Admiral Holloway was concerned about this latter point, which dominated his discussions with the Secretary of the Navy on 1 September 1953. He had, he told Anderson, discussed with his recruiting specialists the possibility of recruiting white sailors for the branch, and while they all agreed that whites must not be induced to join by "improper procedures," such as preferential recruitment to escape the draft, they felt that whites could be attracted to steward duty by skillful recruiters, especially in areas of the country where industrial integration had already been accomplished. His bureau was considering the abolition of separate recruiting, but to make specific recommendations on matters involving the stewards he had created an ad hoc committee, under the Deputy Chief of Naval Personnel and composed of representatives of the other bureaus. When he received this committee's views, Holloway promised to take "definite administrative action."[16-93]
Integrated Stewards Class Graduates, Great Lakes, 1953
The three recommendations of the reservist experts did not survive intact the ad hoc committee's scrutiny. At the committee's suggestion, Holloway rejected the proposed merger of the commissary and steward functions on the grounds that such a move was unnecessary in an era of high reenlistment. He also decided that stewards would retain their branch insignia. He did approve, however, in a decision announced on 28 February 1954, putting an end to the separate recruitment of stewards with the exception of the contract enlistment of Filipino citizens. As Anderson assured Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York, only after recruit training and "with full knowledge of the opportunities in various categories of administrative specialties" would an enlistee be allowed to volunteer for messman's duty.[16-94]
Admiral Holloway promised a further search for ways to eliminate "points of friction" regarding the stewards, and naval officials discussed the problem with civil rights leaders and Defense Department officials on several occasions in the next years.[16-95] The Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Adam Yarmolinsky, reported in 1961 that the Bureau of Naval Personnel "was not sanguine" about recruiting substantial numbers of white seamen for the Steward's Branch.[16-96] In answer, the Chief of Naval Personnel could only point out that no matter what their qualifications or ambitions all men assigned to the Steward's Branch were volunteers. As one commentator observed, white sailors were very rarely attracted to the messmen's field because of its reputation as a black specialty.[16-97]
Nevertheless, by 1961 a definite pattern of change had emerged in the Steward's Branch. The end of separate recruitment drastically cut the number of Negroes entering the rating, while the renewed emphasis on transferring eligible chief stewards to other specialties somewhat reduced the number of Negroes already in the branch. Between 1956 and 1961, some 600 men out of the 1,800 tested transferred to other rating groups or fields. The substantial drop in black strength resulting from these changes combined with a corresponding rise in the number of contract messmen from the western Pacific region reduced for the first time in some thirty years Negroes in the Steward's Branch to a minority. Even for those remaining in the branch, life changed considerably. Separate berthing for stewards, always justified on the grounds of different duties and hours, was discontinued, and the amount of time spent by stewards at sea, with the varied military work that sea duty involved, was increased.[16-98]
If these changes caused by the increased enlistment of stewards from the western Pacific relieved the Steward's Branch of its reputation as the black man's navy, they also perpetuated the notion that servants' duties were for persons of dark complexion. The debate over a segregated branch that had engaged the civil rights leaders and the Navy since 1932 was over, but it had left a residue of ill will; some were bitter at what they considered the listless pace of reform, a pace which left the impression that the service had been forced to change against its will. To some extent the Navy in the 1950's failed to capitalize on its early achievements because it had for so long missed the point of the integrationists' arguments about the stewards. In the fifties the Navy expended considerable time and energy advertising for black officer candidates and recruits whom they guaranteed a genuinely equal chance to participate in all specialties, but these efforts were to some extent dismissed by critics as not germane. In 1950, for example, only 114 Negroes served in the glamorous submarine assignments and even fewer in the naval air service.[16-99] Yet this obvious underrepresentation caused no great outcry from the black community. What did cause bitterness and protest in an era of aroused racial pride was the fact that servants' duties fell almost exclusively on nonwhite Americans. That these duties were popular—the 80 percent reenlistment rate in the Steward's Branch continued throughout the decade and the transfer rate into the branch almost equaled the transfer out—was disregarded by many of the more articulate spokesmen, who considered the branch an insult to the black public. As Congressman Powell informed the Navy in 1953, "no one is interested in today's world in fighting communism with a frying pan or shoe polish."[16-100] Although statistics showed nearly half the black sailors employed in other than menial tasks, Powell voiced the mood of a large segment of the black community.
