Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965

Morris J. Macgregor

Informations

• Publié par: astau
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 30
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965, by
Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965
Author: Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
Release Date: February 15, 2007 [EBook #20587]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTEGRATION ARMED FORCES ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Christine P. Travers and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, author's spelling has
been retained.]
INTEGRATION OF THE ARMED FORCES
1940-1965
DEFENSE STUDIES SERIES
INTEGRATION
OF THE ARMED FORCES
1940-1965by Morris J. MacGregor, Jr.


Defense Historical Studies Committee
(as of 6 April 1979)
Robert J. Watson
Alfred Goldberg
Historical Division, Joint Chiefs of
Office of the Secretary of Defense
Staff
Brig. Gen. James L. Collins, Jr. Maj. Gen. John W. Huston
Chief of Military History Chief of Air Force History
Maurice Matloff Stanley L. Falk
Center of Military History Office of Air Force History
Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Edwin H. Simmons
Rear Adm. John D. H. Kane, Jr.
Director of Marine Corps History and
Director of Naval History
Museums
Dean C. Allard Henry J. Shaw, Jr.
Naval Historical Center Marine Corps Historical Center
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
MacGregor, Morris J
Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965.
(Defense studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Supt. of Docs. no.: D 114.2:In 8/940-65
1. Afro-American soldiers. 2. United States—
Race Relations. I. Title. II. Series.
UB418.A47M33 335.3'3 80-607077Department of the Army
Historical Advisory Committee
(as of 6 April 1979)
Maj. Gen. Robert C. Hixon
Otis A. Singletary
U.S. Army Training and Doctrine
University of Kentucky
Command
Brig. Gen. Robert Arter Sara D. Jackson
U.S. Army Command and National Historical Publications
General Staff College and Records Commission
Harry L. Coles Maj. Gen. Enrique Mendez, Jr.
Ohio State University Deputy Surgeon General, USA
Robert H. Ferrell James O'Neill
Indiana University Deputy Archivist of the United States
Cyrus H. Fraker Benjamin Quarles
The Adjutant General Center Morgan State College
William H. Goetzmann Brig. Gen. Alfred L. Sanderson
University of Texas Army War College
Col. Thomas E. Griess Russell F. Weigley
U.S. Military Academy Temple University
Foreword
The integration of the armed forces was a momentous event in our military and national
history; it represented a milestone in the development of the armed forces and the
fulfillment of the democratic ideal. The existence of integrated rather than segregated
armed forces is an important factor in our military establishment today. The experiences
in World War II and the postwar pressures generated by the civil rights movement
compelled all the services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—to reexamine
their traditional practices of segregation. While there were differences in the ways that the
services moved toward integration, all were subject to the same demands, fears, and
prejudices and had the same need to use their resources in a more rational and
economical way. All of them reached the same conclusion: traditional attitudes toward
minorities must give way to democratic concepts of civil rights.
If the integration of the armed services now seems to have been inevitable in a
democratic society, it nevertheless faced opposition that had to be overcome and
problems that had to be solved through the combined efforts of political and civil rights
leaders and civil and military officials. In many ways the military services were at the
cutting edge in the struggle for racial equality. This volume sets forth the successivemeasures they and the Office of the Secretary of Defense took to meet the challenges of a
new era in a critically important area of human relationships, during a period of transition
that saw the advance of blacks in the social and economic order as well as in the military.
It is fitting that this story should be told in the first volume of a new Defense Studies
Series.
The Defense Historical Studies Program was authorized by the then Deputy Secretary of
Defense, Cyrus Vance, in April 1965. It is conducted under the auspices of the Defense
Historical Studies Group, an ad hoc body chaired by the Historian of the Office of the
Secretary of Defense and consisting of the senior officials in the historical offices of the
services and of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Volumes produced under its sponsorship will be
interservice histories, covering matters of mutual interest to the Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marine Corps, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The preparation of each volume is entrusted
to one of the service historical sections, in this case the Army's Center of Military History.
Although the book was written by an Army historian, he was generously given access to
the pertinent records of the other services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and
this initial volume in the Defense Studies Series covers the experiences of all
components of the Department of Defense in achieving integration.
JAMES L. COLLINS, JR.
Washington, D.C.
Brigadier General, USA
14 March 1980
Chief of Military History
The Author
Morris J. MacGregor, Jr., received the A.B. and M.A. degrees in history from the Catholic
University of America. He continued his graduate studies at the Johns Hopkins University
and the University of Paris on a Fulbright grant. Before joining the staff of the U.S. Army
Center of Military History in 1968 he served for ten years in the Historical Division of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has written several studies for military publications including
"Armed Forces Integration—Forced or Free?" in The Military and Society: Proceedings
of the Fifth Military Symposium of the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is the coeditor with
Bernard C. Nalty of the thirteen-volume Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic
Documents and with Ronald Spector of Voices of History: Interpretations in American
Military History. He is currently working on a sequel to Integration of the Armed Forces
which will also appear in the Defense Studies Series.
Preface
This book describes the fall of the legal, administrative, and social barriers to the black
American's full participation in the military service of his country. It follows the changingstatus of the black serviceman from the eve of World War II, when he was excluded from
many military activities and rigidly segregated in the rest, to that period a quarter of a
century later when the Department of Defense extended its protection of his rights and
privileges even to the civilian community. To round out the story of open housing for
members of the military, I briefly overstep the closing date given in the title.
The work is essentially an administrative history that attempts to measure the influence of
several forces, most notably the civil rights movement, the tradition of segregated service,
and the changing concept of military efficiency, on the development of racial policies in
the armed forces. It is not a history of all minorities in the services. Nor is it an account of
how the black American responded to discrimination. A study of racial attitudes, both
black and white, in the military services would be a valuable addition to human
knowledge, but practically impossible of accomplishment in the absence of sufficient
autobiographical accounts, oral history interviews, and detailed sociological
measurements. How did the serviceman view his condition, how did he convey his desire
for redress, and what was his reaction to social change? Even now the answers to these
questions are blurred by time and distorted by emotions engendered by the civil rights
revolution. Few citizens, black or white, who witnessed it can claim immunity to the
influence of that paramount social phenomenon of our times.
At times I do generalize on the attitudes of both black and white servicemen and the black
and white communities at large as well. But I have permitted myself to do so only when
these attitudes were clearly pertinent to changes in the services' racial policies and only
when the written record supported, or at least did not contradict, the memory of those
participants who had been interviewed. In any case this study is largely history written
from the top down and is based primarily on the written records left by the administrations
of five presidents and by civil rights leaders, service officials, and the press.
Many of the attitudes and expressions voiced by the participants in the story are now out
of fashion. The reader must be constantly on guard against viewing the beliefs and
statements of many civilian and military officials out of context of the times in which they
were expressed. Neither bigotry nor stupidity was the monopoly of some of the people
quoted; their state