Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 Part 95

Particular note should be made of the especially valuable interviews with former Secretary of the Air Force Eugene M. Zuckert and several of the more prominent black generals.

The extensive Columbia University Oral History Collection has several interviews of special interest, in particular the very revealing interview with the National Urban League's Lester Granger. Read in conjunction with the National Archives' Forrestal Papers, this interview is a major source for the Navy's immediate postwar policy changes. Similarly, the Kennedy Library's oral history program contains several interviews that are helpful in a.s.sessing the role of the services in the Kennedy administration's civil rights program. Of particular interest are the interviews with Harris Wofford, Roy Wilkins, and Theodore Hesburgh.

The U.S. Marine Corps Oral History Program, whose interviews are on file in Marine Corps headquarters, and the U.S. Navy Oral History Collection, copies of which can be found in the Navy's Operational Archives Branch, contain several interviews of special interest to researchers in racial history. Mention should be made of the Marine Corps interviews with Generals Ray A. Robinson and Alfred G. n.o.ble and the Navy's interviews with Captains Mildred McAfee Horton and Dorothy Stratton, leaders of the World War II WAVES and SPARS.

Finally, included in the files of the Center of Military History is a collection of notes taken by Lee Nichols, Martin Blumenson, and the author during their interviews with leading figures in the integration story. The Nichols notes, covering the series of interviews conducted by that veteran reporter in 1953-54, include such items as summaries of conversations with Harry S. Truman, Truman K. Gibson, Jr., and Emmett J. Scott.

_Printed Materials_ (p. 631)

Many of the secondary materials found particularly helpful by the author have been cited throughout the volume, but special attention should be drawn to certain key works in several categories. In the area of official works, Ulysses Lee's _The Employment of Negro Troops_ in the United States Army in World War II series (Was.h.i.+ngton: Government Printing Office, 1966) remains the definitive account of the Negro in the World War II Army. The Bureau of Naval Personnel's "The Negro in the Navy," Bureau of Naval Personnel History of World War II (mimeographed, 1946, of which there is a copy in the bureau's Technical Library in Was.h.i.+ngton), is a rare item that has a.s.sumed even greater significance with the loss of so much of the bureau's records.

Presented without attribution, the text paraphrases many important doc.u.ments accurately. Margaret L. Geis's "Negro Personnel in the European Command, 1 January 1946-30 June 1950," part of the Occupation Forces in Europe series (Historical Division, European Command, 1952), Ronald Sher's "Integration of Negro and White Troops in the U.S. Army, Europe, 1952-1954" (Historical Division, Headquarters, U.S. Army, Europe, 1956), and Charles G. Cleaver, "Personnel Problems," vol. III, pt. 2, of the "History of the Korean War" (Military History Section, Headquarters, Far East Command, 1952), are important secondary sources for guiding the student through a bewildering ma.s.s of materials. Alan M. Osur's _Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II: The Problem of Race Relations_ (Was.h.i.+ngton: Government Printing Office, 1977) and Alan Gropman's _The Air Force Integrates, 1945-1964_ (Was.h.i.+ngton: Government Printing Office, 1978), both published by the Office of Air Force History, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., and Ralph W.

Donnelly's _Blacks in the Marine Corps_ (Was.h.i.+ngton: Government Printing Office, 1975) provided official, comprehensive surveys of their subjects. Finally, there is in the files of the Center of Military History a copy of the transcripts of the National Defense Conference on Negro Affairs (26 April 1948). Second only to the transcripts of the Fahy Committee hearings in comprehensiveness on the subject of postwar racial policies, this doc.u.ment also provides a rare look at the att.i.tudes of the traditional black leaders.h.i.+p at a crucial period.

As the footnotes indicate, congressional doc.u.ments and newspapers were also important resources mined in the preparation of this volume. Of particular interest, the Center of Military History has on file a special guide to some of these sources prepared by Lt. Col. Reinhold S. Schumann (USAR). This guide a.n.a.lyzes the congressional and press reaction to the 1940 and 1948 draft laws and to the Fahy and Gesell Committee reports.

In his _Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective_ (New York: Praeger, 1974), Jack D. Foner provides a fine general survey of the Negro in the armed forces, including an accurate summary of the integration period. Among the many specialized studies on the integration period itself, cited throughout the text, several might provide a helpful entree to a complicated subject. The standard account is Richard M. Dalfiume's _Desegregation of the_ _United (p. 632) States Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953_ (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1969). Carefully doc.u.mented and containing a very helpful bibliography, this work tends to emphasize the influence of the civil rights advocates and Harry Truman on the integration process. The reader will also benefit from consulting Lee Nichols's pioneer work, _Breakthrough on the Color Front_ (New York: Random House, 1954). Although lacking doc.u.mentation, Nichols's journalistic account was devised with the help of many of the partic.i.p.ants and is still of considerable value to the student.

The reader may also want to consult Richard J. Stillman II's short survey, _Integration of the Negro in the U.S. Armed Forces_ (New York: Praeger, 1968), princ.i.p.ally for its statistical information on the post-Korean period.

The role of President Truman and the Fahy Committee in the integration of the armed forces has been treated in detail by Dalfiume and by Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten in _Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration_ (Lawrence, Kansas: The University of Kansas Press, 1973). A valuable critical appraisal of the short-range response of the Army to the Fahy Committee's work appeared in Edwin W. Kenworthy's "The Case Against Army Segregation,"

_Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ 275 (May 1951):27-33. In addition, the reader may want to consult William C. Berman's _The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration_ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970) for a general survey of civil rights in the Truman years.

The expansion of the Defense Department's equal treatment and opportunity policy in the 1960's is explained by Adam Yarmolinsky in _The Military Establishment: Its Impacts on American Society_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). This book is the work of a number of informed specialists sponsored by the 20th Century Fund. A general survey of President Kennedy's civil rights program is presented by Carl M. Brauer in his _John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). The McNamara era is treated in Fred Richard Bahr's "The Expanding Role of the Department of Defense as an Instrument of Social Change" (Ph.D. dissertation, George Was.h.i.+ngton University, 1970).

Concerning the rise of the civil rights movement itself, the reader would be advised to consult C. Vann Woodward's masterful _The Strange Career of Jim Crow_, 3d ed. rev. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), and the two volumes composed by Gesell Committee member Benjamin Muse, _Ten Years of Prelude: The Story of Integration Since the Supreme Court's 1954 Decision_ (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), and _The American Negro Revolution: From Nonviolence to Black Power, 1963-1967_ (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1968). Important aspects of the civil rights movement and its influence on American servicemen are discussed by Jack Greenberg in _Race Relations and American Law_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) and Eli Ginzberg, _The Negro Potential_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).

Finally, many of the doc.u.ments supporting the history of the integration of the armed forces, including complete transcripts of the Fahy Committee hearings and the Conference on Negro Affairs, have (p. 633) been compiled by the author and Bernard C. Nalty in the multivolumed _Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Doc.u.ments_ (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1977).