On his deathbed, former Fort Bragg soldier makes a final plea to clear his name

The young Army paratrooper had barely set foot in the club for noncommissioned officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he was confronted by a sergeant.

The paratrooper, Needham Mayes, was among the first black servicemen on the base since the executive order to desegregate the armed forces was signed seven years earlier. But here in this club, in July 1955, he was just a 21-year-old private, and privates weren’t allowed.

The sergeant and the private exchanged heated words, then blows. Other sergeants tried to break them up. From the chaos emerged a gunshot. The sergeant lay wounded, and the private was led away in irons.

He was swiftly court-martialed and expelled from the Army with a dishonorable discharge. He maintained his innocence, but his appeal was denied. He then moved to Brooklyn to start a new life, one filled with public service in the borough’s poorest black neighborhoods.

Now, 64 years later, a new and urgent level of attention has returned to his discharge: Mayes, 85, is nearing the end of his life, unable to hear or eat, his thin frame curled in a bed at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center.

His lawyers are seeking to have the discharge upgraded so that Mayes can be granted a final wish to be buried among veterans at a national cemetery.

The race against the clock is playing out in legal filings to the acting Secretary of the Army, Ryan D. McCarthy, with letters of support from friends and family — even one from the sergeant who was wounded in the fight.

The case is the latest in what many consider a period of reckoning for the military and what are known as “bad paper” discharges, which force separation under less than fully honorable conditions under the military’s interpretation of misconduct or poor performance.

Nearly 260,000 Korean War-era service members were separated with less than fully honorable discharges, according to statistics provided by the Department of Defense to Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco-based veterans advocacy group.

Some of the disciplinary actions, which cover various offenses, have been successfully contested in recent years, especially ones involving homosexual acts. A 2011 Obama administration policy has generally granted an honorable discharge to veterans who were ousted for homosexuality unless there were aggravating factors like misconduct.

In the Jim Crow South, black service members were administratively separated or court-martialed in disproportionate numbers, according to government studies dating back to the 1970s — and relatively few of those servicemen have sought reconsideration.

These discharges can result in the lifelong denial of certain veteran benefits, including access to health care, subsidized education and many government jobs, as well as burial in national cemeteries.

“Needham isn’t alone,” said Rob Cuthbert, a former coordinator for the Veteran Advocacy Project’s Discharge Upgrade Clinic at the Urban Justice Center. “Going public with his discharge is a brave and final act of service.”

Six Men Tell Their Stories of Sexual Assault in the Military

Mayes was born in 1934 in New Bern, North Carolina, to a laborer and a mother of seven. He was born Needham Maye, but changed his last name to Mayes years later. He enlisted in 1953 after he graduated from high school.

“He was very excited,” said his brother, Derry Maye, 81. “When he came home the first time, with them boots shining like new money — he was looking good.”

Mayes volunteered for paratrooper training and joined the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg. It was there that the incident that reshaped his life took place, on July 30, 1955.

Mayes ran into a friend, Sgt. Henry C. Saunders, who told Mayes that he was heading to town from the base shortly, and invited him to come. Mayes said he would change clothes and join him.

Saunders said he had a particular reason to go to town: He was carrying a gun, a personal weapon not issued by the Army, and he wanted to get rid of it.

The sergeant tucked the small pistol, a .22-caliber revolver, into the inside pocket of his sport coat and entered the base club for noncommissioned officers like himself — known as the NCO Club — for a cheeseburger. He was sitting with other sergeants, including one who had been promoted that very day, Sgt. James W. Emery, 21.

Emery was celebrating. (“You won’t deny that you had eight or 10 beers, do you?” he was asked later, to which he replied, “I may have had.”) It was 7:30 p.m.

Mayes entered the club and found Saunders. Emery noticed the private in a place where privates weren’t welcome, and, goaded by the older sergeants around him, rose to tell him as much.

The scuffle that followed would be hazily recalled later among its three or four principals, the details lost to the heat of the moment and to the beer. Emery and Mayes exchanged words and began shoving one another. Saunders and another sergeant broke them up, but the two resumed wresting.

Then, a gunshot.

Saunders said later he only then realized that his pistol was gone from his pocket. A round had been fired, wounding Emery in the thigh. Military police officers arrived and arrested Mayes.

He stood trial for general court-martial two months later. The other men in or near the fracas testified to what they saw and heard — Emery rising to confront the man of a lower rank, Saunders hearing a shot and realizing his gun was missing.

Mayes at first admitted to taking the gun: “I reached with my hand into the inside of Sergeant Saunders’ pocket and pulled it out,” he testified, according to a transcript of the hearing. But he said he only meant to show it to the sergeant. “I don’t think I pulled the trigger,” he wrote in an affidavit, and he said he did not know who did.

He was found guilty and handed a dishonorable discharge and a sentence of one year of hard labor. Emery was back to work soon after; his wound was minor.

Mayes moved to Brooklyn a troubled man.

“I struggled with depression, alcohol abuse and the shame of my dishonorable discharge,” he wrote decades later, in 2017, in an affidavit. He recanted his testimony about grabbing the gun, saying Saunders pulled out his own gun: “Several people grabbed for the pistol at the same time, and the pistol went off.”

He turned his life around. In 1978, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Adelphi University, the first of his seven siblings to finish college. He earned a master’s degree and became a social worker and therapist. He had three daughters. He worked at organizations that fought drug abuse and promoted mental health awareness. He sought to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS, handing out condoms at events. And in 2009, when Mayes was 75, he joined the NAACP’s Brooklyn branch. On its Civic Engagement Committee he became a regular presence in poor, black neighborhoods, urging young men to register to vote with the verve of a preacher seeking converts. He visited homes and jails, but he was particularly drawn to large events, where the crowds were greater.

“All over Brooklyn, basketball tournaments,” said Onida Mayers, 54, who worked at Mayes’ side until, in his late 70s, his health began to decline. “He always wanted to be sure that young black men knew their rights and had a future. That they had the tools they needed.”

Mayers would later write a letter to the Army supporting Mayes’ appeal for a new discharge status: “Mr. Mayes utilized all his resources to assist people trapped in these negative cycles: monetary, physical and mental.”

He was in the early stages of declining health when he approached lawyers in New York in 2016 who specialize in applying for upgrades in military discharges. He was among the very oldest of former servicemen to seek an upgrade — generally, the clients on the older end of the spectrum were from the Vietnam era.

In Mayes’ case, an upgrade from dishonorable to honorable or general discharge, besides possibly providing him with a pension and other veteran benefits, would make him eligible for burial in a national cemetery.

“I am a rehabilitated man,” he wrote in 2017, “and I hope to have the right to be buried in a national cemetery with my comrades-in-arms.” The Secretary of the Army has the authority to upgrade a discharge immediately. In 2017, that office denied Mayes’ request. His lawyers filed a new application on Friday, and the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has requested a meeting with the acting Army secretary and has urged that the case be considered quickly.

Mayes also found another, unlikely ally: Emery, the injured man from 1955.

“Mistakes were made on both our parts that evening,” Emery, now retired and living in South Dakota, wrote in 2017. “Chalk it up to youthful brashness, boisterousness, and stupidity. I hold absolutely no animosity toward Mr. Mayes, and am pleased to hear that he spent his life helping others.”

In his hospital bed, Mayes seems largely unaware of his surroundings, and his doctors have told his daughter, Nathalie Pilgrim, 54, that they are mainly trying to make him comfortable.

On Sunday, Mayers, his friend and partner in registering voters, visited his bedside.

“There are people who are working for you, and people who care about you and love you,” Mayers told him. “You are not forgotten.”