As in the past, he turned first to Lester Granger, his old friend from the National Urban League. Acting on the recommendation of his special assistant, Marx Leva, Forrestal invited Granger to the Pentagon to discuss the department's racial problems with a view to holding a general conference and symposium on the subject. As usual, Granger was full of ideas, and he and the secretary agreed that Forrestal should create a "critics group," which would discuss "Army and general defense policies in the use of Negro personnel."[12-30] Granger suggested a roster of black and white experts, influential in the black community and representing most shades of opinion, but he would exclude those apt to make political capital out of the issues.
The Leva-Granger conference idea fitted neatly into Forrestal's thinking. It offered the possibility of introducing to the services in a systematic and documented way the complaints of responsible black leaders while instructing those leaders in the manpower problems confronting the postwar armed forces. He hoped the conference would modify traditionalist attitudes toward integration while curbing mounting unrest in the black community. Granger and Forrestal agreed that the conference should be held soon. Although Granger wanted some "good solid white representation" in the group, Forrestal decided instead to invite fifteen black leaders to meet on 26 April in the Pentagon; he alerted the service secretaries, asking them to attend or to designate an assistant to represent them in each case.[12-31]
Announcement of the conference was upstaged in the press by the activities of some civil rights militants, including those whom Granger sought to exclude from the Forrestal conference because he thought they would make a political issue of the war against segregation. Forrestal first learned of the militants' plans from members of the National Negro Publishers Association, a group of publishers and editors of important black journals who were about to tour European installations as guests of the Army.[12-32] At Granger's suggestion Forrestal had met with the publishers and editors to explain the causes for the delay in desegregating the services. Instead, he found himself listening to an impassioned demand for immediate change. Ira F. Lewis, president of the Pittsburgh Courier and spokesman for the group, told the secretary that the black community did not expect the services to be a laboratory or clearinghouse for processing the social ills of the nation, but it wanted to warn the man responsible for military preparedness that the United States could not afford another war with one-tenth of its population lacking the spirit to fight. The problem of segregation could best be solved by the policymakers. "The colored people of the country have a high regard for you, Mr. Secretary, as a square shooter," Lewis concluded. And from Forrestal they expected action.[12-33]
While black newspapermen were pressing the executive branch, Randolph and his Committee Against Jim Crow were demanding congressional action. Randolph concentrated on one explosive issue, the Army's procurement of troops. The first War Department plans for postwar manpower procurement were predicated on some form of universal military training, a new concept for the United States. The plans immediately came under fire from Negroes because the Army, citing the Gillem Board Report as its authority, had specified that black recruits be trained in segregated units. The Army had also specified that the black units form parts of larger, racially mixed units and would be trained in racially mixed camps.[12-34] The President's Advisory Commission on Universal Training (the Compton Commission), appointed to study the Army's program, strongly objected to the segregation provisions, but to no avail.[12-35] As if to signal its intentions the Army trained an experimental universal military training unit in 1947 at Fort Knox that carefully excluded black volunteers.
The showdown between civil rights organizations and the administration over universal military training never materialized. Faced with chronic opposition to the program and the exigencies of the cold war, the administration quietly shelved universal training and concentrated instead on the reestablishment of the selective service system. When black attention naturally shifted to the new draft legislation, Randolph was able to capitalize on the determination of many leaders in the civil rights movement to defeat any draft law that countenanced the Army's racial policy. Appearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on the draft bill, Randolph raised the specter of civil disobedience, pledging
to openly counsel, aid, and abet youth, both white and Negro, to quarantine any Jim Crow conscription system, whether it bear the label of universal military training or selective service....
From coast to coast in my travels I shall call upon all Negro veterans to join this civil disobedience movement and to recruit their younger brothers in an organized refusal to register and be drafted....
I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths ... to demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the entire registration and induction machinery....
I shall appeal to the Negro parents to lend their moral support to their sons, to stand behind them as they march with heads held high to Federal prisons as a telling demonstration to the world that Negroes have reached the limit of human endurance, that, in the words of the spiritual, we will be buried in our graves before we will be slaves.[12-36]
Randolph argued that hard-won gains in education, job opportunity, and housing would be nullified by federal legislation supporting segregation. How could a Fair Employment Practices Commission, he asked, dare criticize discrimination in industry if the government itself was discriminating against Negroes in the services? "Negroes are just sick and tired of being pushed around," he concluded, "and we just do not propose to take it, and we do not care what happens."[12-37]