Integration of the Armed Forces | Page 7

Forces for Selected Years. 522 14. Estimated Percentage Distribution of Draft-Age Males in U.S. Population by AFQT Groups............... 523 15. Rate of Men Disqualified for Service in 1962.......... 523 16. Rejection Rates for Failure To Pass Armed Forces Mental Test, 1962..................................... 524 17. Nonwhite Inductions and First Enlistments, Fiscal Years 1953-1962....................................... 525 18. Distribution of Enlisted Personnel in Each Major Occupation, 1956...................................... 525 19. Occupational Group Distribution by Race, All DOD, 1962.................................................. 525 20. Occupational Group Distribution of Enlisted Personnel by Length of Service, and Race.............. 526 21. Percentage Distribution of Navy Enlisted Personnel by Race, AFQT Groups and Occupational Areas, and Length of Service, 1962............................... 526 22. Percentage Distribution of Blacks and Whites by Pay Grade, All DOD, 1962.................................. 527 23. Percentage Distribution of Navy Enlisted Personnel by Race, AFQT Groups, Pay Grade, and Length of Service, 1962......................................... 528 24. Black Percentages, 1962-1968.......................... 568 25. Rates for First Reenlistments, 1964-1967.............. 569 26. Black Attendance at the Military Academies, July 1968. 569 27. Army and Air Force Commissions Granted at Predominately Black Schools........................... 570 28. Percentage of Negroes in Certain Military Ranks, 1964-1966............................................. 571 29. Distribution of Servicemen in Occupational Groups by Race, 1967......................................... 573

INTEGRATION OF THE ARMED FORCES (p.?001) 1940-1965
CHAPTER 1
(p.?003)
Introduction
In the quarter century that followed American entry into World War II, the nation's armed forces moved from the reluctant inclusion of a few segregated Negroes to their routine acceptance in a racially integrated military establishment. Nor was this change confined to military installations. By the time it was over, the armed forces had redefined their traditional obligation for the welfare of their members to include a promise of equal treatment for black servicemen wherever they might be. In the name of equality of treatment and opportunity, the Department of Defense began to challenge racial injustices deeply rooted in American society.
For all its sweeping implications, equality in the armed forces obviously had its pragmatic aspects. In one sense it was a practical answer to pressing political problems that had plagued several national administrations. In another, it was the services' expression of those liberalizing tendencies that were permeating American society during the era of civil rights activism. But to a considerable extent the policy of racial equality that evolved in this quarter century was also a response to the need for military efficiency. So easy did it become to demonstrate the connection between inefficiency and discrimination that, even when other reasons existed, military efficiency was the one most often evoked by defense officials to justify a change in racial policy.
The Armed Forces Before 1940
Progress toward equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces was an uneven process, the result of sporadic and sometimes conflicting pressures derived from such constants in American society as prejudice and idealism and spurred by a chronic shortage of military manpower. In his pioneering study of race relations, Gunnar Myrdal observes that ideals have always played a dominant role in the social dynamics of America.[1-1] By extension, the ideals that helped involve the nation in many of its wars also helped produce important changes in the treatment of Negroes by the armed forces. The democratic spirit embodied in the Declaration of Independence, for example, opened the Continental Army to many Negroes, holding out to them the promise of eventual freedom.[1-2]
[Footnote 1-1: Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Row, 1962), p. lxi.]
[Footnote 1-2: Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 182-85. The following brief summary of the Negro in the pre-World War II Army is based in part on the Quarles book and Roland C. McConnell, Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968); Dudley T. Cornish, Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (New York: Norton, 1966); William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969); William Bruce White, "The Military and the Melting Pot: The American Army and Minority Groups, 1865-1924" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968); Marvin E. Fletcher, The Black Soldier and Officer in the United States Army, 1891-1917 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974); Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974). For a general survey of black soldiers in America's wars, see Jack Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1974).]
Yet the fact that the British themselves were taking large numbers (p.?004) of Negroes into their ranks proved more important than revolutionary idealism in creating a place for Negroes in the American forces. Above all, the participation of both slaves and freedmen in the