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Military, Blacks in the American
African Americans serving in various branches of the United States armed services and in every military conflict entered by the United States, often in the face of white resistance.In 1948, as a result of President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981, the military became the first major American institution to undertake racial integration. Although the military did not welcome the change, over the years it made great strides toward eliminating racial segregation and discrimination. Today large numbers of African Americans serve in the armed forces because—to a much greater extent than the larger society—the various branches of service reward ability regardless of race or class. For much of American history, however, white Americans resisted the admission of blacks to the military. Like other parts of the African American past, the story of blacks in the American military is closely entwined with the historical American realities of slavery and racism.African Americans in the armed forces have faced conditions that varied widely over the years and from branch to branch within the services. Their story encompasses three major themes: first, black efforts to gain the right to serve and their changing reception within the various services; second, the service records and combat experiences of African American soldiers; and third, the complex impact of black military service on other aspects of American society and African American life. For African Americans, the most significant American military conflicts were the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Civil War (1861–1865), World War I (1914–1918), World War II (1939–1945), and the Vietnam War (1959–1975). Each of these wars had a profound impact on African American life as well as on the nation as a whole, and each involved significant numbers of black soldiers. African Americans, largely unsung, have played a part in every military conflict in American history.Role of African Americans in Colonial Militias
In the early seventeenth century, British colonists—conscious of their vulnerability—welcomed slaves and free blacks into the provincial militias that defended their settlements from Native American, French, or Spanish attack. But as white colonists came to fear slave rebellions more than foreign aggression, they began to exclude African Americans from military service. Virginia passed such a law in 1639; Massachusetts in 1656; and Connecticut followed five years later, after a joint rebellion of Native Americans and slaves near Hartford. In wartime, however, whites were receptive to black volunteers. Black militiamen fought and died in King William's War (1689–1697), Queen Anne's War (1702–1713), and the French and Indian War (1754–1763) as well as in countless skirmishes with Native Americans.Slaves who distinguished themselves in battle were often granted their freedom, but most did not escape bondage in this manner because they had few opportunities to demonstrate their heroism. In what would be an enduring pattern, white commanders relegated black soldiers to support positions such as laborers and teamsters. As Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Michael Lee Lanning observed in The African-American Soldier (1997), it was only when whites felt immediately “threatened by outside enemies” that they welcomed blacks in “armed positions,” and black soldiers consistently found themselves “fighting and dying for a culture which did not recognize them as equals.”At sea, on the other hand, African Americans experienced much greater acceptance. Because of intolerable living conditions aboard ships, many white seamen deserted. Free blacks and runaway slaves, however, welcomed the comparative freedom and relative equality of pay, and they were therefore willing to endure the hardships faced by American merchantmen, whalers, and privateers. Although few blacks served as officers or ship captains—the most notable exception being black Massachusetts captain and ship owner Paul Cuffe—black seamen served in racially integrated crews. A similar tradition of racial openness would continue in the U.S. Navy until the late nineteenth century.African Americans in the American Revolution
Black soldiers also played their part in the American Revolution, although the role of Crispus Attucks, the most celebrated black revolutionary hero, has been misunderstood. In 1770, when Attucks and four whites were killed in the Boston Massacre, they did not die in the cause of American independence—a political goal that would not emerge until several years later. Rather, they were involved in a labor struggle. Attucks's role in leading a mob against British soldiers reflected rising anger at soldiers who were taking jobs in their off-duty hours and augmenting their pay at the expense of Boston workingmen. It would thus be more accurate to view Attucks as an early martyr in the American labor movement.African Americans—especially those who were slaves—faced a difficult choice between siding with the patriots, whose leaders included prominent slaveholders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, or with the British Loyalists. Late in 1775 Virginia's royal governor John Murray, the earl of Dunmore, tried to take advantage of implicit racial divisions by offering freedom to any slave who joined the Loyalist forces. Although Lord Dunmore organized one black regiment, a surprisingly small number of slaves answered his call—probably 2,000, although higher figures have been reported.But the threat of a wholesale slave exodus to the British led patriot leaders to reconsider their original policy of excluding black soldiers. Ultimately, some 5,000 African Americans—both free blacks and slaves—joined the Continental Army, and many others served in local militias. Most of those who were slaves won their freedom in the process. These black soldiers proved their courage under fire, and many died in the struggle for American independence, beginning with Prince Estabrook, a black militiaman killed at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775.In 1775, after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Massachusetts legislature particularly commended African American militiaman Salem Poor, declaring that “in the person of this said Negro centers a brave and gallant soldier.” Black sailors in the fledgling American navy also saw extensive action, including service aboard John Paul Jones's Bonhomme Richard in its 1778 victory over the British Serapis. Lemuel Haynes, a black soldier from Connecticut and later a Congregational minister, dramatically broadened the patriots' own logic of liberty and inalienable rights in “Liberty Further Extended.” This essay, written around 1776 though long unpublished, offers an early natural-rights argument against slavery.Gains and Losses from the Revolution to the Civil War
Revolutionary ideals gave impetus to the abolition of slavery in the North—beginning with Vermont in 1777 and concluding with a plan for gradual emancipation that New Jersey ratified in 1804—certainly the most significant consequence of the Revolutionary War for African Americans. At the same time, however, Southern slavery became more entrenched and the military more firmly whites-only. The Militia Act, passed by Congress in 1792, was restrictively understood to limit militia service to “able-bodied white male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45.” In 1798, in the act that formally organized the U.S. Marine Corps, Congress expressly excluded “Negroes, mulattos (of African and European descent), and Indians” from serving. The Marines remained lily-white until the manpower crisis of World War II.African Americans encountered a very different reception in the army and the navy, the nation's principal military branches. The navy remained a bastion of opportunity for African Americans, in large part because it had to compete with the expanding fleet of American merchant vessels and fishing and whaling ships. Thus many blacks fought as sailors against the Barbary States (1801–1805) and in the War of 1812 (1812–1815); at the end of the latter, fully 10 percent of the U.S. Navy was black. On land, however, blacks had a far less prominent role, although black explorers did play an important part in westward expansion. The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1805) included one African American, Captain William Clark's slave, York. Black Mountain Men and fur trappers—such as Jim Beckwourth and Pierre Bonga—gained extensive knowledge of the mountainous West and later served as scouts and guides for the military.
"Dorie" Miller. Despite hardships, African Americans have served with valor in every American war since the Revolution. This image represents Doris "Dorie" Miller, a mess attendant aboard the West Virginia on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Miller's subsequent heroism in mounting one of the ships 50mm guns to fire at the dive-bombing planes has since made him one of the most celebrated figures of WWII.
(Library of Congress.)
(Library of Congress.)
Military Role in the Civil War
The Civil War offered significant numbers of African Americans the chance to prove themselves in combat. At the outset, however, the war gave every appearance of being strictly a white man's fight. President Abraham Lincoln specifically refused to accept black recruits for the Union army. “Colored men were good enough to fight under Washington,” remarked a frustrated Frederick Douglass, “but they are not good enough to fight under McClellan.” However, Union forces advancing through the slave states attracted large numbers of blacks who sought freedom and refuge and who confronted Union commanders with a significant tactical, legal, and moral problem. Southern slaveholders who were noncombatants regularly appealed to Union commanders demanding the return of their slave property. Army commanders faced with such pleas discovered that no set policy or precedent existed to guide them.General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts abolitionist and political appointee, argued that if Southerners chose to regard runaway slaves as property, those slaves should be considered “contrabands of war” and, in light of their obvious strategic value, should not be returned. Soon these “contrabands” were put to work in support roles, and eventually some were outfitted with discarded Union equipment to serve as sentries to protect other African Americans. On the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, General David C. Hunter began organizing contrabands into military units as early as May 1862. That August, General Hunter's successor, General Rufus Saxton, received authorization from the War Department to recruit, arm, and train 5,000 African American volunteers under the leadership of white officers. That unit, named the First South Carolina Colored Volunteers, was the first African American regiment organized in the war, although it was not called into active duty until January 31, 1863.In 1863—through the diligent efforts of Northern black leaders, most notably Frederick Douglass, and because of a growing manpower shortage in the North—President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which set the Union on the path to dismantling slavery and authorized African American military recruitment. This change in policy did not alter the profound racial hostility of many Northern whites, evidenced in the Draft Riots of 1863 that erupted in various Northern cities, most seriously in New York City, where a massive race riot by whites against blacks resulted in as many as 1,200 fatalities.Nonetheless, Douglass, Martin R. Delany, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, and other African American leaders enthusiastically engaged in recruiting black volunteers. Black leaders even accepted that the new black regiments were to be commanded by white officers, although eventually Delany—commissioned a major in 1865—became the nation's first African American field officer. The most celebrated black regiment was the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers, subject of the 1989 film Glory. Like their white counterparts, African American women also took part in the Civil War, although mostly in support roles. The nation's two most prominent black women were actively involved in the struggle: Sojourner Truth worked as a nurse in a field hospital, and Harriet Tubman performed valuable service as a scout and Union spy.As historian Eric Foner pointed out, African American soldiers “played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War, but also in defining the war's consequences.” Even more important, they helped to transform the black community. In the course of military service, many former slaves learned to read and write, and a considerable number of black soldiers acquired the fundamentals of leadership, including, during Reconstruction, sixty state legislators, forty-one delegates to state constitutional conventions, three lieutenant governors, and four congressmen. For African Americans as a group, the war instilled a new confidence. Thus in 1865 black troops of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts marched into Charleston, South Carolina—that city of planter-aristocrats and secessionist “fire-eaters” that had started the war—singing “John Brown's Body.”Reconstruction and the Late 1800s
Black soldiers were prominent in the U.S. military forces that occupied the defeated South during the early years of Reconstruction, at least until 1867 when complaints by Southerners led President Andrew Johnson to phase most of them out. Moreover, the contributions of the 180,000 black Union army volunteers—accounting for 9 to 10 percent of the total Union army enrollment—provided a compelling case not only for emancipation, accomplished by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), but for granting African Americans citizenship through the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and for extending the suffrage to black males through the Fifteenth Amendment (1870). Indeed, when President Abraham Lincoln cautiously endorsed the idea of black suffrage, he proposed a limited extension to “the very intelligent” and to “those who serve our cause as soldiers.”The late nineteenth century was a time of heightened racial animus on the part of white America, marked by a sharp increase in the Lynching of African Americans and the development of Jim Crow social segregation and black disfranchisement throughout the South. Black wartime contributions faded quickly from white memories. White harassment cut short the military careers of James Webster Smith and Henry O.Flipper, the first two African American cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Smith was dismissed before graduating; Flipper graduated in 1877, earning a commission as a lieutenant, but four years later was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Nearly a century passed before the army exonerated him and made his discharge honorable.Peacetime reductions in defense spending after the Civil War resulted in the disbandment of almost all of the army's black regiments. But unlike peacetime contractions in years past, the U.S. Army did not wholly abandon African American soldiers. Until World War I it maintained four black units, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments. These regiments served mainly in the Far West and became known by Native Americans as Buffalo Soldiers.Spanish-American War and Philippines Insurrection
All four African American units played a prominent role in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The regimental quartermaster for the Tenth Cavalry was young Captain John J. Pershing, whose nickname Black Jack derived from his service with African American troops. The Tenth fought gallantly at the Battle of San Juan Hill, and in a speech several months later Pershing declared, “We officers of the Tenth Cavalry could have taken our black heroes into our arms. They had fought their way into our affections as they have fought their way into the hearts of the American people.”After the war, the army's four permanent black regiments—later augmented by two regiments of black volunteers—were ordered to the Philippines (1899–1902) to join in the jungle fighting between U.S. troops and Filipino freedom fighters that had erupted shortly after the Spanish capitulation. The so-called Philippines Insurrection, an undeclared and unpopular jungle war fought against an elusive enemy, had much in common with the later conflict in Vietnam. It was also potentially divisive for African Americans, since the Filipino freedom fighters were dark-skinned people seeking freedom from oppression. Moreover, white American troops in the Philippines consistently referred to the Filipino nationalists as “niggers.”In the United States, some black newspapers emphasized the similarities between the Filipinos and African Americans. The Colored American of Washington, D.C., observed that both groups were “struggling for the right of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” However, most African Americans stood by their country. When white newspapers questioned the ability of blacks to fight their racial “brothers,” African American soldiers were adamant in their patriotism. “We are American citizens,” one man in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry declared, “and we have at heart the interests of our native land in the same manner as do all Americans.”In late November and December 1899 on the island of Luzon, some 350 men of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry participated in one of the most successful operations of the war. After marching more than 480 kilometers (300 miles) through uncharted jungle, they captured rebel commander Daniel Tirona and his 1,000-man force. General Elwell S. Otis commended the Twenty-Fourth for its accomplishments despite “the difficulties encountered and the discomfort suffered by the troops.”In the U.S. Navy, however, conditions for African Americans deteriorated significantly by the turn of the twentieth century. The navy, once the most receptive branch of the military to African Americans, deliberately acted to reduce the number of black sailors. Service heads and ship captains justified the new policies as inevitable, given the navy's shift from sailing vessels that required a large and relatively unspecialized crew of common seamen, to steamships that relied on more highly trained engineers, gunners, and other specialists. Naval officers argued that blacks lacked the intellectual or technical capabilities to master the high technology of steam engines, and black sailors found themselves increasingly confined to work as stewards or messmen in ships' galleys. After the war in the Philippines, even those positions became fewer. Around the time of World War I, the navy began recruiting allegedly more tractable Filipino messmen.Early 1900s and World War I
Thus the United States entered the twentieth century with a whites-only Marine Corps, a largely white navy, and a segregated army. After returning from duty in the Philippines, the nation's four black army regiments resumed their isolated postings in the West. The Tenth Cavalry served with distinction in General “Black Jack” Pershing's Punitive Expedition (1916–1917) against Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, riding 1,210 kilometers (750 miles) in the first four weeks of the ten-month operation. On January 9, 1918, members of the Tenth made the last cavalry charge against Native Americans in the history of the American West.In general, however, African Americans learned to expect little in the way of recognition or justice from any branch of the armed forces. In the Southwest, the buffalo soldiers encountered steady racial harassment and intimidation—including lynching—yet no white citizen was ever punished for engaging in such assaults. In the 1906 Brownsville Affair, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the discharge without honor of 167 black enlisted men after a Texas shooting incident in which the men quite likely had no part. The men—of Companies B, C, and D of the Twenty-fifth Infantry—had served with distinction in Cuba and the Philippines, yet their exemplary record counted for little.However, African Americans found greater opportunities as the nation mobilized for its 1917 entry into World War I, an ongoing conflict in Europe since August 1914. Ultimately, 200,000 black soldiers would be deployed to Europe, some serving with the American Expeditionary Force and others detailed to the French army. But almost 90 percent of those troops were relegated to service and labor battalions far behind the lines. Curiously, the War Department did not order its four black regiments—the U.S. Army's most experienced soldiers—to Europe; they remained at their posts along the Mexican border. The army did organize two black combat divisions, the Ninety-Second and Ninety-third Divisions, but when the Ninety-Third arrived in France, General Pershing, the supreme American commander, turned it over to the French army. As Colonel William Hayward, commander of the 369th Infantry Regiment and part of the 93rd Division wrote, “Our great American general simply put the black orphan in a basket, set it on the doorstep of the French, pulled the bell, and went away.”Both the Ninety-Third Division and the French inadvertently benefited from white Americans' unwillingness to serve with blacks. With the French, the Ninety-Third experienced far greater acceptance and more equal treatment than the U.S. Army then provided. The unit served heroically throughout the remainder of the war, suffering a casualty rate of 35 percent. The 369th Infantry Regiment spent 191 days on the front lines—longer than any other American unit, during which time it neither gave up an inch of Allied territory nor lost a single soldier through capture. Although no black soldiers were awarded a Medal of Honor during the war, in the 369th alone, 171 officers and men received either the Croix de Guerre or the Legion of Merit from the French government. The 369th included Lieutenant James Reese Europe, the black society musician from New York City who organized the regimental band. Lieutenant Europe was the first black officer to lead troops into combat in World War I, and he and his band also introduced the French to African American music, catalyzing a lasting French fascination with Jazz.Colored Officers Training Camp and the Houston Mutiny
African American leaders faced great difficulties in gaining recognition for black soldiers. In light of the service academies' hostility to black cadets, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pressed for the establishment of a training school for black officers. Joel E. Spingarn, a white member of the NAACP board of directors, coordinated the effort that established the Colored Officers' Training Camp at Fort Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa. Over the course of the war, Fort Dodge trained and commissioned 639 African American officers. However important the achievement of these officers was in symbolic terms, it did little to alter the reality of racial imbalance. During the war, African Americans comprised 13 percent of active-duty military manpower but a mere seven-tenths of 1 percent of the officer corps.Black aspirations were dealt a further setback when members of the Third Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry took part in the Houston Mutiny of August 23, 1917—the first race riot in American history in which more whites than blacks died. The violence left sixteen whites and four black soldiers dead. After hasty courts-martial, nineteen more African American soldiers were executed for their part in the mutiny, and numerous others received lengthy jail sentences. Ironically, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Michael Lee Lanning, author of The African-American Soldier, concluded that a key factor in the riot was the previous transfer of twenty-five of the battalion's most senior sergeants to Des Moines to attend the Colored Officers Training Camp, leaving only one experienced company first sergeant and seriously undermining battalion discipline. In the years to come, this incident effectively undermined any proposal to increase the role of black troops.World War II
During World War I, challenges to racial injustice were fitful and fruitless, but in World War II, the nation faced a crisis of such magnitude that it swept away much of the rationale for exclusion and segregation. At the outset, however, African Americans encountered an all-too-familiar resistance from the white majority. In 1941, as the United States began to mobilize for war, there were few opportunities for African Americans in the booming defense industry. In response, black labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph organized a massive March on Washington Movement, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was eager to head off the protest, signed Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in hiring for jobs in the defense industry and the federal government. Executive Order 8802 also established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to implement and oversee the new policy. Randolph's victory would be the first of many during the war years.Throughout the war, the NAACP stressed the need for a Double-V campaign, meaning victory over fascism overseas and over racism at home. In fact, World War II set in motion a process of change that would not only integrate the armed services, it would transform the whole of African American life and remake the nation. Above all, World War II greatly accelerated the Great Migration that first began in the early decades of the twentieth century. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, millions upon millions of African Americans would leave the South for newly opened high-paying factory jobs in urban areas in the North and West.Within the armed services, World War II offers a long list of firsts, advancements, and breakthroughs. Initially, however, the opportunities for blacks remained few. The army's mobilization plan on the eve of World War II would have allowed African Americans to contribute only 6 percent of total army manpower. And few African American soldiers were given combat assignments. For example, Dorie Miller, who shot down two enemy aircraft—and possibly downed two more—during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was a messman ineligible for military training. Moreover, he was ignored for months after the battle; only after concerted protests in the African American press did Miller receive a Navy Cross and an invitation to speak to the 1942 graduating class at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Miller was then assigned to the aircraft carrier Liscome Bay, but a year later, when a Japanese submarine sank the ship, the black hero of Pearl Harbor died as a messman.Throughout the war, the official American policy was “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.” On the other hand, in 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt did commit the nation to establishing combatant and noncombatant black units in each branch of the armed forces. A year later the army activated the first black tank battalion, the 758th Tank Battalion. On March 7, 1942, the U.S. Army Air Corps commissioned its first black pilots, part of the all-black Ninety-Ninth Pursuit Squadron—the famed Tuskegee Airmen—that Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., would command. On June 1st, the U.S. Marine Corps admitted African Americans for the first time in its 144-year history, taking as its first recruit a former Nashville, Tennessee, dogcatcher named George Thompson. A month later, the army accepted the first black women for the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), later simplified to the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Nonetheless, African American soldiers never accounted for more than 8.7 percent of army manpower, and only 15 percent of that number received combat assignments.The U.S. Navy, in contrast to its record in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, remained the service most obdurate on racial issues. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and senior naval officers resisted assigning African American sailors to any but the most menial shipboard duties, as servants to officers, in construction battalions, or as messmen or stewards in ships' galleys. The navy did not commission its first group of black officers, known as the Golden Thirteen, until March 17, 1944. Three days later, it finally commissioned the USS Mason, an antisubmarine ship and the first navy vessel manned by black sailors under the command of white officers, at last providing African Americans with an official opportunity for naval combat. The navy would not order the desegregation of its shore facilities until after the end of the Korean War (1950–1953). Understandably, therefore, during World War II, African Americans represented only 5 percent of the navy's total manpower.Integrating the Military
In contrast, the U.S. Army began to take steps to challenge the assumptions of Jim Crow segregation. In 1941 it began integrating its officers' candidate schools. In July 1944 the War Department prohibited discrimination in transportation and recreational facilities on all army bases. On a Texas military base not long after this directive was issued, Lieutenant Jackie Robinson—who would soon become the first African American to break the long-standing color bar in major league baseball—refused to go to the back of a bus, resulting in his court-martial and complete vindication. Lieutenant Robinson's refusal to abide Southern Jim Crow practices was by no means an isolated example. Indeed, the pride and confidence of African American military veterans and their unwillingness to endure further discrimination would help provide the impetus for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.On December 26, 1944, during the worst days of the Battle of the Bulge, the army issued a directive requesting African American volunteers to be integrated into white combat units, a request that clearly marked the beginning of the end for the Jim Crow army. But no service branch welcomed the prospect of integration. The persistent delaying tactics of the various service heads outraged African Americans, whose pressure in 1948 moved President Harry S. Truman to order the integration of America's armed forces and to establish the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services.During the Korean War, the first integrated American combat units saw action, and they proved that racial prejudices and enmities fall away quickly under the pressure of battle. By the war's end, over 90 percent of black troops were serving in integrated units. The only regrets that African Americans expressed about this process were at the disbandment of the four historic black regiments, which closed a part of black history reaching back to the end of the Civil War. Above all, the Korean War transformed the U.S. Marine Corps. At the start of that conflict, African Americans made up only 1,075 of the nation's 74,279 marines, and of that 1,075, nearly half (427) were stewards. In the space of two years, the corps changed from the most segregated branch of the armed forces to one approaching complete integration. The United States disbanded its last segregated unit in 1954, the year in which the Supreme Court of the United States issued its pivotal decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Thus when the nation had scarcely begun its effort to end segregation in public schools, racial integration was nearly an accomplished fact in the armed forces.Integration proceeded, not always smoothly, through the 1950s and 1960s. The military made great strides toward integrating its rank and file, but progress was much slower in the officer corps, although undeniable gains were made there as well. Moreover, during the Vietnam War, African American soldiers faced a new problem—rather than being excluded from combat, they now found themselves almost inevitably condemned to it. African Americans, as military historian Colonel Lanning observed, were “13.5 percent of the military-age population [and] 10.6 percent of the total force in the war zone,” but accounted for “20 percent of U.S. battlefield casualties.” It was, as one black soldier remarked, “the kind of integration that could kill you.”The Vietnam War was the first war in which African American leaders gradually turned against the federal government—which they had long regarded as African Americans' best ally. Paradoxically, as Colonel Lanning noted, the first black leaders to come out against the war were not, generally speaking, those who advocated nonviolence. Thus the militant and often bellicose Malcolm X spoke out against the war as early as 1964; the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other hand, did not voice his opposition until 1967.Far more quickly than most civil rights activists, African American soldiers in Vietnam came to doubt the wisdom of their political and military leaders. Black soldiers—along with Mexican Americans and working-class whites—faced the most dangerous and thankless combat assignments. Regardless of race, these combat troops came in many ways to share a common outlook. They questioned military discipline, sometimes challenged orders, and generally developed a cynical attitude toward military authority and political leaders. On the other hand, soldiers in the field learned that they needed to count on one another, regardless of race. Indeed, in a war where the difficulty in knowing the enemy and the obduracy of the high command were equally legendary, they discovered that they could not really count on anyone else.African Americans in the All-Volunteer Army
During the war, Americans black and white came to mistrust the draft, which had been established by the Selective Service Act of 1948. In response, President Richard M. Nixon approved a proposal for an all-volunteer military, and the army inducted its last draftees in mid-1973. The new policy resulted in a sharp increase in the proportion of African Americans in military service. Many blacks joined the military because it offered jobs, training, and educational and other benefits, while in the larger society African Americans faced an unemployment rate significantly higher than that of the white majority. But critics argued that the phrase all-volunteer misrepresented what was in fact an economic draft, in which the lack of alternatives forced a disproportionate number of blacks into military service. Thus in 1972 about 17 percent of the army was African American, but by 1981 that figure had nearly doubled to one-third. The navy continued to be the least congenial service for blacks; nonetheless, the proportion of black sailors also essentially doubled from 6.4 to 12 percent. Only the U.S. Air Force lagged in its ability to attract African Americans, posting a much smaller increase from 12.6 to 16.5 percent.
African American airmen such as these seen here in a photograph from southern Italy in 1945 were to become legendary during WWII.
(Library of Congress.)
(Library of Congress.)
Persian Gulf War and After
The Persian Gulf War (1991) was the first war in the nation's history in which the top military commander, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was black. Moreover, General Cal Waller, an African American, was second-in-command to General Norman Schwarzkopf in Operation Desert Storm, as the Pentagon designated the Allied war effort. African Americans were also heavily overrepresented in U.S. forces in the war zone. Although only 12 percent of the military-age population, African Americans accounted for 26 percent of the troops in the Gulf. This trend continued in the Iraq War twelve years later. More than sixty black U.S. military personnel had died in that conflict by December 2003.
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Colin Powell on Blacks in the U.S. Military Colin Powell discusses the military service of African Americans.
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