The first phase of a memorial honoring the nation's first African American Marines was dedicated at a July 29 ceremony in Jacksonville, NC. (Read the Washington Post story here.)

The National Montford Point Marine Memorial is named after the camp where some 20,000 African Americans underwent Marine Corps training in the 1940s. The service branch was opened to them following President Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 signing of Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in the armed forces.

Montford Point Camp, later renamed Camp Johnson, was also the site of a Section 106 Success Story. The Marine Corps had proposed demolition of three of the buildings associated with Montford Point Camp as part of a plan to construct a new academic instruction facility at Camp Johnson. But, using the Section 106 process, the Montford Point Marine Association and the State Historic Preservation Officer later signed a Memorandum of Agreement that preserved two of those buildings and expanded the interpretative media and materials at the site.