Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 Part 94

In the years from 1946 to 1954, then, several forces converged to bring about integration of the regular armed forces. Pressure from the civil rights advocates was one, idealistic leadership another. Most important, however, was the services' realization that segregation was an inefficient way to use the manpower provided by a democratic draft law or a volunteer system made democratic by the Secretary of Defense.

Each service reached its conclusion separately, since each had a different problem in the efficient use of manpower and each had its own racial traditions. Accordingly, the services saw little need to exchange views, develop rivalries, or imitate one another's racial policies. There were two exceptions to this situation: both the Army and Air Force naturally considered the Navy's integration experience when they were formulating postwar policies, and the Navy and Air Force fought the Army's proposals to experiment with integrated units and inst.i.tute a parity of enlistment standards.

_Equal Treatment and Opportunity_

Segregation officially ended in the active armed forces with the announcement of the Secretary of Defense in 1954 that the last all-black unit had been disbanded. In the little more than six years after President Truman's order, some quarter of a million blacks had been intermingled with whites in the nation's military units worldwide. These changes ushered in a brief era of good feeling during which the services and the civil rights advocates tended to overlook some forms of discrimination that persisted within the services. This tendency became even stronger in the early 1960's when the discrimination suffered by black servicemen in local communities dramatized the relative effectiveness of the equal treatment and opportunity policies on military installations. In July 1963, in the wake of another presidential investigation of racial equality (p. 620) in the armed forces, Secretary of Defense McNamara outlined a new racial policy. An extension of the forces that had produced the abolition of segregated military units, the new policy also vowed to carry the crusade for equal treatment and opportunity for black servicemen outside the military compound into the civilian community beyond. McNamara's 1963 directive became the model for subsequent racial orders in the Defense Department.

This enlargement of the department's concept of equal treatment and opportunity paralleled the rise of the modern civil rights movement, which was reaching its apogee in the mid-1960's. McNamara later acknowledged the influence of the civil rights activists on his department during this period. But the department's racial progress cannot be explained solely as a reaction to the pressures exerted by the civil rights movement. Several other factors lay behind the new and broader policy. The Defense Department was, for instance, under constant pressure from black officers and men who were not only reporting inequities in the newly integrated services and complaining of the remaining racial discrimination within the military community but were also demanding the department's a.s.sistance in securing their const.i.tutional rights from the communities outside the military bases.

This was particularly true in the fields of public education, housing, and places of entertainment.

The services as well as the Defense Department's manpower officials resisted these demands and continued in the early 1960's to limit their racial reforms to those necessary but exclusively internal matters most obviously connected with the efficient operation of their units. Reinforcing this resistance was the reluctance on the part of most commanders to break with tradition and interfere in what they considered community affairs. Nor had McNamara's early policy statements in response to servicemen's demands come to grips with the issue of discrimination in the civilian community. At the same time, some reformers in the Defense Department had allied themselves with like-minded progressives throughout the administration and were searching for a way to carry out President Kennedy's commitment to civil rights. These individuals were determined to use the services'

early integration successes as a stepping-stone to further civil rights reforms while the administration's civil rights program remained bogged down in Congress.

Although these reformers believed that the armed forces could be an effective instrument of social change for society at large, they clothed their aims in the garb of military efficiency. In fact, military efficiency was certainly McNamara's paramount concern when he supported the idea of enlarging the scope of his department's racial programs and when in 1962 he readily accepted the proposal to appoint the Gesell Committee to study the services' racial program.

The Gesell Committee easily doc.u.mented the connection, long suspected by the reformers, between discrimination in the community and poor morale among black servicemen and the link between morale and combat efficiency. More important, with its ability to publicize the extent of discrimination against black servicemen in local communities and to offer practical recommendations for reform, the committee was able (p. 621) to stimulate the secretary into action. Yet not until his last years in office, beginning with his open housing campaign in 1967, did McNamara, who had always championed the stand of Adam Yarmolinsky and the rest, become a strong partic.i.p.ant.

McNamara promptly endorsed the Gesell Committee's report, which called for a vigorous program to provide equal opportunity for black servicemen, ordering the services to launch such a program in communities near military bases and making the local commander primarily responsible for its success. He soft-pedaled the committee's controversial provision for the use of economic sanctions against recalcitrant businessmen, stressing instead the duty of commanders to press for changes through voluntary compliance. These efforts, according to Defense Department reports, achieved gratifying results in the next few years. In conjunction with other federal officials operating under provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, local commanders helped open thousands of theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, and bathing beaches to black servicemen. Only in the face of continued opposition to open housing by landlords who dealt with servicemen, and then not until 1967, did McNamara decide to use the powerful and controversial weapon of off-limits sanctions. In short order his programs helped destroy the patterns of segregation in multiple housing in areas surrounding most military bases.

The federal government's commitment to civil rights, manifest in Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, and congressional actions, was an important support for the Defense Department's racial program during this second part of the integration era. It is doubtful whether many of the command initiatives recommended by the Gesell Committee would have succeeded or even been tried without the court's 1954 school ruling and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet in several important instances, such as the McNamara 1963 equal opportunity directive and the open housing campaign in 1967, the department's actions antedated federal action. Originally a follower of civilian society in racial matters, the armed forces moved ahead in the 1950's and by the mid-1960's had become a powerful stimulus for change in civilian practices in some areas of the country.[24-7]

[Footnote 24-7: For a discussion of this point, see Yarmolinsky's _The Military Establishment_, pp.

346-51.]

Achievements of the services should not detract from the primacy of civil rights legislation in the reforms of the 1960's. The sudden fall of barriers to black Americans was primarily the result of the Civil Rights Acts. But the fact and example of integration in the armed forces was an important cause of change in the communities near military bases. Defense officials, prodding in the matter of integrated schooling for dependent children, found the mere existence of successfully integrated on-base schooling a useful tool in achieving similar schooling off-base. The experience of having served in the integrated armed forces, shared by so many young Americans, also exercised an immeasurable influence on the changes of the 1960's.

Gesell Committee member Benjamin Muse recalled hearing a Mississippi hitchhiker say in 1961 at the height of the anti-integration, anti-Negro fever in that area: "I don't hold with this stuff about 'n.i.g.g.e.rs'. (p. 622) I had a colored buddy in Korea, and I want to tell you he was all right."[24-8]

[Footnote 24-8: Quoted in Ltr, Muse to Chief of Military History, 2 Aug 76, in CMH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAMARADERIE. _A soldier of Company C, 7th Infantry, lights a cigarette for a marine from D Company, 26th Marines, during "Operation Pegasus" near Khe Sanh._]

In retrospect, the attention paid by defense officials and the services to off-base discrimination in the 1960's may have been misdirected; many of these injustices would eventually have succ.u.mbed to civil rights legislation. Certainly more attention could have been paid to the unfinished business of providing equal treatment and opportunity for black servicemen within the military community.

Discrimination in matters of promotion, a.s.signment, and military justice, overlooked by almost everyone in the early 1960's, was never treated with the urgency it deserved. To have done so might have averted at least some of the racial turmoil visited on the services in the Vietnam era.

But these shortcomings merely point to the fact that the services were the only segment of American society to have integrated, however imperfectly, the races on so large a scale. In doing so they demonstrated that a policy of equal treatment and opportunity is more than a legal concept; it also ordains a social condition. Between (p. 623) the enunciation of such a policy and the achievement of its goals can fall the shadow of bigotry and the traditional way of doing things.

The record indicates that the services surmounted bigotry and rejected the old ways to a gratifying degree. To the extent that they were successful in bringing the races together, their efficiency prospered and the nation's ideal of equal opportunity for all citizens was fortified.

Unfortunately, the collapse of the legal and administrative barriers to equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces did not lead immediately to the full realization of this ideal. Equal treatment and opportunity would remain an elusive goal for the Department of Defense for years to come. The post-1965 period comprises a new chapter in the racial history of the services. The agitation that followed the McNamara era had different roots from the events of the previous decades. The key to this difference was suggested during the Vietnam War by the Kerner Commission in its stark conclusion that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate but unequal."[24-9] In contrast to the McNamara period of integration, when civil rights advocates and Defense Department officials worked toward a common goal, subsequent years would be marked by an often greater militancy on the part of black servicemen and a new kind of friction between a fragmented civil rights movement and the Department of Defense. Clearly, in coping with these problems the services will have to move beyond the elimination of legal and administrative barriers that had ordered their racial concerns between 1940 and 1965.

[Footnote 24-9: _Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders_, p. 1.]

Note on Sources (p. 625)

The search for source materials used in this volume provided the writer with a special glimpse into the ways in which various government agencies have treated what was until recently considered a sensitive subject. Most important doc.u.ments and working papers concerning the employment of black servicemen were, well into the 1950's and in contrast to the great bulk of personnel policy papers, routinely given a security cla.s.sification. In some agencies the "secret" or "confidential" stamp was considered sufficient to protect the materials, which were filed and retired in a routine manner and, therefore, have always been readily available to the persistent and qualified researcher. But, as any experienced staff officer could demonstrate, other methods beyond mere cla.s.sification can be devised to prevent easy access to sensitive material.

Thus, subterfuges were employed from time to time by officials dealing with racial subjects. In some staff agencies, for example, doc.u.ments were collected in special files, separated from the normal personnel or policy files. In other instances the materials were never retired in a routine matter, but instead remained for many years scattered in offices of origin or, less often, in some central file system. If some officials appear to have been overly anxious to shield their agency's record, they also, it should be added, possessed a sense of history and the historical import of their work. Though the temptation may have been strong within some agencies to destroy papers connected with past controversies, most officials scrupulously preserved not only the basic policy doc.u.ments concerning this specialized subject, but also much of the back-up material that the historian treasures.

The problem for the modern researcher is that these special collections and reserved materials, no longer cla.s.sified and no longer sensitive, have fallen, largely unnoted, into a sea of governmental paper beyond the reach of the archivist's finding aids. The frequently expressed comment of the researcher, "somebody is withholding something," should, for the sake of accuracy, be changed to "somebody has lost track of something."

This material might never have been recovered without the skilled a.s.sistance of the historical offices of the various services and Office of the Secretary of Defense. At times their search for lost doc.u.ments a.s.sumed the dimensions of a detective story. In partnership with Marine Corps historian Ralph Donnelly, for example, the author finally traced the bulk of the World War II racial records of the Marine Corps to an obscure and unmarked file in the cla.s.sified records section of Marine Corps headquarters. A comprehensive collection of official doc.u.ments on the employment of black personnel in the Navy between 1920 and 1946 was unearthed, not in the official archives, but in a dusty file cabinet in the Bureau of Naval Personnel's Management Information Division.

The search also had its frustrations, for some materials seem (p. 626) permanently lost. Despite persistent and imaginative work by the Coast Guard's historian, Truman Strobridge, much of the doc.u.mentary record of that service's World War II racial history could not be located.

The development of the Coast Guard's policy has had to be reconstructed, painstakingly and laboriously, from other sources. The records of many Army staff agencies for the period 1940-43 were destroyed on the a.s.sumption that their materials were duplicated in The Adjutant General's files, an a.s.sumption that frequently proved to be incorrect.

Although generally intact, the Navy's records of the immediate post-World War II period also lack some of the background staff work on the employment of black manpower. Fortunately for this writer, the recent, inadvertent destruction of the bulk of the Bureau of Naval Personnel's cla.s.sified wartime records occurred after the basic research for this volume had been completed, but this lamentable accident will no doubt cause problems for future researchers.

Thanks to the efforts of the services' historical offices and the wonder of photocopying, future historians may be spared some of the labor connected with the preparation of this volume. Most of the records surviving outside regular archives have been identified and relocated for easy access. Copies of approximately 65 percent of all doc.u.ments cited in this volume have been collected and are presently on file in the Center of Military History, from which they will be retired for permanent preservation.

_Official Archival Material_

The bulk of the official records used in the preparation of this volume is in the permanent custody of the National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C. The records of most military agencies for the period 1940-54 are located in the Modern Military Records Branch or in the Navy and Old Army Branch of the National Archives proper. Most doc.u.ments dated after 1954, along with military unit records (including ships' logs), are located in the General Archives Division in the Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. The Suitland center also holds the other major group of official materials, that is, all those doc.u.ments still administered by the individual agencies but stored in the center prior to their screening and acquisition by the National Archives. These records are open to qualified researchers, but access to them is controlled by the records managers of the individual agencies, a not altogether felicitous arrangement for the researcher, considering the bulk of the material and its lack of organization.

The largest single group of materials consulted were those of the various offices of the Army staff. Although these agencies have abandoned the system of cla.s.sifying all doc.u.ments by a decimal-subject system, the system persisted in many offices well into the 1960's, thereby enabling the researcher to accomplish a speedy, if unrefined, screening of pertinent materials. Even with this crutch, the researcher must still comb through thousands of doc.u.ments created by the Secretary of War (later Secretary of the Army), his a.s.sistant secretary, the Chief of Staff, and the various staff divisions, (p. 627) especially the Personnel (G-1), Organization and Training (G-3), and Operations Divisions, together with the offices of The Adjutant General, the Judge Advocate General, and the Inspector General. The War Department Special Planning Division's files are an extremely important source, especially for postwar racial planning, as are the records of the three World War II major commands, the Army Ground, Service, and Air Forces. Although illuminating in regard to the problem of racial discrimination, the records of the office of the secretary's civilian aide are less important in terms of policy development. Finally, the records of the black units, especially the important body of doc.u.ments related to the tribulations of the 92d Infantry Division in World War II and the 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea, are also vital sources for this subject.

The records managers in the Office of the Secretary of Defense also used the familiar 291.2 cla.s.sification to designate materials related to the subject of Negroes. (An exception to this generalization were the official papers of the secretary's office during the Forrestal period when a Navy file system was generally employed.) The most important materials on the subject of the Defense Department's racial interests are found in the records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The majority of these records, including the voluminous files of the a.s.sistant Secretary (Manpower) so helpful for the later sections of the study, have remained in the custody of the department and are administered by the Office of the Deputy a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense (Administration). After 1963 the Office of the Deputy a.s.sistant Secretary (Civil Rights) and its successor organizations loom as a major source. Many of the official papers were eventually filed with those of the a.s.sistant Secretary (Manpower) or have been retained in the historical files of the Equal Opportunity Office of the Secretary of Defense. The records of the Personnel Policy Board and the Office of the General Counsel, both part of the files of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, are two more important sources of materials on black manpower.

A subject cla.s.sification system was not universally applied in the Navy Department during the 1940's and even where used proved exceedingly complicated. The records of the Office of the Secretary of the Navy are especially strong in the World War II period, but they must be supplemented with the National Archives' separate Forrestal papers file. Despite the recent loss of records, the files of the Bureau of Naval Personnel remain the primary source for doc.u.ments on the employment of black personnel in the Navy. Research in all these files, even for the World War II period, is best begun in the Records Management offices of those two agencies. More readily accessible, the records of the Chief of Naval Operations and the General Board, both of considerable importance in understanding the Navy's World War II racial history, are located in the Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Division, Washington Navy Yard. This office has recently created a special miscellaneous file containing important doc.u.ments of interest to the researcher on racial matters that have been gleaned from various sources not easily available to the researcher.

Copies of all known staff papers concerning black marines and the (p. 628) development of the Marine Corps' equal opportunity program during the integration period have been collected and filed in the reference section of the Director of Marine Corps History and Museums, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps. Likewise, most of the very small selection of extant official Coast Guard records on the employment of Negroes have been identified and collected by the Coast Guard historian. The log of the _Sea Cloud_, the first Coast Guard vessel in modern times to boast a racially mixed crew, is located in the Archives Branch at Suitland.

The Air Force has retained control of a significant portion of its postwar personnel records, and the researcher would best begin work in the Office of the Administrative a.s.sistant, Secretary of the Air Force. This office has custody of the files of the Secretary of the Air Force, his a.s.sistant secretaries, the Office of the Chief of Staff, and the staff agencies pertinent to this story, especially the Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel, and the Director of Military Personnel. The records of black air units, as well as the extensive and well-indexed collection of official unit and base histories and studies and reports of the Air staff that touch on the service's racial policies, are located in the Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. These records are supplemented, and sometimes duplicated, by the holdings of the Suitland Records Center and the Office of Air Force History, Boiling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C. Other Air Force files of interest, particularly in the area of policy planning, can be found in the holdings of the National Archives' Modern Military Branch.

The records of the Selective Service System also provide some interesting material, but most of this has been published by the Selective Service in its _Special Groups_ (Special Monograph Number 10, 2 vols. [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953]). Far more important are the records of the War Manpower Commission, located in the National Archives, which, when studied in conjunction with the papers of the Secretaries of War and Navy, reveal the influence of the 1940 draft law on the services' racial policies.

_Personal Collections_

The official records of the integration of the armed forces are not limited to those doc.u.ments retired by the governmental agencies. Parts of the story must also be gleaned from doc.u.ments that for various reasons have been included in the personal papers of individuals.

Doc.u.ments created by government officials, as well as much unofficial material of special interest, are scattered in a number of inst.i.tutional or private repositories. Probably the most noteworthy of these collections is the papers of the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces (the Fahy Committee) in the Harry S. Truman Library. In addition to this central source, the Truman Library also contains materials contributed by Philleo Nash, Oscar Chapman, and Clark Clifford, whose work in the White House was intimately, if briefly, concerned with armed forces integration. The President's own papers, especially the recently opened White House Secretary's File, contain a number of important (p. 629) doc.u.ments.

Doc.u.ments of special interest can also be found in the Roosevelt Papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and among the various White House files preserved in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. The Central White House file in the John F. Kennedy Library, along with the papers of Harris Wofford and Gerhard Gesell, are essential to the history of equal opportunity in the early 1960's. Most of these collections are well indexed.

The James V. Forrestal Papers, Princeton University Library, while helpful in tracing the Urban League's contribution to the Navy's integration policy, lack the focus and comprehensiveness of the Forrestal Papers in the National Archives' Office of the Secretary of the Navy file. Another collection of particular interest for the naval aspects of the story is the Dennis D. Nelson Papers, in the custody of the Nelson family in San Diego, California, with a microfilm copy on file in the Navy's Operational Archives Branch in Washington. The heart of this collection is the materials Nelson gathered while writing "The Integration of the Negro in the United States Navy, 1776-1947," a U.S. Navy monograph prepared in 1948. The Nelson collection also contains a large group of newspaper clippings and other rare secondary materials of special interest. The Maxie M. Berry Papers, in the custody of the equal opportunity officer of the U.S.

Coast Guard headquarters, offer a rare glimpse into the life of black Coast Guardsmen during World War II, especially those a.s.signed to the all-black Pea Island Station, North Carolina.

The U.S. Army Military History Research Collection at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, has acquired the papers of James C. Evans, the long-time Civilian Aide to the Secretaries of War and Defense, and those of Lt. Gen. Alvan C. Gillem, Jr., the chairman of the Army's special personnel board that bears his name. The Evans materials contain a rare collection of clippings and memorandums on integration in the armed forces; the Gillem Papers are particularly interesting for the summaries of testimony before the Gillem Board.

The papers of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People in the Ma.n.u.script Division, Library of Congress, are useful, especially if used in conjunction with that library's Arthur B.

Spingarn Papers, in a.s.sessing the role of the civil rights leaders in bringing about black partic.i.p.ation in World War II. The collection of secondary materials on Negroes in the armed forces in the Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library, however, is disappointing, considering the prominence of that inst.i.tution.

Finally, the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C., has on file those materials collected by the author in the preparation of this volume, including not only those items cited in the footnotes, but also copies of hundreds of official doc.u.ments and correspondence with various partic.i.p.ants, together with the unique body of doc.u.ments and notes collected by Lee Nichols in his groundbreaking research on integration. Of particular importance among the doc.u.ments in the Center of Military History are copies of many Bureau of Naval Personnel doc.u.ments, the originals of which have since been destroyed, as well as copies of the bulk of the papers produced by the Fahy Committee.

_Interviews_ (p. 630)

The status of black servicemen in the integration era has attracted considerable attention among oral history enthusiasts. The author has taken advantage of this special source, but oral testimony concerning integration must be treated cautiously. In addition to the usual dangers of fallible memory that haunt all oral history interviews, the subjects of some of these interviews, it should be emphasized, were separated from the events they were recalling by a civil rights revolution that has changed fundamentally the att.i.tudes of many people, both black and white. In some instances it is readily apparent that the recollections of persons being interviewed have been colored by the changes of the 1950's and 1960's, and while their recitation of specific events can be checked against the records, their estimates of att.i.tudes and influences, not so easily verified, should be used cautiously. Much of this danger can be avoided by a skillful interviewer with special knowledge of integration. Because of the care that went into the interviews conducted in the U.S. Air Force Oral History Program, which are on file at the Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center, they are particularly dependable. This is especially true of those used in this study, for they were conducted by Lt. Col.

Alan Gropman and Maj. Alan Osur, both serious students of the subject.