Adam Yarmolinsky
This last argument was certainly not new. For some time civil rights spokesmen had been urging the services to use economic pressure to ease discrimination. Specifically, Congressman Powell, and later a number of civil rights groups, had called on the armed forces to impose off-limits sanctions for all servicemen against businesses that discriminated against black servicemen. Clear historical precedent seemed to exist for the action demanded by the controversial Harlem legislator because from earliest time the services had been declaring establishments and whole geographical areas off limits to their officers and men in order to protect their health and welfare. In view of the services' contention that equal treatment and opportunity were important to the welfare of servicemen, was it not reasonable, the spokesmen could ask, for the armed forces to use this powerful economic weapon against those who discriminated?
Those defense officials calling for further changes also argued that even the limited reforms already introduced by the administration faced slow going in the Department of Defense. This point was of particular concern to Robert Kennedy and his assistants in the Justice Department who agreed that senior defense officials lacked neither the zeal nor the determination to advance the civil rights of black servicemen but that the uniformed services were not, as Deputy Secretary Gilpatric expressed it, "putting their hearts and souls into really carrying out all of these directives and policies." Reflecting on it later, Gilpatric decided that the problem in the armed forces was one of pace. The services, he believed, were willing enough to carry out the policies, but in their own way and at their own speed, to avoid the appearance of acting as the agent of another federal department.
James Evans
All these arguments failed to convince Assistant Secretary for Manpower Runge, some officials in the general counsel's office, and principal black adviser on racial affairs James Evans, among others. This group and their allies in the services could point to a political fact of life: to interfere with local segregation laws and customs, specifically to impose off-limits sanctions against southern businessmen, would pit the administration against powerful congressmen, calling down on it the wrath of the armed services and appropriation committees. To the charge that this threat of congressional retaliation was simply an excuse for inaction, the services could explain that unlike the recent integration of military units, which was largely an executive function with which Congress, or at least some individual congressmen, reluctantly went along, sanctions against local communities would be considered a direct threat by scores of legislators. "Even one obscure congressman thus threatened could light a fire over military sanctions," Evans later remarked, "and there were plenty of folks around who were eager to fan the flames."
Even more important, the department's equal opportunity bureaucracy argued, was the need to protect the physical well-being of the individual black soldier. In a decade when civil rights beatings and murders were a common occurrence, these men knew that Evans was right when he said "by the time Washington could enter the case the young man could be injured or dead." Operating under the principle that the safety and welfare of the individual transcended the civil rights of the group, these officials wanted to forbid the men, both the black and the increasing number of white activists, to disobey local segregation laws and customs.