My Veterans Day thoughts center on my dad, this proud black Marine on the right, a patriotic American who fought Nazis for his country in WWII, only to have his own country turn on him after he returned, wrongfully sentencing him in 1968 to 22-55 years for pot possession & sale. 
Standing 6 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 260 pounds, eloquent, successful in business, & flouting all the racial restrictions of his day, my barel-chested dad towered like a black Gulliver over the lily-white Lilliputians—call ‘em Lily-putians—in law enforcement who resented him.
After he became a jailhouse lawyer and successfully appealed his own case in Armour v. Salisbury, my dad, ever the proud Marine, felt no ill will toward the nation that had rewarded his patriotic service & sacrifice with a racist prosecution and miscarriage of justice!?
Despite being abused by corrupt state actors, my dad remained a proud Marine. He’d point out that even though Lily-putians had twisted the law to vent their venomous biases, he himself had found redemption in the law, for he had found the key to his cell door in prison law books.
