The new policy made an immediate difference. In less than two months the Steward's Branch was 20 percent white. In marked contrast to the claims of Navy recruiters, the marines reported no difficulty in attracting white volunteers for messman duties. Curiously, the volunteers came mostly from the southeastern states. As the racial composition of the Steward's Branch changed, the morale of its black members seemed to improve. As one senior black warrant officer later explained, simply opening stewards duty to whites made such duty acceptable to many Negroes who had been prone to ask "if it [stewards duty] was so good, why don't you have some of the whites in it."[18-32] When transfer to general service assignments became easy to obtain in the 1960's, the Marine Corps found that only a small percentage of the black stewards now wished to make the change.
There were still inequities in the status of black marines, especially the near absence of black officers (two on active duty in 1950, nineteen in January 1955) and the relatively slow rate of promotion among black marines in general. The corps had always justified its figures on the grounds that competition in so small a service was extremely fierce, and, as the commandant explained to Walter White in 1951, a man had to be good to compete and outstanding to be promoted. He cited the 1951 selection figures for officer training: out of 2,025 highly qualified men applying, only half were selected and only half of those were commissioned.[18-33] Promotion to senior billets for noncommissioned officers was also highly competitive, with time in service an important factor. It was unlikely in such circumstances that many black marines would be commissioned from the ranks or a higher percentage of black noncommissioned officers would be promoted to the most senior positions during the 1950's.[18-34] The Marine Corps had begun commissioning Negroes so recently that the development of a representative group of black officers in a system of open competition was of necessity a slow and arduous task. The task was further complicated because most of the nineteen black officers on active duty in 1955 were reservists serving out tours begun in the Korean War. Only a few of them had made the successful switch from reserve to regular service. The first two were 2d Lt. Frank E. Petersen, Jr., the first black Marine pilot, and 2d Lt. Kenneth H. Berthoud, Jr., who first served as a tank officer in the 3d Marine Division. Both men would advance to high rank in the corps, Petersen becoming the first black marine general.
Sergeant Major Huff
As for the noncommissioned officers, there were a number of senior enlisted black marines in the 1950's, many of them holdovers from the World War II era, and Negroes were being promoted to the ranks of corporal and sergeant in appreciable numbers.
But the tenfold increase in the number of black marines during the Korean War caused the ratio of senior black noncommissioned officers to black marines to drop. Here again promotion to higher rank was slow. The first black marine to make the climb to the top in the integrated corps was Edgar R. Huff. A gunnery sergeant in an integrated infantry battalion in Korea, Huff later became battalion sergeant major in the 8th Marines and eventually senior sergeant major of the Marine Corps.[18-35]
By 1962 there were 13,351 black enlisted men, 7.59 percent of the corps' strength, and 34 black officers (7 captains, 25 lieutenants, and 2 warrant officers) serving in integrated units in all military occupations. These statistics illustrate the racial progress that occurred in the Marine Corps during the 1950's, a change that was both orderly and permanent, and, despite the complicated forces at work, in essence a gift to the naval establishment from the Korean battlefield.