By Anya Litvak
Charles Culliver left Pittsburgh at the age of 18 on a Pullman railroad car headed to Louisville, Ky. It was 1958, 10 years after President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military. Mr. Culliver had volunteered to serve.
It was his first time away from home. When he awoke on the Army base his first morning, a drill sergeant was screaming in his face but his attention focused on a sign above a water fountain.
“Coloreds only.”
It was a sign in more ways than one. “There were just in-your-face dividing lines,” Mr. Culliver said of his time in the service.
When younger soldiers came to him to ask what to expect, he’d say, “The books are stacked.”
“It’s still out there, in the new Army,” he said Saturday at a panel discussion at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Oakland.
Mr. Culliver served in the Army for six years. When he returned to Pittsburgh in 1964, a few months after the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination, he noticed that a traditionally whites-only public pool now had black swimmers. It was a detail he remembers to this day.
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