THE AMERICAN MILITARY handed out one million Purple Hearts to those wounded in World War II. Osceola “Ozzie” Fletcher had to wait 77 years to get his.
On D-Day, Fletcher was delivering supplies on Omaha Beach when his truck was hit by German fire and. “That was an awful day.” But Fletcher, 99, a Black crane operator in a segregated army, did not receive a Purple Heart. “Black soldiers didn’t get the Purple Heart,” he told New York media in 2020. “They got injured, damaged, hurt. But they never got wounded.” Although some Black combatants did receive Purple Hearts during the war, including more than 60 “Tuskegee Airmen”—the renowned African American pilots—they were indeed often overlooked for medals.
