Memphis lost its charter as a result of the yellow fever epidemic. People were panicked; lots of people were ready to throw in the towel and let the city die. The city came back. But it came back with its racism fully alive, and it took another century to make real progress on that front. There’s no doubt we have a long way to go in America and in Memphis, Tennessee, as far as race relations are concerned. But we’ve come a long way. I see great progress. I see tremendous growth among the citizens of this great city, and I’m proud to be a Memphian.
SERGEANT MAJOR KENNETH WILCOX
Training Days
“I try to teach people, don’t let other folks characterize you,” Sergeant Major Kenneth Wilcox told me at Fort Benning. “You have to characterize who you are as a person. Remember, we’ve been challenged not only to train these guys; we’ve been challenged to take all the abnormal behavior that society has taught them and turn them around. And psychologically, we do wonders in fourteen weeks.”
My men call me Sergeant Major. I’ve been in the army for twenty-four years. You hear that there’s no more racism in the army, that it’s a model for society. Racism itself is not visibly seen, but when you look at who has the opportunity to get to the highest level of command, it seems as if we’ve missed the boat on that one. General Powell and other black generals have served as examples of how far we can go, but his kind are few in number.
I come from South Georgia, from an environment where racism was an everyday way of life. The military has allowed me to grow a lot in comparison to my brothers who are down South. So I’m grateful for the military. It’s a great place to grow, but you still have people in the military who display racist attitudes, who haven’t made the mental change. They can’t display their racism openly, but the attitude is still present. The new form of racism is subversive, like the young man with a Confederate flag flying high on his car. He has no idea how offensive that is to me, or maybe he does and really does not care how it makes me feel. This is the subversive behavior I am talking about. It’s underneath the surface; you can’t see it, but you sense it. Our task is to root it out and expose how ugly it really is.
I can tell a racist soldier when I meet him. His attitude and demeanor give him away. He can’t openly state his racist attitudes, but you can tell. What I try to do is make sure he hears my perspective. You never know what’s going to change a person’s attitude, so what I try to do is interject myself into his life. Whether he wants me to or not doesn’t matter. I must seize every opportunity to turn a negative behavior into something positive. As a sergeant major, I have the authority and right to do that. We’re talking about an attitude that has been part of someone’s life for a long time. Sometimes these men have grown up from kids believing in this attitude about different races, so you can’t change that in one day. I look at this job as a blessing because it allows me to reach out to the world and interject something positive. I tell the soldiers, I care about you as a person, regardless of your attitude toward me; I’m a professional and I care about you. I tell that to every soldier.
If I see a Confederate flag on a cadet’s car, I’m personally offended by that. It doesn’t represent me as a black American. Many would say that it symbolizes a love for the South, but it represents oppression for me. So I’ll say to this guy, you’ve got a right to display that Confederate flag on your car, but I find it very offensive. It’s your right to display it on your car, but if you need a favor from me, you understand I’m offended and therefore I have the right to not give a favor to a person that offends me. I’ll do what I can do for you professionally, but once in a while people need a favor, and I won’t give you one.
I will just talk to him personally and give him my perspective on things. And whether he changes or not is basically irrelevant. My responsibility as the offended black American is to tell people when I’m offended. It then becomes that person’s responsibility to either change or continue the same way. The choice is theirs. I’ve given them a choice to change or not. Then I leave the situation as is. I can’t make someone take a flag off his car. I can’t twist his arm. But if he respects me and I respect him, he should be willing to remove the flag.
If a soldier makes it known that he just can’t stand black people, and that his dislike or hatred of blacks is a hindrance to his becoming a soldier, we won’t kick him out for that. We will counsel him and we’ll try to help him change his attitudes. We have guys come in here with different tattoos that show they came from a gang environment or from an extremist group. Or you get a black guy and a white guy who are always fighting, and you interview the white guy one-on-one, and the bottom line is there’s a hatred towards the person’s color; it’s not because of anything in particular the black guy has done. Or a white guy might say something to the black soldier like, you’re just lazy, and the black soldier will get irritated by that.
It’s a stereotypical thing that white guys look at black Americans as being lazy, as not wanting to work. And so I bring those guys to my office and I’ll spend sometimes an hour with each of them. Often my drill sergeant becomes upset because of me spending so much time with each soldier. But I use that time to break through the hardened outer shell of the person. When I break through to the core and that person breaks down in tears, he knows and I know that I’ve gotten to him. I feel like I have been successful. Whether he goes back and builds his character up is irrelevant to me. I’ve done what I’ve been chosen to do, whether by the army or by society as an American, and also as a person who has the opportunity to change some of these abnormal behaviors and attitudes in the army.
Some of the soldiers leave here with what we call an EPTS—Existed Prior to Service—meaning they had a medical problem prior to enlisting in the army and this problem will not allow them to adapt to a military lifestyle. That’s the easy way to get them out of here. A guy can go out and he can come back in six months later. When we attempt to discharge a soldier for being a racist, it can take a long time. But when that person does not want to continue his service and wants to go home, we just get them out of the way with an EPTS, and those guys usually don’t come back. Occasionally we have one or two guys who come back, but hardly ever do you see those guys back in the service again.
A person who belongs to an extremist group, or wants to join one, comes into the military for one purpose only: to get the training. When they’re face-to-face with the training, and discover that it’s more difficult than they expected it to be, they soon start seeking ways to get out. But they come here to get the training. We’ve been told—I haven’t had any firsthand experience of this—that they go out and utilize the military tactics they learned here.
Knowing that the training I’ve given might be used to fight against me just because I am black, how do I detach myself from resenting those I have been chosen to train? I tell myself, your job is to train all who come to you, and in terms of political extremists, we are talking about a very small number. And second, your job is to be a citizen of the United States and carry out your obligations as a citizen. This means rooting out that person from the military before he can achieve his goal. But my first job is doing my mission, which is to train those guys whether I like them or not. It is basically irrelevant whether I like them. My job is to train them.
I don’t encourage my trainer to treat the extremists any differently from any other soldier. We do not make them do more push-ups or run more laps. As a matter of fact, these are the guys we don’t focus our attention on. Knowing that they are looking for any excuse to hate and blame others for their own attitudes, we do just the opposite. We treat everybody the same way. At least I try to teach my drill sergeants to exhibit this attitude. And I learned as a drill sergeant that this method works.
When I was a drill sergeant, I had some guys come in who were either Muslims or white extremists. They put them in my platoon, and those guys learned to perform to the same standard. I didn’t change my way of dealing with them. Whether it be a white guy like them or a black guy, they got dealt with the same way. You can’t deal differently with them or you become just as bad as they are.
We call Eagle Tower our confidence builder. The first week of training, we bring the young men to the tower and we make them display their skills at handling themselves at a great height. By requiring them to rappel and negotiate the apparatus on the tower, we help them to overcome their fears and mistrust. They are going to climb up and rappel down. And then they’ve got to go climb up on the back side of the tower and walk across a rope bridge, swing across an open hole in the tower, and then climb down the cargo net on the other side. This will help them overcome their fears of height and fears of where they are falling. Then they come back and they climb up an apparatus and slide down the harness to the other side. You have soldiers who will get stuck on part or all of the apparatus. The first time they get up there, you have soldiers who will shake in their boots, crying and doing all kind of things. So you’ve got to do some discipline stuff with them, like making them do some push-ups to get their mind off their fears. You don’t have to look pretty as you negotiate the apparatus, but you must negotiate it. The bottom line is that everybody will come off the tower whether they want to or not.
You’ll see some guys, you think they may be having a heart attack. They cry, they slobber, they kick. You’d be surprised at the kinds of facial expressions you get up on top of that tower. Up there these soldiers are not concerned what color the sergeants are. They focus on how the sergeants can help them not to die. There is no color; there is only “please help me.” The hardest thing to do is to get a person to trust in you and your ability. Everybody learns to trust their drill sergeant eventually, and the soldiers learn to trust one another. The idea is, hey, guy, you’re here to train. We know that at times you’re going to face some things you’re probably not confident in doing, but trust me, I’ll get you through it. That’s why we do the confidence builder in the first week of the cycle, and then they come back to do it about two other times. By that time, a soldier has been through a lot of training. He’s learned how to trust the drill sergeant and it’s not a big issue anymore. Same thing about jumping out of an airplane. You’ve got that fear and the sergeant says, trust me, go out there, the chute’s going to open up. You don’t trust anybody till that chute actually opens up, but now I trust you. I had no faith in you at all till the chute opened up.
I’ve never experienced racism in the army face-to-face. I’ve suspected it and I’ve confronted it. And when I confronted it, the person did the right thing. I can’t say I’ve been treated unfairly as a soldier at any time in the military. It’s one thing to say that a person’s racist, but it’s another thing to prove it. All I say is that when a racist is revealed, at any level of the military, he or she must do the professional thing, and each time, that person has. I’ve never been held back; I’ve always been able to make my rank. People have always treated me favorably because of my self-discipline.
The military is the place where I feel most secure and where, as a black American, I can achieve the goals I want to achieve based on my character and my ability. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree and I’m going for my master’s degree now. I would not have had either of these aside from being in this uniform, so I am grateful, and it’s an honor to serve.
Take Fort Benning, for instance. When I go to staff meetings at post level, I don’t see a whole load of my folks sitting at the tables as heads of departments. This was first brought to my attention by a civilian. He spoke of other black soldiers who had retired and applied for civilian jobs to no avail. This particular civilian had obtained degrees and came highly qualified for the position he applied for, but didn’t get it. The person who was hired was not highly qualified, nor did he have a degree. But he was white. So the norm in the army has changed, but in the civilian sector, at least at Fort Benning, there’s still work to do.
The army has made it difficult for a person not to treat you equal, because I’ve got the ability, and I’ve got the authority, to challenge you or your decision on me based on the regulations. And you must adhere to the regulations whether you want to or not, or else you get egg on your face. Let’s say somebody is very irritated and wants to call the guy who’s irritating him a name, under his breath even. He goes “you nigger,” and I hear it. That soldier will be told to go to my office, and he is looked at very straightforwardly as being a racist. I would probably deal with him personally as a sergeant major, and he’ll definitely get punished. He’ll lose money in his paycheck at a minimum, and at a maximum he could be discharged just off that one statement. The drill sergeant will probably do a little more than I do. But it’s a serious allegation, and you can’t not deal with it. If you don’t deal with it, it becomes okay to do. Whether it be between two black soldiers using the “n” word in their slang, it doesn’t matter. It’s wrong. No matter who uses that word, it’s still degrading language, and I say to anybody, no matter who uses it or where, don’t use it at all.
Today you frequently hear people referring to each other with the derogatory slang “my dog.” I don’t let people call me their dog. I’m not your dog. I tell people, you don’t determine my character; I tell you what my character is. You don’t put me on a piece of paper and say this is your character, Wilcox. No. I will tell you. As a matter of fact, anytime I find you’re mischaracterizing me, I will correct you, because that’s not who I am. I’ve been in front of senior officers and said, I am not a liar; you’re saying that I’m a liar. Now you do what you want to do with it, but I’m not a liar. I must make that statement before you now, because if I let you continue that way, you are characterizing me as a liar and everybody will see me as a liar. I don’t want you to do that. So I try to teach people, don’t let other folks characterize you. You have to characterize who you are as a person. Remember, we’ve been challenged not only to train these guys; we’ve been challenged to take all the abnormal behavior that society has taught them and turn them around. And psychologically, we do wonders in fourteen weeks.
We talk about men who have died on the battlefield to give us our freedom and how all that blood is red. There are no colors, there are no boundaries; all men on the battlefield are brothers. That man, no matter where he came from, I tell the guys, is your brother.