The only practical recourse for parents of military dependents, Fitt believed, was to follow the slow process of judicial redress under Title IV of the civil rights bill then moving through Congress. Anticipating the new law, Fitt asked the services to provide him with pertinent data on all school districts where military dependents attended segregated schools. He planned to use this information in cooperation with the Departments of Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare for use in federal suits. He also requested reports on the efforts made by local commanders to integrate schools used by dependent children and the responses of local school officials to such efforts.[23-65] Later, after the new law had been signed by the President, Norman Paul outlined for the services the procedures to be used for lodging complaints under Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act and directed that local commanders inform all parents under their command of the remedies afforded them under the new legislation.[23-66]
With no prospect in sight for speedy integration of schools attended by military dependents, the Department of Defense summarily ended the attendance of uniformed personnel at all segregated educational institutions. With the close of the 1964 spring semester, Paul announced, no Defense Department funds would be spent to pay tuition for such schooling.[23-67] The economic pressure implicit in this ruling, which for some time had been applied to the education of civilian employees of the department, allowed many base commanders to negotiate an end to segregation in off-base schools.[23-68]
The effort of the Department of Defense to secure education for its military dependents in integrated schools was, on the whole, unsuccessful. Integration, when it finally came to most of these institutions later in the 1960's, came principally through the efforts of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet the role of local military commanders in the effort to secure integrated schools cannot be ignored, for with the development of a new policy toward off-base facilities in 1963 the commander became a permanent and significant partner in the administration's fight to desegregate the nation's schools. In contrast to earlier times when the Department of Defense depended on moral suasion to desegregate schools used by servicemen's children, its commanders now educated parents on their legal rights, collected data to support class action suits, and negotiated with school boards. If the primary impetus for this activity was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the philosophy of the Gesell Committee and the Secretary of Defense's directive were also implicit.
Discrimination in the sale and lease of housing continued to be the most widespread and persistent form of racial injustice encountered by black servicemen, and a most difficult one to fight. The chronic shortage of on-base accommodations, the transient nature of a military assignment, and the general reluctance of men in uniform to protest publicly left the average serviceman at the mercy of local landlords and real estate interests. Nor did he have recourse in law. No significant federal legislation on the subject existed before 1969, and state laws (by 1967 over half the states had some form of prohibition against discrimination in public housing and twenty-one states had open housing laws) were rather limited, excluding owner-occupied dwellings, for example, from their provisions. Even President Kennedy's 1962 housing order was restricted to future building and to housing dependent on federal financing.
Both the Civil Rights Commission and the Gesell Committee studied the problem in some detail and concluded that the President's directive to all federal agencies to use their "good offices" to push for open housing in federally supported housing had not been followed in the Department of Defense. The Civil Rights Commission, in particular, painted a picture of a Defense Department alternating between naivete and indifference in connection with the special housing problems of black servicemen.[23-69] White House staffer Wofford later decided that the Secretary of Defense was dragging his feet on the subject of off-base housing, although Wofford admitted that each federal agency was a forceful advocate of action by other agencies.[23-70]
Submarine Tender Duty.
A senior chief boatswain mate and master diver at his station on the USS Hunley.
The Assistant Secretary for Manpower conceded in November 1963 that little had been done, but, citing the widely misunderstood off-base inventory, he pleaded the need to avoid retaliation by segregationist forces in Congress both on future authorizations for housing and on the current civil rights legislation. He recommended that the Department of Defense complete and disseminate to local commanders information packets containing relevant directives, statistics, and legal procedures available in the local housing field.[23-71]
McNamara approved this procedure, again investing local commanders with responsibility for combating a pervasive form of discrimination with a voluntary compliance program. Specifically, local commanders were directed to promote open housing near their bases, expanding their open housing lists and pressing the problem of local housing discrimination on their biracial community committees for solution. They were helped by the secretary's assistants. His civil rights and housing deputies became active participants in the President's housing committee, transmitting to local military commanders the information and techniques developed in the executive body. McNamara's civil rights staff inaugurated cooperative programs with state and municipal equal opportunity commissions and other local open housing bodies, making these community resources available to local commanders. Finally, in February 1965, the Department of Defense entered into a formal arrangement with the Federal Housing Administration to provide commanders with lists of all housing in their area covered by the President's housing order and to arrange for the lease of foreclosed Federal Housing Authority properties to military personnel.[23-72]