Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940 1965

M >> Morris J. MacGregor Jr. >> Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940 1965

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[Footnote 9-52: See Testimony of Lester Granger and
Assistant Secretary Brown at National Defense
Conference on Negro Affairs, 26 Apr 48, morning
session, pp. 45-46; and Memo, Nelson for Marx Leva,
24 May 48, copy in Nelson Archives.]

[Illustration: NAVAL UNIT PASSES IN REVIEW, _Naval Advanced Base,
Bremerhaven, Germany, 1949_.]

Several reasons were suggested for this attitude. Assistant Secretary
Brown placed the blame, at least in part, on the gap between policy
and practice. Because of delay in abolishing old discriminatory
practices, he pointed out to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations,
"the Navy's good public relations are endangered."[9-53] The personnel
bureau promptly investigated, found justification for complaints (p. 250)
of discrimination, and took corrective action.[9-54] Yet, as Nelson
pointed out, such corrections, often in the form of "clarifying
directives," were usually directed to specific commanders and tied to
specific incidents and were ignored by other commanders as
inapplicable to their own racial experiences.[9-55] Despite the
existence of the racially separate Steward's Branch, the Navy's policy
seemed so unassailable to the Chief of Naval Personnel that when his
views on a congressional measure to abolish segregation in the
services were solicited he reported without reservation that his
bureau interposed no objection.[9-56]

[Footnote 9-53: Memo, Asst SecNav for Air for Dep
CNO, 3 Feb 48, sub: Racial Discrimination, P1-4
(8), GenRecsNav.]

[Footnote 9-54: See Memo, Chief, NavPers, for CO, USS
_Grand Canyon_ (AD 28), 17 Dec 48, sub: Navy
Department's Non Discrimination Policy--Alleged
Violation of, P14; Ltr, Chief, NavPers, to Cmdt,
Twelfth Nav Dist, 27 Feb 46, sub: Officer Screening
Procedure and Indoctrination Course in the
Supervision of Negro Personnel--Establishment of,
Pers 4221; both in BuPersRecs.]

[Footnote 9-55: Memo, Nelson for Chief, NavPers, 29
Nov 48, sub: Complaint of Navy Enlisted Man Made to
Pittsburgh Courier..., PR221, BuPersRecs.]

[Footnote 9-56: Memo, Chief, NavPers, for JAG, 11 Feb
47, sub: HR 279: To Prohibit Race Segregation in
the Armed Forces of the United States, GenRecsNav.]

The Navy's major racial problem by 1948 was the shockingly small
number of Negroes in the service. In November 1948, a presidential
election month, Negroes accounted for 4.3 percent of the navy's
strength. Not only were there few Negroes in the Navy, but there were
especially too few in the general service and practically no black
officers, a series of statistics that made the predominately black and
separate stewards more conspicuous. The Navy rejected an obvious
solution, lowering recruitment standards, contending that it could not
run its ships and aircraft with men who scored below ninety in the
general classification test.[9-57] The alternative was to recruit among
the increasing numbers of educated Negroes, as the personnel bureau
had been trying to do. But here, as Nelson and others could report,
the Navy faced severe competition from other employers, and here the
Navy's public image had its strongest effect.

[Footnote 9-57: For discussion of the problem of
comparative enlistment standards, see Chapter 12.]

Lt. Comdr. Edward Hope, a black reserve officer assigned to officer
procurement, concluded that the black community, especially veterans,
distrusted all the services. Consequently, Negroes tended to disregard
announced plans and policies applicable to all citizens unless they
were specially labeled "for colored." Negroes tried to avoid the
humiliation of applying for certain rights or benefits only to be
arbitrarily rejected.[9-58] Compounding the suspicion and fear of
humiliation, Hope reported, was a genuine lack of information on Navy
policy that seriously limited the number of black applicants.

[Footnote 9-58: Ltr, Lt Cmdr, E. S. Hope to SecDef,
17 May 48, with attached rpt, D54-1-10,
GenRecsNav.]

The cause of confusion among black students over Navy policy was easy
to pinpoint, for memories of the frustrations and insults suffered by
black seamen during the war were still fresh. Negroes remembered the
labor battalions bossed by whites--much like the old plantation
system, Lester Granger observed. Unlike the Army, the Navy had offered
few black enlisted men the chance of serving in vital jobs under black
commanders. This slight, according to Granger, robbed the black sailor
of pride in service, a pride that could hardly be restored by the
postwar image of the black sailor not as a fighting man but as
a servant or laborer. Always a loyal member of the Navy team, (p. 252)
Granger was anxious to improve the Navy's public image in the black
community, and he and others often advanced plans for doing so.[9-59]
But any discussion of image quickly foundered on one point: the Navy
would remain suspect in the eyes of black youth and be condemned by
civil rights leaders as long as it retained that symbol of racism, the
racially separate Steward's Branch.

[Footnote 9-59: See, for example, Ltr, Granger to
SecNav, 10 Jun 47, 54-1-13, Forrestal file,
GenRecsNav, and Granger's extensive comments and
questions at the National Defense Conference on
Negro Affairs, 26 Apr 48.]

[Illustration: SUBMARINER.]

Here the practical need for change ran headlong into strong military
tradition. An integrated general service was traditional and therefore
acceptable; an integrated servants' branch was not. Faced with the
choice of a small number of Negroes in the Navy and the attendant
charges of racism or a change in its traditions, the Navy accepted the
former. Lack of interest on the part of the black community was not a
particularly pressing problem for the Navy in the immediate postwar
years. Indeed, it might well have been a source of comfort for the
military traditionalists who, armed with an unassailable integration
policy, could still enjoy a Navy little changed from its prewar
condition. Nevertheless, the lack of black volunteers for general
service was soon to be discussed by a presidential commission, and in
the next fifteen years would become a pressing problem when the Navy,
the first service with a policy of integration, would find itself
running behind in the race to attract minority members.

CHAPTER 10 (p. 253)

The Postwar Marine Corps

Unlike the Army and Navy, the all-white Marine Corps seemed to
consider the wartime enlistment of over 19,000 Negroes a temporary
aberration. Forced by the Navy's nondiscrimination policy to retain
Negroes after the war, Marine Corps officials at first decided on a
black representation of some 2,200 men, roughly the same proportion as
during the war. But the old tradition of racial exclusion remained
strong, and this figure was soon reduced. The corps also ignored the
Navy's integration measures, adopting instead a pattern of segregation
that Marine officials claimed was a variation on the Army's historic
"separate but equal" black units. In fact, separation was real enough
in the postwar corps; equality remained elusive.

_Racial Quotas and Assignments_

The problem was that any "separate but equal" race policy, no matter
how loosely enforced, was incompatible with the corps' postwar
manpower resources and mission and would conflict with its
determination to restrict black units to a token number. The dramatic
manpower reductions of 1946 were felt immediately in the two major
elements of the Marine Corps. The Fleet Marine Force, the main
operating unit of the corps and usually under control of the Chief of
Naval Operations, retained three divisions, but lost a number of its
combat battalions. The divisions kept a few organic and attached
service and miscellaneous units. Under such severe manpower
restrictions, planners could not reserve one of the large organic
elements of these divisions for black marines, thus leaving the
smaller attached and miscellaneous units as the only place to
accommodate self-contained black organizations. At first the Plans and
Policies Division decided to assign roughly half the black marines to
the Fleet Marine Force. Of these some were slated for an antiaircraft
artillery battalion at Montford Point which would provide training as
well as an opportunity for Negroes' overseas to be rotated home.
Others were placed in three combat service groups and one service
depot where they would act as divisional service troops, and the rest
went into 182 slots, later increased to 216, for stewards, the
majority in aviation units.

The other half of the black marines was to be absorbed by the so
called non-Fleet Marine Force, a term used to cover training,
security, and miscellaneous Marine units, all noncombat, which
normally remained under the control of the commandant. This part of
the corps was composed of many small and usually self-contained units,
but in a number of activities, particularly in the logistical
establishment and the units afloat, reductions in manpower would (p. 254)
necessitate considerable sharing of living and working facilities,
thus making racial separation impossible. The planners decided,
therefore, to limit black assignments outside the Fleet Marine Force
to naval ammunition depots at McAlester, Oklahoma, and Earle, New
Jersey, where Negroes would occupy separate barracks; to Guam and
Saipan, principally as antiaircraft artillery; and to a small training
cadre at Montford Point. Eighty stewards would also serve with units
outside the Fleet Marine Force. With the exception of the depot at
Earle, all these installations had been assigned Negroes during the
war. Speaking in particular about the assignment of Negroes to
McAlester, the Director of the Plans and Policies Division, Brig. Gen.
Gerald C. Thomas, commented that "this has proven to be a satisfactory
location and type of duty for these personnel."[10-1] Thomas's
conception of "satisfactory" duty for Negroes became the corps'
rationale for its postwar assignment policy.

[Footnote 10-1: Memos, Dir, Div of Plans and Policies,
for CMC, 25 Sep and 17 Oct 46, sub: Post War
Personnel Requirements, A0-1, MC files. Unless
otherwise noted, all the documents cited in this
chapter are located in Hist Div, HQMC. The
quotation is from the September memo.]

[Illustration: MARINE ARTILLERY TEAM. _Men of the 51st Defense
Battalion in training at Montford Point with 90-mm. antiaircraft
gun._]

To assign Negroes to unskilled jobs because they were accustomed to
such duties and because the jobs were located in communities that
would accept black marines might be satisfactory to Marine officials,
but it was considered racist by many civil rights spokesmen and left
the Marine Corps open to charges of discrimination. The policy of
tying the number of Negroes to the number of available, appropriate
slots also meant that the number of black marines, and consequently
the acceptability of black volunteers, was subject to chronic
fluctuation. More important, it permitted if not encouraged further
restrictions on the use of the remaining black marines who had combat
training, thereby allowing the traditionalists to press for a
segregated service in which the few black marines would be mostly
servants and laborers.

The process of reordering the assignment of black marines began just
eleven weeks after the commandant approved the staff's postwar policy
recommendations. Informing the commandant on 6 January 1947 that
"several changes have been made in concepts upon which such (p. 255)
planning was based," General Thomas explained that the requirement for
antiaircraft artillery units at Guam and Saipan had been canceled,
along with the plan for maintaining an artillery unit at Montford
Point. Because of the cancellation his division wanted to reduce the
number of black marines to 1,500. These men could be assigned to depot
companies, service units, and Marine barracks--all outside the Fleet
Marine Force--or they could serve as stewards. The commandant's
approval of this plan reduced the number of Negroes in the corps by 35
percent, or 700 men. Coincidental with this reduction was a 17 percent
rise in spaces for black stewards to 350.[10-2]

[Footnote 10-2: Memo, G. C. Thomas, Div of Plans and
Policies, for CMC, 6 Jan 47, sub: Negro
Requirements, A0-1.]

Approval of this plan eliminated the last Negroes from combat
assignments, a fact that General Thomas suggested could be justified
as "consistent with similar reductions being effected elsewhere in the
Corps." But the facts did not support such a palliative. In June 1946
the corps had some 1,200 men serving in three antiaircraft artillery
battalions and an antiaircraft artillery group headquarters. In June
1948 the corps still had white antiaircraft artillery units on Guam
and at Camp Lejeune totaling 1,020 men. The drop in numbers was
explained almost entirely by the elimination of the black units.[10-3]

[Footnote 10-3: USMC Muster Rolls of Officers and
Enlisted Men, 1946 and 1948.]

A further realignment of black assignments occurred in June 1947 when
General Vandegrift approved a Plans and Policies Division decision to
remove more black units from security forces at naval shore
establishments. The men were reassigned to Montford Point with the
result that the number of black training and overhead billets at that
post jumped 200 percent--a dubious decision at best considering that
black specialist and recruit training was virtually at a standstill.
General Thomas took the occasion to advise the commandant that
maintaining an arbitrary quota of black marines was no longer a
consideration since a reduction in their strength could be "adequately
justified" by the general manpower reductions throughout the corps.[10-4]

[Footnote 10-4: Memo, G. C. Thomas for CMC, 11 Jun 47,
sub: Negro Requirements and Assignments, A0-1.]

Actually the Marine Corps was not as free to reduce the quota of 1,500
Negroes as General Thomas suggested. To make further cuts in what was
at most a token representation, approximately 1 percent of the corps
in August 1947, would further inflame civil rights critics and might
well provoke a reaction from Secretary Forrestal. Even Thomas's
accompanying recommendation carefully retained the black strength
figure previously agreed upon and actually raised the number of
Negroes in the ground forces by seventy-six men. The 1,500-man minimum
quota for black enlistment survived the reorganization of the Fleet
Marine Force later in 1947, and the Plans and Policies Division even
found it necessary to locate some 375 more billets for Negroes to
maintain the figure. In August the commandant approved plans to add
100 slots for stewards and 275 general duty billets overseas, the
latter to facilitate rotation and provide a broader range of
assignments for Negroes.[10-5] Only once before the Korean War, (p. 256)
and then only briefly, did the authorized strength of Negroes
drop below the 1,500 mark, although because of recruitment lags actual
numbers never equaled authorized strength.[10-6]

[Footnote 10-5: Memo, Dir, Div of Plans and Policies,
for CMC, 28 Aug 47, sub: Requirements for General
Duty Negro Marines, A0-1.]

[Footnote 10-6: Idem for Div, Pub Info, 10 Nov 48,
sub: Information Relating to Negro Marines, A0-1.]

By mid-1947, therefore, the Marine Corps had abandoned its complex
system of gearing the number of black marines to available assignments
and, like the Army and the Air Force, had adopted a racial quota--but
with an important distinction. Although they rarely achieved it, the
Army and the Air Force were committed to accepting a fixed percentage
of Negroes; in an effort to avoid the problems with manpower
efficiency plaguing the other services, the Marine Corps established a
straight _numerical_ quota. Authorized black strength would remain at
about 1,500 men until the Korean War. During that same period the
actual percentage of Negroes in the Marine Corps almost doubled,
rising from 1.3 percent of the 155,679-man corps in June 1946 to
slightly more than 2 percent of the 74,279-man total in June 1950.[10-7]

[Footnote 10-7: Unless otherwise noted, statistics in
this section are from NA Pers, 15658 (A), _Report,
Navy and Marine Corps Military Statistics_, 30 Jun
59, BuPers. Official figures on black marines are
from reports of the USMC Personnel Accounting
Section.]

Yet neither the relatively small size of the Marine Corps nor the fact
that few black marines were enrolled could conceal the inefficiency of
segregation. Over the next three years the personnel planning staff
tried to find a solution to the problem of what it considered to be
too many Negroes in the general service. First it began to reduce
gradually the number of black units accommodated in the Operating
Force Plan, absorbing the excess black marines by increasing the
number of stewards. This course was not without obvious public
relations disadvantages, but they were offset somewhat by the fact
that the Marine Corps, unlike the Navy, never employed a majority of
its black recruits as stewards. In May 1948 the commandant approved
new plans for a 10 percent decrease in the number of general duty
assignments and a corresponding increase in spaces for stewards.[10-8]
The trend away from assigning Negroes to general service duty
continued until the Korean War, and in October 1949 a statistical high
point was reached when some 33 percent of all black marines were
serving as stewards. The doctrine that all marines were potential
infantrymen stood, but it was small comfort to civil rights activists
who feared that what at best was a nominal black representation in the
corps was being pushed into the kitchen.

[Footnote 10-8: Memo, Dir, Plans and Policies Div, for
CMC, 20 May 48, sub: Procurement and Assignment of
Negro Enlisted Personnel, A0-1.]

But they had little to fear since the number of Negroes that could be
absorbed in the Steward's Branch was limited. In the end the Marine
Corps still had to accommodate two-thirds of its black strength in
general duty billets, a course with several unpalatable consequences.
For one, Negroes would be assigned to new bases reluctant to accept
them and near some communities where they would be unwelcome. For
another, given the limitations in self-contained units, there was the
possibility of introducing some integration in the men's living or
working arrangements. Certainly black billets would have to be created
at the expense of white billets. The Director of Plans and Policies
warned in August 1947 that the reorganization of the Fleet Marine (p. 257)
Force, then under way, failed to allocate spaces for some 350 Negroes
with general duty contracts. While he anticipated some reduction in
this number as a result of the campaign to attract volunteers for the
Steward's Branch, he admitted that many would remain unassigned and
beyond anticipating a reduction in the black "overage" through
attrition, his office had no long-range plans for creating the needed
spaces.[10-9] When the attrition failed to materialize, the commandant
was forced in December 1949 to redesignate 202 white billets for black
marines with general duty contracts.[10-10] The problem of finding
restricted assignments for black marines in the general service lasted
until it was overtaken by the manpower demands of the Korean War.
Meanwhile to the consternation of the civil rights advocates, as the
corps' definition of "suitable" assignment became more exact, the
variety of duties to which Negroes could be assigned seemed to
decrease.[10-11]

[Footnote 10-9: Ibid., 28 Aug 47, sub: Requirements
for General Duty Negro Marines, A0-1.]

[Footnote 10-10: Ibid., 14 Nov 49, sub: Designation of
Units for Assignment of Negro Marines, A0-1.]

[Footnote 10-11: For criticism of assignment
restrictions, see comments and questions at the
National Defense Conference on Negro Affairs, 26
Apr 48 (afternoon session), pp. 1-10, copy in CMH.]

_Recruitment_

Postwar quotas and assignments for Negroes did nothing to curb the
black community's growing impatience with separate and limited
opportunities, a fact brought home to Marine Corps recruiters when
they tried to enlist the Negroes needed to fill their quota. At first
it seemed the traditionalists would regain their all-white corps by
default. The Marine Corps had ceased drafting men in November 1945 and
launched instead an intensive recruiting campaign for regular marines
from among the thousands of reservists about to be discharged and
regulars whose enlistments would soon expire. Included in this group
were some 17,000 Negroes from among whom the corps planned to recruit
its black contingent. To charges that it was discriminating in the
enlistment of black civilians, the corps readily admitted that no new
recruits were being accepted because preference was being given to men
already in the corps.[10-12] In truth, the black reservists were
rejecting the blandishments of recruiters in overwhelming numbers. By
May 1946 only 522 Negroes, less than a quarter of the small postwar
black complement, had enlisted in the regular service.

[Footnote 10-12: G-1, Div of Plans and Policies,
Operational Diary, Sep 45-Oct 46, 23 Apr 47; Memo,
Dir of Personnel (Div of Recruiting) for Off in
Charge, Northeastern Recruiting Div, 17 Jan 46,
sub: Enlistment of Negro Ex-Marines, MC 706577. See
also _Afro-American_, February 16, 1946.]

The failure to attract recruits was particularly noticeable in the
antiaircraft battalions. To obtain black replacements for these
critically depleted units, the commandant authorized the recruitment
of reservists who had served less than six months, but the measure
failed to produce the necessary manpower. On 28 February 1946 the
commanding general of Camp Lejeune reported that all but seven Negroes
on his antiaircraft artillery roster were being processed for
discharge.[10-13] Since this list included the black noncommissioned
instructors, the commander warned that future training of black (p. 258)
marines would entail the use of officers as instructors. The
precipitous loss of black artillerymen forced Marine headquarters to
assign white specialists as temporary replacements in the heavy
antiaircraft artillery groups at Guam and Saipan, both designated as
black units in the postwar organization.[10-14]

[Footnote 10-13: Msg, CMC to CG, Cp Lejeune, 19 Feb
46, MC 122026; Memo, CG, Cp Lejeune, for CMC, 28
Feb 46, sub: Personnel and Equipment for
Antiaircraft Artillery Training Battalion
(Colored), Availability of, RPS-1059, MC files.]

[Footnote 10-14: Memo, G. C. Thomas for Dir of
Personnel, 6 Mar 48, sub: Replacements for Enlisted
Personnel (Colored) Assignment of, Request for,
A0-3; Msg, CINCPAC/POA PEARL to CNO, 282232Z Apr
46, MC 76735, MC files.]

It was not the fault of the black press if this expression of black
indifference went unnoticed. The failure of black marines to reenlist
was the subject of many newspaper and journal articles. The reason for
the phenomenon advanced by the Norfolk _Journal and Guide_ would be
repeated by civil rights spokesmen on numerous occasions in the era
before integration. The paper declared that veterans remembered their
wartime experiences and were convinced that the same distasteful
practices would be continued after the war.[10-15] Marine Corps officials
advanced different reasons. The Montford Point commander attributed
slow enlistment rates to a general postwar letdown and lack of
publicity, explaining that Montford Point "had an excellent athletic
program, good chow and comfortable barracks." A staff member of the
Division of Plans and Policies later prepared a lengthy analysis of
the treatment the Marine Corps had received in the black press. He
charged that the press had presented a distorted picture of conditions
faced by blacks that had "agitated" the men and turned them against
reenlistment. He recommended a public relations campaign at Montford
Point to improve the corps' image.[10-16] But this analysis missed the
point, for while the black press might influence civilians, it could
hardly instruct Marine veterans. Probably more than any other factor,
the wartime treatment of black marines explained the failure of the
corps to attract qualified, let alone gifted, Negroes to its postwar
junior enlisted ranks.