CNN’s Chris Wallace Riveted As Wendell Pierce Talks About White Officer Denying His Father WW2 Medals

CNN anchor Chris Wallace was moved as actor and former The Wire star Wendell Pierce told him about his father Amos Pierce, and the White officer who denied him medals he earned in World War II.

Wallace interviewed the accomplished character actor for this week’s edition of his Max series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace on a variety of topics, including the roles he has portrayed in his long career.

In one gripping moment, Pierce choked up discussing his role in Death of a Salesman, and explained how it related to his father:

And in another exchange, Pierce told Wallace about his father’s decades-long wait to receive the medals he earned after a White officer refused to give them to him when he was discharged:

WALLACE: I wanted to talk to you about your dad Amos first of all, so sorry about your loss 98 When he passed in November he was as you say, in World War Two in a segregated army unit and you said he loved this country when this country wasn’t loving him back?

PIERCE: Absolutely. Well, you’re a historian, you’re a journalist, you know America owes a great debt to a generation that has no reason. No reason to believe in the values that it states because they have every evidence that every opportunity. They tried to embrace that efforts were made to stop them and is not only a hinderance people’s lives were lost. So when that that’s generational damage, you know, and you have to fight that but then on the other side of that, that emboldens and strengthens men like my father who said, you can’t get lost in America. They’ve sent the blueprint out, and no matter how much they place in front of us any obstacles you still have an individual strength that can do anything. And so to have this private who was in a segregated army unit, with a Third Marines as they went on to Cyprus Beach in World War Two, first of all live so he can come home, denied his metals, and he was coming home by a white officer. It was a you. Yeah, right you.

WALLACE: I mean, I read that that that he was, he had earned six medals. And a white officer said…

PIERCE: He said, my papers are behind me. I think we got some medals with. She said, ‘Yeah, right. You’ and just signed off. You’re discharged. My mother comes to me and says Wendell, your father earned medals and he never got them. We got a letter from the Army. Let him, you know, see if you can get the medals. I said, Of course. My mother brings me this yellowed piece of paper from January 1945. I said wait a minute, I thought it came the other day. This was in 2010. And she said no. And my father had held on to that all that time. And the World War Two Museum, got him his medals, and they said ‘we not only got him his medals, we’re going to present his medals on Memorial Day’. At the at the museum, the World War Two Museum and they gave him his medals. After decades, 60 years of not receiving them, he received his medals finally.

Watch above via Max’s Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace.