Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 Part 14

[Footnote 3-127: Quoted in Forrestal, "Remarks for Dinner of Urban League."]

[Footnote 3-128: Ltr, SecNav to Lester Granger, 1 Feb 45, Forrestal file, GenRecsNav.]

[Footnote 3-129: Ltrs, Granger to Forrestal, 19 Mar and 3 Apr 45, 54-1-13, Forrestal file, GenRecsNav.

Granger and Forrestal had attended Dartmouth College, but not together as Forrestal thought. For a detailed and affectionate account of their relationship, see Columbia University Oral History Interview with Granger.]

Forrestal was sympathetic to the Urban League's approach to racial justice, and in Granger he had a man who had developed this approach into a social philosophy. Granger believed in relating the Navy's racial problems not to questions of fairness but to questions of survival, comfort, and security for all concerned. He a.s.sumed that if leadership in any field came to understand that its privilege or its security were threatened by denial of fairness to the less privileged, then a meeting of minds was possible between the two groups. They would begin to seek a way to eliminate insecurity, and from the process of eliminating insecurity would come fairness. As Granger explained it, talk to the commander about his loss of efficient production, not the shame of denying a Negro a man's right to a job.

Talk about the social costs that come from denial of opportunity and talk about the penalty that the privileged pay almost in equal measure to what the Negro pays, but in different coin. Only then would one begin to get a hearing. On the other hand, talk to Negroes not about achieving their rights but about making good on an opportunity. This would lead to a discussion of training, of ways to override barriers "by maintaining themselves whole."[3-130] The Navy was going to get a lesson in race relations, Urban League style.

[Footnote 3-130: Columbia University Oral Hist Interv with Granger.]

At Forrestal's request, Granger explained how he viewed the special adviser's role. He thought he could help the secretary by smoothing the integration process in the general service through consultations with local commanders and their men in a series of field visits. He could also act as an intermediary between the department and the civil rights organizations and black press. Granger urged the formation (p. 096) of an advisory council, which would consist of ranking representatives from the various branches, to interpret and administer the Navy's racial policy. The need for such intradepartmental coordination seemed fairly obvious. Although in 1945 the Bureau of Naval Personnel had increased the resources of its Special Programs Unit, still the only specialized organization dealing with race problems, that group was always too swamped with administrative detail to police race problems outside Washington. Furthermore, the Seabees and the Medical and Surgery Department were in some ways independent of the bureau, and their employment of black sailors was different from that of other branches--a situation that created further confusion and conflict in the application of race policy.[3-131]

[Footnote 3-131: Memo, Chief, NavPers, for Cmdr Richard M. Paget (Exec Office of the SecNav), 21 Apr 45, sub: Organization of Advisory Cmte, Pers 2119, GenRecsNav. See also "BuPers Hist," pt. II, p. 3.]

a.s.suming that the advisory council would require an executive agent, Granger suggested that the secretary have a full-time a.s.sistant for race relations in addition to his own part-time services. He wanted the man to be black and he wanted him in the secretary's office, which would give him prestige in the black community and increase his power to deal with the bureaus. Forrestal rejected the idea of a council and a full-time a.s.sistant, pleading that he must avoid creating another formal organization. Instead he decided to a.s.semble an informal committee, which he invited Granger to join, to standardize the Navy's handling of Negroes.[3-132]

[Footnote 3-132: Ltr, Granger to SecNav, 19 Mar 45; Ltrs, SecNav to Granger, 26 Mar and 5 Apr 45. All in 54-1-13, Forrestal file, GenRecsNav. The activities of the intradepartmental committee will be discussed in Chapter 5.]

It was obvious that Forrestal, convinced that the Navy's senior officials had made a fundamental shift in their thinking on equal treatment and opportunity for Negroes in the Navy, was content to let specific reforms percolate slowly throughout the department. He would later call the Navy's wartime reforms "a start down a long road."[3-133]

In these last months of the war, however, more barriers to equal treatment of Negroes were quietly falling. In March 1945, after months of prodding by Forrestal, the Surgeon General announced that the Navy would accept a "reasonable" number of qualified black nurses and was now recruiting for them.[3-134] In June the Bureau of Naval Personnel ordered the integration of recruit training, a.s.signing black general service recruits to the nearest recruit training command "to obtain the maximum utilization of naval training and housing facilities."[3-135]

Noting that this integration was at variance with some individual att.i.tudes, the bureau justified the change on the grounds of administrative efficiency. Again at the secretary's urging, plans were set in motion in July for the a.s.signment of Negroes to submarine and aviation pilot training.[3-136] At the same time Lester Granger, acting as the secretary's personal representative, was visiting the (p. 097) Navy's continental installations, prodding commanders and converting them to the new policy.[3-137]

[Footnote 3-133: Ltr, Forrestal to Marshall Field III (publisher of _PM_), 14 Jul 45, 54-1-13, Forrestal file, GenRecsNav.]

[Footnote 3-134: Memo, SecNav for Rear Adm W. J. C.

Agnew, a.s.st Surg Gen, 28 Jan 45; Memo, Surg Gen for Eugene Duffield, 19 Mar 45; both in 54-1-3, Forrestal file, GenRecsNav. By V-J day the Navy had four black nurses on active duty.]

[Footnote 3-135: Ltr, Chief, NavPers, to Cmdts, All Naval Districts, 11 Jun 45, sub: Negro Recruit Training--Discontinuance of Special Program and Camps for, P16-3/MM, BuPersRecs.]

[Footnote 3-136: Memo, SecNav for Artemus L. Gates, a.s.st Sec for Air, et al. 16 Jul 45; Ltr, SecNav to Granger, 14 Jul 45; both in 54-1-20, GenRecsNav.]

[Footnote 3-137: Ltr, Granger to Forrestal, 4 Aug 45, 54-1-13, GenRecsNav.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE 22D SPECIAL CONSTRUCTION BATTALION CELEBRATES V-J DAY.]

The Navy's wartime progress in race relations was the product of several forces. At first Negroes were restricted to service as messmen, but political pressure forced the Navy to open general service billets to them. In this the influence of the civil rights spokesmen was paramount. They and their allies in Congress and the national political parties led President Roosevelt to demand an end to exclusion and the Navy to accept Negroes for segregated general service. The presence of large numbers of black inductees and the limited number of a.s.signments for them in segregated units prevented the Bureau of Naval Personnel from providing even a semblance of separate but equal conditions. Deteriorating black morale and the specter of racial disturbance drove the bureau to experiment with all-black crews, but the experiment led nowhere. The Navy could never operate a separate but equal fleet. Finally in 1944 Forrestal began to experiment with integration in seagoing a.s.signments.

The influence of the civil rights forces can be overstated. Their attention tended to focus on the Army, especially in the later years of the war; their attacks on the Navy were mostly sporadic and uncoordinated and easily deflected by naval spokesmen. Equally important to race reform was the fact that the Navy was developing its own group of civil rights advocates during the war, influential men in key positions who had been dissatisfied with the prewar status of the Negro and who pressed for racial change in the name of military efficiency. Under the leadership of a sympathetic secretary, (p. 098) himself aided and abetted by Stevenson and other advisers in his office and in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, the Navy was laying plans for a racially integrated general service when j.a.pan capitulated.

To achieve equality of treatment and opportunity, however, takes more than the development of an integration policy. For one thing, the liberalization of policy and practices affected only a relatively small percentage of the Negroes in the Navy. On V-J day the Navy could count 164,942 enlisted Negroes, 5.37 percent of its total enlisted strength.[3-138] More than double the prewar percentage, this figure was still less than half the national ratio of blacks to whites. In August 1945 the Navy had 60 black officers, 6 of whom were women (4 nurses and 2 WAVES), and 68 enlisted WAVES who were not segregated. The integration of the Navy officer corps, the WAVES, and the nurses had an immediate effect on only 128 people. Figures for black enlisted men show that they were employed in some sixty-seven ratings by the end of the war, but steward and steward's mate ratings accounted for some 68,000 men, about 40 percent of the total black enlistment.

Approximately 59,000 others were ordinary seamen, some were recruits in training or specialists striking for ratings, but most were a.s.signed to the large segregated labor units and base companies.[3-139]

Here again integrated service affected only a small portion of the Navy's black recruits during World War II.

[Footnote 3-138: Pers 215-BL, "Enlisted Strength--U.S. Navy," 26 Jul 46, BuPersRecs.]

[Footnote 3-139: Pers 215-12-EL, "Number of Negro Enlisted Personnel on Active Duty," 29 Nov 45 (statistics as of 31 Oct 45), BuPersRecs.]

Furthermore, a real chance existed that even this limited progress might prove to be temporary. On V-J day the Regular Navy had 7,066 Negroes, just 2.14 percent of its total.[3-140] Many of these men could be expected to stay in the postwar Navy, but the overwhelming majority of them were in the separate Steward's Branch and would remain there after the war. Black reservists in the wartime general service would have to compete with white regulars and reservists for the severely reduced number of postwar billets and commissions in a Navy in which almost all members would have to be regulars. Although Lester Granger had stressed this point in conversations with James Forrestal, neither the secretary nor the Bureau of Naval Personnel took the matter up before the end of the war. In short, after setting in motion a number of far-reaching reforms during the war, the Navy seemed in some danger of settling back into its old prewar pattern.

[Footnote 3-140: Pers-215-BL, "Enlisted Strength--U.S. Navy," 26 Jul 46.]

Still, the fact that reforms had been attempted in a service that had so recently excluded Negroes was evidence of progress. Secretary Forrestal was convinced that the Navy's hierarchy had swung behind the principle of equal treatment and opportunity, but the real test was yet to come. Hope for a permanent change in the Navy's racial practices lay in convincing its tradition-minded officers that an integrated general service with a representative share of black officers and men was a matter of military efficiency.

CHAPTER 4 (p. 099)

World War II: The Marine Corps and the Coast Guard

The racial policies of both the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard were substantially the same as the Navy policy from which they were derived, but all three differed markedly from each other in their practical application. The differences arose partly from the particular mission and size of these components of the wartime Navy, but they were also governed by the peculiar legal relationship that existed in time of war between the Navy and the other two services.

By law the Marine Corps was a component of the Department of the Navy, its commandant subordinate to the Secretary of the Navy in such matters as manpower and budget and to the Chief of Naval Operations in specified areas of military operations. In the conduct of ordinary business, however, the commandant was independent of the Navy's bureaus, including the Bureau of Naval Personnel. The Marine Corps had its own staff personnel officer, similar to the Army's G-1, and, more important for the development of racial policy, it had a Division of Plans and Policies that was immediately responsible to the commandant for manpower planning. In practical terms, the Marine Corps of World War II was subject to the dictates of the Secretary of the Navy for general policy, and the secretary's 1942 order to enlist Negroes applied equally to the Marine Corps, which had no Negroes in its ranks, and to the Navy, which did. At the same time, the letters and directives of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Chief of Naval Personnel implementing the secretary's order did not apply to the corps. In effect, the Navy Department imposed a racial policy on the corps, but left it to the commandant to carry out that policy as he saw fit. These legal distinctions would become more important as the Navy's racial policy evolved in the postwar period.

The Coast Guard's administrative position had early in the war become roughly a.n.a.logous to that of the Marine Corps. At all times a branch of the armed forces, the Coast Guard was normally a part of the Treasury Department. A statute of 1915, however, provided that during wartime or "whenever the President may so direct" the Coast Guard would operate as part of the Navy, subject to the orders of the Secretary of the Navy.[4-1] At the direction of the President, the Coast Guard pa.s.sed to the control of the Secretary of the Navy on 1 November 1941 and so remained until 1 January 1946.[4-2]

[Footnote 4-1: 38 _U.S. Stat. at L_ (1915), 800-2.

Since 1967 the Coast Guard has been a part of the Department of Transportation.]

[Footnote 4-2: Executive Order 8928, 1 Nov 41. A similar transfer under provisions of the 1915 law was effected during World War I. The service's predecessor organizations, the Revenue Marine, Revenue Service, Revenue-Marine Service, and the Revenue Cutter Service, had also provided the Navy with certain specified ships and men during all wars since the Revolution.]

At first a division under the Chief of Naval Operations, the (p. 100) headquarters of the Coast Guard was later granted considerably more administrative autonomy. In March 1942 Secretary Knox carefully delineated the Navy's control over the Coast Guard, making the Chief of Naval Operations responsible for the operation of those Coast Guard ships, planes, and stations a.s.signed to the naval commands for the "proper conduct of the war," but specifying that a.s.signments be made with "due regard for the needs of the Coast Guard," which must continue to carry out its regular functions. Such duties as providing port security, icebreaking services, and navigational aid remained under the direct control and supervision of the commandant, the local naval district commander exercising only "general military control" of these activities in his area.[4-3] Important to the development of racial policy was the fact that the Coast Guard also retained administrative control of the recruitment, training, and a.s.signment of personnel. Like the Marine Corps, it also had a staff agency for manpower planning, the Commandant's Advisory Board, and one for administration, the Personnel Division, independent of the Navy's bureaus.[4-4] In theory, the Coast Guard's manpower policy, at least in regard to those segments of the service that operated directly under Navy control, had to be compatible with the racial directives of the Navy's Bureau of Naval Personnel. In practice, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, like his colleague in the Marine Corps, was left free to develop his own racial policy in accordance with the general directives of the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations.

[Footnote 4-3: Ltr, SecNav to CominCh-CNO, 30 Mar 42, sub: Administration of Coast Guard When Operating Under Navy Department, quoted in Furer, _Administration of the Navy Department in World War II_, pp. 608-10.]

[Footnote 4-4: For a survey of the organization and functions of the U.S. Coast Guard Personnel Division, see USCG Historical Section, _Personnel_, The Coast Guard at War, 25:16-27.]

_The First Black Marines_

These legal distinctions had no bearing on the Marine Corps' prewar racial policy, which was designed to continue its tradition of excluding Negroes. The views of the commandant, Maj. Gen. Thomas Holcomb, on the subject of race were well known in the Navy. Negroes did not have the "right" to demand a place in the corps, General Holcomb told the Navy's General Board when that body was considering the expansion of the corps in April 1941. "If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites."[4-5] He was more circ.u.mspect but no more reasonable when he explained the racial exclusion publicly. Black enlistment was impractical, he told one civil rights group, because the Marine Corps was too small to form racially separate units.[4-6]

And, if some Negroes persisted in trying to volunteer after Pearl Harbor, there was another deterrent, described by at least one senior recruiter: the medical examiner was cautioned to disqualify the black applicant during the enlistment physical.[4-7]

[Footnote 4-5: Quoted in Navy General Board, "Plan for the Expansion of the USMC," 18 Apr 41 (No.

139), Recs of Gen Bd, OpNavArchives.]

[Footnote 4-6: Ltr, CMC to Harold E. Thompson, Northern Phila. Voters League, 6 Aug 40, AQ-17, Central Files, Headquarters, USMC (hereafter MC files).]

[Footnote 4-7: Memo, Off in Charge, Eastern Recruiting Div, for CMC, 16 Jan 42, sub: Colored Applicants for Enlistment in the Marine Corps, WP 11991, MC files.]

Such evasions could no longer be practiced after President (p. 101) Roosevelt decided to admit Negroes to the general service of the naval establishment. According to Secretary Knox the President wanted the Navy to handle the matter "in a way that would not inject into the whole personnel of the Navy the race question."[4-8] Under pressure to make some move, General Holcomb proposed the enlistment of 1,000 Negroes in the volunteer Marine Corps Reserve for duty in the general service in a segregated composite defense battalion. The battalion would consist primarily of seacoast and antiaircraft artillery, a rifle company with a light tank platoon, and other weapons units and components necessary to make it a self-sustaining unit.[4-9] To inject the subject of race "to a less degree than any other known scheme,"

the commandant planned to train the unit in an isolated camp and a.s.sign it to a remote station.[4-10] The General Board accepted this proposal, explaining to Secretary Knox that Negroes could not be used in the Marine Corps' amphibious units because the inevitable replacement and redistribution of men in combat would "prevent the maintenance of necessary segregation." The board also mentioned that experienced noncommissioned officers were at a premium and that diverting them to train a black unit would be militarily inefficient.[4-11]

[Footnote 4-8: Memo, SecNav for Adm W. R. s.e.xton, 14 Feb 42, P14-4, Recs of Gen Bd, OpNavArchives. The quotation is from the Knox Memo and is not necessarily in the President's exact words.]

[Footnote 4-9: In devising plans for the composite battalion the Director of Plans and Policies rejected a proposal to organize a black raider battalion. The author of the proposal had explained that Negroes would make ideal night raiders "as no camouflage of faces and hands would be necessary."

Memo, Col Thomas Gale for Exec Off, Div of Plans and Policies, 19 Feb 42, AO-250, MC files.]