Biography
Terry Marvell Whitmore was a Black U.S. Marine from Memphis who was wounded in Vietnam and decorated by President Lyndon Johnson. While recovering in Japan, he concluded that the war was immoral and refused orders sending him back to Vietnam. With help from the Japanese anti-war network Beheiren, he traveled through the Soviet Union and arrived in Sweden on May 27, 1968, where he received refuge as a military deserter. Whitmore publicly connected his resistance to the war, atrocities he had witnessed and racism in the military and the United States. He published Memphis-Nam-Sweden: The Autobiography of a Black American Exile in 1971. After a visit to the United States in 1977, he remained in Sweden until returning permanently to Memphis in 2001.
