The immediate test for the services' belatedly organized civil rights apparatus was the racial discrimination lingering within the armed forces themselves. The Civil Rights Commission and the Gesell Committee had been concerned with the exceptions to the services' generally satisfactory equal opportunity record. It was these exceptions, such chronic problems as underrepresentation of Negroes in some services, in the higher military grades, and in skilled military occupations, that continued to concern the Defense Department civil rights organization and the services as they tried to carry out McNamara's directive. Seemingly minor compared to the discrimination faced by black servicemen outside the military reservation, racial problems within the military family and how the services dealt with them would have direct bearing on the tranquility of the armed forces in the 1970's.
Listening To the Squad Leader.
Men of Company D, 21st Infantry, prepare to move out, Quang Tin Province, Vietnam.
Two pressing needs, and obviously interrelated ones, were to attract a greater number of young blacks to a military career and improve the status of Negroes already in uniform. These were not easy, short-term tasks. In the first place the Negro, ironically in view of the services' now genuine desire to have him, was no longer so interested in joining. As explained by Defense Department civil rights officials, the past attitudes and practices of the services, especially the treatment of Negroes during World War II, had created among black opinion-makers an indifference toward the services as a vocation.[22-40] Lacking encouragement from parents, teachers, and peers, black youths were increasingly reluctant to consider a military career. For their part the services tried to counter this attitude with an energetic public relations program.[22-41] Encouraged by the department's civil rights experts they tried to establish closer relations with black students. They even reorganized their recruitment programs, and the Secretary of Defense himself initiated a program to attract more black ROTC cadets.[22-42] Service representatives also worked with teachers and school officials to inform students on military career opportunities.
Enlistment depended not only on a man's desire to join but also on his ability to qualify. Following the publication of a presidential task force report on the chronic problem of high draft rejection rates, the Army inaugurated in August 1964 a Special Training and Enlistment Program (STEP), an experiment in the "military training, education, and physical rehabilitation of men who cannot meet current mental or medical standards for regular enlistment in the Army."[22-43] Aimed at increasing enlistments by providing special training after induction for those previously rejected as unqualified, the program provided for the enlistment of 8,000 substandard men, which included many Negroes. Before the men could be enlisted, however, Congress killed the program, citing its cost and duplication of the efforts of the Job Corps. It was not until 1967 that the idea of accepting many young men ineligible for the draft because of mental or educational deficiencies was revived when McNamara launched his Project 100,000.[22-44]
The services were unable to bring off a dramatic change in black enlistment patterns in the 1960's. With the exception of the Marine Corps, in which the proportion of black enlisted men increased 4 percent, the percentage of Negroes in the services remained relatively stationary between 1962 and 1968 (Table 24). In 1968, when Negroes accounted for 11 percent of the American population, their share of the enlisted service population remained at 8.2, with significant differences among the services. Nor did there seem much chance of increasing the number of black servicemen since the percentage of Negroes among draftees and first-time enlistees was rising very slowly while black reenlistment rates, for some twenty years a major factor in holding black strength steady, began to decline (Table 25). Actually, enlistment figures for both whites and blacks declined, a circumstance usually attributed to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, although in the midst of the war, in 1967, black first-term reenlistment rates continued to exceed white rates 2 to 1.
Table 24—Black Percentages, 1962-1968
| Year | Army | Navy | Marine Corps | Air Force | ||||
| Officers | Enlisted Men | Officers | Enlisted Men | Officers | Enlisted Men | Officers | Enlisted Men | |
| 1962 | 3.2 | 12.2 | .2 | 5.2 | .2 | 7.6 | 1.2 | 9.2 |
| 1964 | 3.4 | 13.4 | .3 | 5.8 | .4 | 8.7 | 1.5 | 10.0 |
| 1965 | 3.5 | 13.9 | .3 | 5.8 | .4 | 8.7 | 1.6 | 10.7 |
| 1967 | 3.4 | 12.1 | .3 | 4.7 | .7 | 10.3 | 1.8 | 10.4 |
| 1968 | 3.3 | 12.6 | .4 | 5.0 | .9 | 11.5 | 1.8 | 10.2 |