The racial quota, in the guise of an "acceptable" percentage of Negroes in individual units, continued to operate long after the Army agreed to abandon it. No one, black or white, appears to have voiced in the early 1950's the logical observation that the establishment of a racial quota in individual Army units—whatever the percentage and the grounds for that percentage—was in itself a residual form of discrimination. Nor did anyone ask how establishing a race quota, clearly distinct from restricting men according to mental, moral, or professional standards, could achieve the "effective working level" posited by the Army's scientific advisers.
These questions would still be pertinent years later because the alternative to the racial quota—the enlistment and assignment of men without regard for color—would continue to be unacceptable to many. They would argue that to abandon the quota, as the services did in the 1960's, was to violate the concept of racial balance, which is yet another hallmark of an egalitarian society. For example, during the Vietnam War some black Americans complained that too many Negroes were serving in the more dangerous combat arms. Since men were assigned without regard to race, these critics were in effect asking for the quota again, reminding the service that the population of the United States was only some 11 percent black. And during discussions of the all-volunteer Army a decade later, critics would be asking how the white majority would react to an army 30 or even 50 percent black.
These considerations were clearly beyond the ken of the men who integrated the Army in the early 1950's. They concentrated instead on the perplexities of enlisting and assigning vast numbers of segregated black soldiers during wartime and closely watched the combat performance of black units in Korea. Integration provided the Army with a way to fill its depleted combat units quickly. The shortage of white troops forced local commanders to turn to the growing surplus of black soldiers awaiting assignment to a limited number of black units. Manpower restrictions did not permit the formation of new black units merely to accommodate the excess, and in any case experience with the 24th Infantry had strengthened the Army staff's conviction that black combat units did not perform well. However commanders may have felt about the social implications of integration, and whatever they thought of the fighting ability of black units, the only choice left to them was integration. When the Chief of Staff ordered the integration of the Far East Command in 1951, what had begun as a battlefield expedient became official policy.
Segregation became unworkable when the Army lost its power to limit the number of black soldiers. Abandonment of the quota on enlistments, pressed on the Army by the Fahy Committee, proved compatible with segregated units only so long as the need for fighting men was not acute. In Korea the need became acute. Ironically, the Gillem Board, whose work became anathema to the integrationists, accurately predicted the demise of segregation in its final report, which declared that in the event of another major war the Army would use its manpower "without regard to antecedents or race."
CHAPTER 18
Integration of the Marine Corps
Even more so than in the Army, the history of racial equality in the Marine Corps demonstrates the effect of the exigencies of war on the integration of the armed forces. The Truman order, the Fahy Committee, even the demands of civil rights leaders and the mandates of the draft law, all exerted pressure for reform and assured the presence of some black marines. But the Marine Corps was for years able to stave off the logical outcome of such pressures, and in the end it was the manpower demands of the Korean War that finally brought integration.
In the first place the Korean War caused a sudden and dramatic rise in the number of black marines: from 1,525 men, almost half of them stewards, in May 1949, to some 17,000 men, only 500 of them serving in separate stewards duty, in October 1953.[18-1] Whereas the careful designation of a few segregated service units sufficed to handle the token black representation in 1949, no such organization was possible in 1952, when thousands of black marines on active duty constituted more than 5 percent of the total enlistment. The decision to integrate the new black marines throughout the corps was the natural outcome of the service's early experiences in Korea. Ordered to field a full division, the corps out of necessity turned to the existing black service units, among others, for men to augment the peacetime strength of its combat units. These men were assigned to any unit in the Far East that needed them. As the need for more units and replacements grew during the war, newly enlisted black marines were more and more often pressed into integrated service both in the Far East and at home.
Most significantly, the war provided a rising generation of Marine Corps officers with a first combat experience with black marines. The competence of these Negroes and the general absence of racial tension during their integration destroyed long accepted beliefs to the contrary and opened the way for general integration. Although the corps continued to place special restrictions on the employment of Negroes and was still wrestling with the problem of black stewards well into the next decade, its basic policy of segregating marines by race ended with the cancellation of the last all-black unit designation in 1951. Hastily embraced by the corps as a solution to a pressing manpower problem, integration was finally accepted as a permanent manpower policy.