The Status of Racial Integration in the Armed Services

Abstract

Integration in the Armed Services will probably be marked officially as mission accomplished when this writing appears in print. Dr. John A. Hannah, Assistant Secretary of Defense, said in a statement released on October 12, 1953, that within eight months from that date there would be no more segregated Army units. Thus, by June 1954, the nation will have for the first time a fighting force that gives to citizens in life the same equality they have so often found in death. The impact' of integration on civilian life is beautifully demonstrated by this excerpt from a speech of Dr. John Fischer, Superintendent of Public Schools in Baltimore, Maryland, delivered on June 14, 1954, at a special meeting of teacher and school officials on desegregation of the schools in his city. He read as his conclusion a letter from a white school principal which contained this paragraph: My step-son found the colored boys who fought in Korea beside him to be first-class fighting men, who neither asked for nor received special favors. He learned that the colored skin received enemy bullets with the same bravery that the white skin received them. The Air Force with approximately 7 per cent colored personnel has been integrated since 1950. The same is true of the Navy and the Marine Corps which have 7 and 4 per cent colored personnel respectively. The Army, with nearly 13 per cent colored personnel has been the last hold-out. The other branches of the Service continue to present certain special problems, but their official policy is one of complete acceptance of full integration. The halting of segregation in the Armed Services is one of the finest examples of an entrenched evil yielding to the pressure of public opinion. The chief channels of this opinion were and are the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Negro Press. From time to time other forces have been operating, but these two institutions have never relented in their protests against incidents and policies of segregation in the Armed Services. If either of these groups had been willing to settle for continued segregation in the Armed Services, the fight would have been lost. Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, has recorded the memorable meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in September 1940 when, with A. Philip Randolph and the late T. Arnold Hill, he called for total abolition of racial segregation in the Armed Services.1 In 1951, Thurgood Marshall, Special Counsel for the NAACP, went to the fighting front in Korea as part of the organization's struggle for full integration and justice in fighting forces. This writing is an attempt to list a few of the highlights that helped to achieve integration. It also will suggest a few items