UPDATED: 9:30 a.m. ET, Sept. 11, 2024
The nation forever changed 23 years ago when 3,000 people were killed in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a field in rural Pennsylvania in terror attacks orchestrated by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on Sept. 11, 2001.
After four planes were hijacked during flights originating from separate locations, one of them struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m., trapping the building’s workers who were above the 91st floor. Seventeen minutes later, another of the three planes flew directly into the World Trade Center’s South Tower at 9:03 a.m. Nearly 40 minutes after that, the third plane crashed into the Pentagon in northern Virginia at 9:37 a.m. And at 10:03 a.m., the fourth and final hijacked flight crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
MORE: The 11 Most Compelling 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
Ever since then, the horror of it all replays like a bad movie on the anniversary and fresh wounds are reopened. Here, NewsOne remembers some of the unsung heroes of color who stood on the front lines during and following the devastating attacks on 9/11.
Rodney Gillis
NYPD Sgt. Rodney Gillis was killed in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center while he was saving people.
“That was what Rodney would do,” former NYPD detective Madeline Lawrence recalled in an interview with USA Today. Lawrence said Gillis always put others first, as evidenced by how he jumped to action even though he wasn’t on duty that day.
“He was our sergeant, and he looked out for us,” Lawrence added. “He appreciated the magnitude of those buildings.”
Black firefighters
The stories of a group of African American firefighters — Vernon Cherry, Tarel Coleman, Andre Fletcher, Keith Glascoe, Ronnie L. Henderson, William L. Henry Jr., Gerard Jean Baptiste, Karl Joseph, Keithroy Maynard, Shawn E. Powell, Vernon Richard and Leon W. Smith Jr. — who gave their lives at the World Trade Center site to…
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