me there.  I was doing stage lighting for plays in high school and a professor by the name of Jack Bonds from North Carolina A&T came down."

 He continues, "we presented a play called The Emperor Jones and I did the stage lighting for him.  He started talking with me and  asked me what I planned to do with my life. I told him what I wanted to do, but I wasn't able to because my parents just didn't have the money.  He told me to write him a letter stating why I wanted to attend college.  I did this and he sent me a very nice letter which said, 'I cannot give you much of a scholarship, but I can give you a job.   This job was sufficient to pay my room and board, but not tuition.  I had to get up my own tuition but that's how I got to school.

 Once he got to NC-A&T, Mr. Tate started off in the electrical engineering program and found a mentor in Andrew Carnegie Bowling, professor of electrical engineering.  His physics teacher was Dr. Hubert Mack Thaxton, who was a nuclear physicist.  Both are deceased now.

 Thaxton had been an undergraduate at Howard University, then went to the University of Wisconsin to get a Masters and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics.

 "You can tell things were pretty segregated during those times because otherwise he would have been out making some money at some company.  I'm sure they weren't paying him very much money at NC-A&T.

 "I was there from 1938 to 1942. It's fortunate in a way and yet, unfortunate, but when I graduated World War II was on.  I was coming out at very opportune time.  There was a very high demand for engineers--probably somewhere on the order of 40 or 50 job offerings.  Also, there were commissions being offered in the armed forces.

 "I only went to one or two job interviews because I had to get there on my own as they didn't provide the transportation.  One interview was with the Glenn L. Martin company (now Martin Marietta) in Baltimore, Maryland. It was an aircraft company and the job was inspector of naval material.  From there, they sent me to Atlanta for a follow-up interview.  As soon as the officer in charge saw me, he said, 'The job is taken.'

 "I traveled all the way to Atlanta for a job in Baltimore and they tell me the job's been taken.  But I had no recourse.  However, I was fortunate that I didn't get the job, because when the war was over that job was gone.  So, I took a job at Fort Monmouth.  From May of '42 to about November of the same year, I was a civilian there working as an electronic technician, P-1 (the same as a GS-5 today). For the first 7 months I was doing bench work on hand-held walkie-talkie radios.

 "I knew people in North Carolina who had an uncle that lived in Red Bank, New Jersey, which was very close to the post.  I stayed with them for a short while, until I located a place to live.  That's how I first got housed here.  I had nothing--no car, nothing, except an education. My pay was 2,600 dollars a year, which was quite a bit of money in those times. You could buy something with a dollar then. But this place was not much better than North Carolina, as far as race was concerned.  Everything was segregated here.

 "When I finished my undergraduate degree, I passed it onto my unit chief whose name was Sidney Metzger.  His title was Supervisor of Electrical Engineering and he was a graduate of the New York University.  (The section chief was John Hessell, out of the University of Michigan.)  The fact that I had the degree and he initiated action to get me changed over, made it possible for me to go into the armed services.  I was a civilian until then.

 "When I left Fort Monmouth, they were calling out assignments.  They would call your name and tell you where you were going. There were three places that we could have gone.  One was to General Electric Company and that would have been building fire control radar--the SCR-584.  We could go to Harvard, or we could go to England along with a bunch of engineers who were actually under fire. This was 1943, England was being bombed heavily, so nobody wanted to go there, but, a lot of them did.  I was called to go to graduate school at Harvard University.  This was selective training to become a radar officer.  I graduated from the radar school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--the two schools worked closely together.

 "The Army didn't provide housing to anybody, but there was plenty of housing for white folk in Cambridge.  The same principal of my school was an officer in the Army and had gone to a program at Harvard in World War I which was very similar to the program we were taking.  He had relatives in the area and gave me their address.

 "Waiting for a bus on a snowy night at Harvard Square, a very fair-skinned black man came along and struck up a conversation with me.  Eventually I showed him the address as he lived in Cambridge and knew the area. He said, 'Well, look, I'm going your way, too.  I'll tell you when you get there and when to get off.' We're riding along on the bus and he said, 'Look, now, I'm going to tell you something.  If you don't find these people, please give me a call and I'll direct you to my place because it's within walking distance of where you're getting off.'  Believe me, that was a lifesaver because when I got to the address, nobody was there and nobody knew these people. One person said, 'I think they passed away.'  That was quite a shock to me. I found a telephone and called him--his name was John Gardner.  He recognized my voice right away and gave me directions to his house. This is exactly how I got housed and I stayed with him all the while I was in school.

 "I was at Harvard until about September of 1943.  I was at MIT for the remainder of the year.  I got married between going to Harvard and MIT  My wife and I met while going to school together in NC-A&T.  She was studying mathematics at North Carolina Central in Durham and commuted over to the campus on the weekends.

 "The program at Harvard was called, 'Electronics and Cathode Ray Tubes'.  At MIT it was called 'Radar Microwave Communications.'  The word 'RADAR' was still top secret then. I could not bring any books or other course materials home.  I had to go down and study at school.  We would go to class at 8 o'clock in the morning until about 12 noon.  We'd be back about 1 o'clock and we'd go until 5 PM.  So, we were there in classes for a full day, five days a week, and a half-day on Saturday.

 "There were only two blacks in the whole class of somewhere in the neighborhood of about 200 officers.  The other black was fair skinned and passing for white.

 "There were numerous instructors.  That is one thing that they didn't have a shortage of--people to teach you just about anything.  Somebody would come in and teach microwave receivers, somebody would teach modulators and transmitters.  Somebody else would come in and teach another facet of radar and so-forth.

 "Professor Chaffe was one of the instructors I remember there.  He held two chairs, the Rumford Professor of Physics and Gordon Mackay Professor of Electrical Engineering Chairs. There was one freshman instructor, Professor Phillipe Emmanual La Corpia, who was absolutely the best instructor I had all the while I was there.  He could make things so simple to understand.  Some of the other guys would get up and try to show you how much they knew.  This guy here was really right down to Earth.  He could take off, too. He would start talking from the time he came in--going from one blackboard right around the room.  He could draw the most beautiful pictures to describe things.

 "We still had military instruction--drills and things like that--all around Harvard yard. I had one of the best commanding officers I've ever had, there.  A full colonel by the name of Fox who was an American Indian.  He was a very understanding man.

 "Colonel Fox had an awful lot to do with me going back to Fort Monmouth.  He called me into his office and said, 'Lieutenant Tate, a lot of these graduating officers are going down to Orlando, Florida, to the Eastern Signal Training Camp.  But I don't want to send you down there and subject you to the conditions that exist.'  That's exactly what he told me.  He said, 'I have talked with people down in Washington and I think I can get them to take you back to the labs at Fort Monmouth.  How would you like that?'  I told him I'd be tickled to death to be sent back to the lab.

 "So, I went back to Fort Monmouth as a Second Lieutenant and was assigned to communications as Assistant Commanding Officer of the Microwave Communications Section.  The C.O. was really running the section of engineers, I just assisted him.  It was not an assignment that was a real job, to be perfectly frank.

 "I knew South Jersey pretty well so I didn't have too much of a problem finding a decent place to live.  I didn't go to the local church organizations for help as I had friends that were still working around here.

 "My branch chief was also a New York University graduate and worked at AT&T Bell Labs before he came into the Army.  I had a guy from Texas that was my immediate supervisor--Marshal Reebe.  Boy, did he give us a hard time.  He just didn't want any help from me, if you know what I mean.  I stayed there from the 1944 until August, when I requested a transfer, and went to the Anti-Aircraft Artillery at Camp Davis in North Carolina.  This is when I became Battalion Radar Officer.

 "I had a good lieutenant colonel for a commanding officer.  I could sit down and talk with him and he understood what I was talking about and I understood him.  He told me, 'You do the job, you get the promotion.'  That's exactly what he said to me, but he wasn't there very long. The people who replaced him were rednecks.  Usually the black organizations got the worst officers, the ones that nobody else wanted.

 "I transferred from there to Camp Stewart, near Savannah, Georgia.  You're talking about an army that's different from any other.  Those people down there were absolutely out of this world. I got down there, you couldn't even ride in a white taxi. You have to carry your personnel records along with you when you report in.  I presented myself and I showed my records to the major there.  He looked at my records, looked up at me, 'This is you?', he said.  He just couldn't believe I was the same person who had that kind of record.

 "The Army had a guy at Camp Stewart by the name of William S. Clater, he was a company commander.  He had a Ph.D. in mathematics and he taught at Howard University.  Another guy was from A&T, his name was Gus Lowe.  The highest-ranking black officer that we had was a Charles Adams, a captain and a medical officer.  All of these guys had great credentials but they were given menial tasks and treated as third class citizens.  These were jobs nobody wanted and were well below their capability to perform them.

 "The Army had obsolete radar that was in vogue in 1937 and they expected us to keep those doggone things going even though search-lights had become obsolete, too. It was teaching obsolescence.  I stayed until March of 1945 when I got out of the Army altogether.

 "When I went back to Fort Monmouth a few weeks later, I was elevated in grade to P-3.  The Army called the position Radio Engineer (Radar).  I was working on radar beacons at the time, designing and developing them.  My immediate supervisor was Irwin Stokes.  From there, I transferred down to a place called Electronic Tubes.  I didn't particularly like the job, so I transferred back into the radar branch and worked for a guy by the name of Jim Evers who was out of MIT, too.

 "This was around 1948 and I began working in the radar equipment group.  I had a section and quite a good group of engineers and technicians under me.  We were working jointly with the three services on ANTPS1-D, aircraft warning radar.  We tested them out at Framingham and Bolton, Massachusetts. I also worked on weapons-locating radar--detecting positions of mortars, artillery, that sort of thing.

 "Of course you had to go out and field test this equipment. Before you went to the site--if you knew somebody who had been there previously--you'd go and talk with them. They would sort of educate you as to where to eat and sleep.  It was awful having to do this because whites would go right to a motel or restaurant--think nothing of it.  Blacks had to go scrounging around for a place to sleep. Even at the Army's Proving Grounds down in Aberdeen, Maryland, you learned exactly where the black hotels were, first.

-----

 "I knew most of the black engineers and technicians that worked in the laboratories at Fort Monmouth.  Even though the labs were scattered over in Eatontown and Belmar, we usually would assemble at a certain place for dinner in order to stay in touch.  Of course, the restaurants were segregated, too.

 "We started tutorials for high school students, teaching these kids something about radio and also helping them with math. Clarence White, from Amherst College, was working with us in the program.  Leroy Hutson, myself, and another volunteer.  We had several technicians in it, too, helping out with equipment, when we needed it.  That program lasted probably three or four years. We were not doing this in conjunction with the school administration, someone just came to us, talked with us, and we voluntarily decided
to do it.

 "The tutorial programs for black Fort Monmouth employees did a respectable job of trying to get people better educated.  We used Major Armstrong Hall, a building named after the founder of frequency modulation.  Walter McAfee and others started formal training and different colleges would came down and teach courses at the college level and on the post-graduate level.  In fact, a lot of guys got Masters degrees this way. Prior to that, we ran tutorials within the laboratory itself for about two or three years.

 "Not long afterwards, the McCarthy hearings started.  There was a general very high up who cooperated with McCarthy and his doings at Fort Monmouth.  This went all out of proportion.  They didn't find a thing, not a single individual down here that was a communist--not one.  It caused a lot of people a lot of trouble and got them kicked out of the labs and out of work. That general didn't do a thing in the world but destroy the place.  Our President didn't help, either.  You know, we had Eisenhower at the time, and he was afraid of his own shadow.

 "Many who weren't actually put out of work, were put into what we referred to as the 'leper colony.'  They would take the security clearance badge away from you, then assign you to less sensitive work on the post, but in a different area.

 "Roy Cohn, McCarthy's lawyer, came down to Fort Monmouth
once.  He had a big picture in New York Times and various places--he was awful. People were really gobbling that stuff up.  It made big headlines, until they found out what was really going on--that there really wasn't anything going on.

 "Bill Jones worked there and he had some security problems that were unfounded--he was actually put out of work. There was a guy by the name of Barry Cohen, who was in Professor Rosenberg's class at City College in New York.  By being in his class, they thought he was a communist.  But eventually he got cleared. He didn't come back to the lab immediately after he got cleared, either.  He worked for Philco down in Philadelphia.

 "Once, we had a contingent of engineers and technicians going down to the missile command at Fort Bliss, Texas.  And three or four of the people originally scheduled were missing when we got there.  I looked at the paper and saw these guys' names were flashed in headlines all the way down in El Paso, Texas.  These are people that I knew very well.  I couldn't believe it.

 "My boss, one of the best engineers that I ever worked for, was Harold Decore.  He got kicked out of a job for a long time and was stigmatized.  He got cleared eventually.  I was getting called two and three times a day by Army intelligence
and the FBI.  'Come up front and answer some questions', they'd say, and so forth.  Just you and the FBI in a room.  It was more harassment than anything else, to be perfectly frank with you.  That was my observation.

 "The people up at MIT got sucked into that thing, too,
because they let people go.   The president of MIT fired a number of good people.

 "It was not until quite a long time after that that Edward R. Murrow really started the downfall of McCarthy.  That was a very, very dark time in the history around here.

-----

 "Unfortunately, there weren't that many black engineers working at Fort Monmouth during the War.  That's one thing blacks need to work on.  It seems to me that we pick things to study that are the easiest.  We don't like to really make any sacrifices.  It's most unfortunate because things that you make sacrifices for are usually the ones that are more productive and the ones that will get you more pay.

Page updated January 4, 2004   page created February 10, 2001

Content copyright Professor Robert Johnson Jr. used with permission