Photo by William Scott III
Portions of the bio excerpted from "A Journey Into 365 Days of Black History"

The Public television documentary "The Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II" was first aired on November 11, 1993 following a gala opening at Harlem's Apollo Theater. The film, which attempted to show that blacks had liberated Jews from concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, featured

surviving soldiers visiting the former camps and attending a reunion with people they had rescued. However after close scrutiny by military associations, the American Jewish Committee, and contradictory testimony by some of the soldiers, the film was withdrawn from television stations nationwide.

Critical challenges came from an article published in New Republic. But a fourteen page report by the American Jewish Committee put the controversy in clearer perspective. In its opening statement the report states: "The film claims, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, that the all black 761st Tank battalion liberated concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. This serious factual error is double troubling, not only because Blacks did take part in the rescuing of Jews from Dachau and Buchenwald, but also because the 761st was involved in the liberation of Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen, something not treated in the film." Part of the controversy was the definition was the definition of the term "liberator". According to the military, a true liberator would have had to arrive at the camp within the first fourtyeight hours of the ending of the war and/or the surrender of the German troops who guarded the camps. In reality, no one knows how soon the black troops arrived, yet it is evident they were present in parts of Germany and Austria where the concentration camps existed.

New York television station WNET and the film's producers have agreed to form a panel of experts to assess the criticism and then to return the film to distribution once it is free of ambiguities and inaccuracies. The film is of great value as an educational tool. The American Jew Committee's report concludes: "The tragedy of 'The Liberators' was the void it filled and will leave again. To fill that void must be our challenge."

In my opinion the men went and did a courageous thing by standing up for a country that did not always stand up for them. And now years later, people would try to down play their accomplishments with semantics and vague military definitions. The people who were there, Jewish and Black know the real truth for they were there. And that truth will not be forgotten.

For more information on this subject, check out the "Liberators Under Fire" page.