Righting the wrong of U.S. Army racial abuse faced by African American soldiers on the Gothic LineI

``The further backward you can look the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. Welcome again to the podcast and this second of a three-part series where we will look back at the story of African American soldiers who braved Nazi and Italian Fascist attacks but also white U.S. Army officer racist abuse while fighting on the Gothic Line. The first episode of the series included an interview with Solace Wales who published a book in 2020 titled Braided in Fire – Black GIs and Tuscan Villagers on the Gothic Line 1944. That episode was published earlier in this Gothic Line podcast series. The second part centers around an interview with military historian and author Daniel Gibran who the U.S. Department of Defense employed in the 1990s to do a report on why no U.S. African American, including those fighting on the Gothic Line, received a Medal of Honor, after WWII ended. As a result seven African American soldiers, including Lt. John Fox and Lt. Vernon Baker, were awarded the Medal of Honor by former U.S. President Bill Clinton at the White House in 1997. Fox received the medal posthumously while Baker was present at the WH East Room ceremony. The third part of the series includes an interview with Ed Valentin, the official historian of an ongoing, special U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency U.S. Army 92nd Infantry Division program to identify the unknown African American soldiers killed in combat on the Gothic Line more than eighty years ago and whose remains are buried in a U.S. military cemetery in Florence, Italy. As Valentin will tell us, racism played a major role in why the African American soldiers were not identified more than seven decades ago and are having such a difficult time today to identify the remains even though the special program was launched in 2014.