Julius W. Becton Jr., pioneering Army general, dies at 97

Julius W. Becton Jr., a three-star general who, as the first black commander of an army corps, was tasked with defending Europe against a Russian invasion during the Cold War, and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Washington, D.C., school system, died November 28 at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He was 97.

His son, Julius W. Becton III, said the cause of death, at a home for retired military officers, was complications of dementia.

General Becton’s uniformed career lasted nearly forty years, beginning in the era of segregated troops in World War II and with the rise of Colin Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Powell, who died in 2021, called General Becton a mentor without whose help and example he “never would have risen.”

General Becton saw combat in three separate wars and earned Silver Stars in Korea and Vietnam. He was the first African American to oversee what was then the Army’s largest basic training program at Fort Dix, NJ, and in 1978, after his promotion to lieutenant general, he led the VII Corps in Stuttgart, West Germany , during the Cold War. War.

In a 2015 oral history Speaking outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, General Becton recalled that when America was in turmoil over racial injustice and later over affirmative action in the 1960s, the military was a rare meritocracy for black soldiers, who enjoyed opportunities and prestige offered.

“We have worked hard. We knew what we had to do. We had to prepare for our job and we progressed through the ranks and were respected for what we did,” he said. ‘Not because we were black. But because we were good at what we did.”

The challenges and politics of civilian leadership proved not so simple.

When General Becton was appointed head of FEMA by President Ronald Reagan, he at one point came into conflict with Governor John H. Sununu of New Hampshire for withholding approval of a nuclear power plant. According to the general’s statement, he was removed from his post when Mr. Sununu became chief of staff to President George HW Bush in 1989.

At the age of 70, General Becton accepted an offer to lead Washington’s deeply troubled school system, but resigned seventeen months later, failing to live up to expectations that he would bring sweeping change. “He suggested he was being undermined by enemies,” The Washington Post reported.

Julius Wesley Becton Jr. was born on June 29, 1926 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His father was head caretaker of an apartment building near Bryn Mawr College, and the family, including his mother, Rose (Banks) Becton, a housekeeper and laundress, lived in a basement apartment.

When he was 17 and a senior at Lower Merion High School, Julius Jr. joined the Army Air Corps reserves and went on active duty after graduation. In August 1945, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant at Officer Candidate School, just as Japan surrendered in World War II. Nevertheless, he was shipped with an all-black division to the Pacific Ocean, to the island of Morotai, where his unit used a bullhorn to tell Japanese soldiers holding out in the jungle to surrender. They did not always comply.

“That provided my first combat experience where I was shot at,” he recalled in the oral history.

In 1948, while a student at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he married Louise Thornton, who became a nurse; she died in 2019. In addition to their son, Julius III, he is survived by their four daughters, Shirley McKenzie, Karen Becton-Johnson, Joyce Best and Renee Strickland; 11 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

General Becton was serving in the Army Reserve in Maryland in the summer of 1948 when his base commander read President Harry Truman’s executive order to desegregate the military.

“As long as I am the commander here, there will be no change,” he recalled the base commander’s words. “I didn’t believe what I heard,” he added in an interview with The Washington Post in 2018. “This was the commander in chief saying, this is what it’s going to be. But here was a commander who said nothing would change.”

Despite the discouragement, General Becton left college and returned to active duty. “I really enjoyed being in the military,” he said later.

Actual integration did not occur until the Korean War.

There, General Becton was in charge of an all-black platoon of the 9th Infantry Regiment and was ordered to lead a breakout from a defensive line known as the Pusan ​​Perimeter. While attacking a slope called Hill 201, he came under heavy fire. He was wounded and earned both a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for valor.

As the war continued and troop casualties increased, replacements were assigned to units regardless of race. General Becton’s platoon had a Mexican-American soldier sent from Texas. “I told my platoon sergeant, ‘Don’t let anything happen to him, he’s our first non-black, we’re not going to hurt him at all,'” he later recalled. “And with that we became integrated.”

After the war, General Becton continued his education, earning a BS in mathematics from Prairie View A&M University in Texas in 1960, graduating from the National War College in 1961, and earning an MA in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1967. .

In 1968, as a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam, he commanded a cavalry squadron in the 101st Airborne Division. He caught the attention of Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. military operations in the country, who General Becton said became a “godfather” to him, which helped his career.

He was promoted to brigadier general in 1972, one of eight generals of the Black Army.

After retiring in 1983, he headed the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, where he coordinated US aid during a famine in Ethiopia. The job led to his appointment in 1985 to head FEMA; the former director had resigned amid a federal investigation into fraud and mismanagement.

“He brought a sense of integrity back to the agency,” Jane Bullock, then the agency’s chief of staff, recalled in a 1996 interview. “He gave the people at the agency a sense of direction.”

After leaving FEMA in 1989, General Becton was recruited as president of his alma mater, Prairie View A&M University, as the historically black institution faced financial and management problems. He invited the Texas Rangers to investigate the school’s administration and suspended football and most other sports programs, feeling they were a waste of money. Although some alumni felt uneasy, endowments and corporate donations increased during his five-year tenure.

He was hired in 1996 as superintendent of Washington’s troubled school system, with its crumbling buildings, chaotic finances and some of the nation’s lowest test scores.

He repaired the roofs of more than sixty schools and tightened security, but as a result the academic year started three weeks late. And he couldn’t fix systemic problems, including a $62 million budget gap.

Several years later, he recalled his decision to quit, saying that running a university had proven to be child’s play compared to a city school system and that his family urged him to give up the aggravation.

“We’re tired of seeing the Becton name in the press,” he recalled them telling him. “‘We’re tired of seeing the beatings you take.'”

The general called a press conference in March 1998, at which he said: “I’m tired and I want to go home and enjoy it.”