We request cooperation and seek voluntary compliance [in obtaining open housing].... I am fully aware that the Defense Department is not a philanthropic foundation or a social-welfare institution. But the Department does not intend to let our Negro servicemen and their families continue to suffer the injustices and indignities they have in the past. I am certain my successors will pursue the same policy.[23-99]
By 1967 the major programs derived from Secretary McNamara's equal opportunity policy had been defined, and the Department of Defense could look back with pride on the substantial and permanent changes it had achieved in the treatment of black servicemen in communities near military bases.[23-100] Emphasizing voluntary compliance with its policy, the department had proved to be quite successful in its campaign against discrimination in off-base recreation, public transportation and accommodation, in the organized reserves, and even, to a limited extent, in off-base schools. It was logical that the services should seek voluntary compliance before resorting to more drastic methods. As the Gesell Committee had pointed out, base commanders had vast influence in their local communities, influence that might be used in countless ways to alter the patterns of off-base discrimination. For the first time the armed forces had fought discrimination by making the local commander responsible for a systematic program of negotiations in the community.
But voluntary compliance had its limits. Its success depended in large measure on the ability and will of local commanders, who, for the most part, were unprepared by training or temperament to deal with the complex and explosive problems of off-base discrimination. Even if the commander could qualify as a civil rights reformer, he had little time or incentive for a duty that would go unrecognized in terms of his efficiency rating yet must compete for his attention with other necessary duties that were so recognized. Finally, the successful use of voluntary compliance techniques depended on the implied threat of legal or economic pressures, yet, for a considerable period following McNamara's 1963 directive, no legal strictures against some forms of discrimination existed, and the use of economic sanctions had been so carefully circumscribed by defense officials as to render the possibility of their use extremely remote.
The decision to circumscribe the use of economic sanctions against off-base discrimination made sense. Closing a base because of discrimination in nearby communities was practically if not politically impossible and might conceivably become a threat to national security. As to sanctions aimed at specific businesses, the secretary's civil rights assistants feared the possibility that the abrupt or authoritarian imposition of sanctions by an insensitive or unsympathetic commander might sabotage the department's whole equal opportunity program in the community. They were determined to leave the responsibility for sanctions in the hands of senior civilian officials. In the end it was the most senior of these officials who acted. When his attention turned to the problem of discrimination in off-base housing for black servicemen in 1967, Secretary McNamara quickly decided to use sanctions against a discriminatory practice widely accepted and still legal under federal law.
The combination of voluntary compliance techniques and economic sanctions, in tandem with the historic civil rights legislation of the mid-1960's, succeeded in eliminating most of the off-base discrimination faced by black servicemen. Ironically, in view of its unquestioned control in the area, the Department of Defense failed to achieve an equal success against discrimination within the military establishment itself. Complaints concerning the number, promotion, assignment, and punishment of black servicemen, a limited problem in the mid-1960's, went mostly unrecognized. Relatively speaking, they were ignored by the Gesell Committee and the civil rights organizations in the face of the more pressing off-base problems and only summarily treated by the services, which remained largely silent about on-base and in-house discrimination. Long after off-base discrimination had disappeared as a specific military problem, this neglected on-base discrimination would rise up again to trouble the armed forces in more militant times.[23-101]
CHAPTER 24
Conclusion
The Defense Department's response to the recommendations of the Gesell Committee marked the close of a well-defined chapter in the racial history of the armed forces. Within a single generation, the services had recognized the rights of black Americans to serve freely in the defense of their country, to be racially integrated, and to have, with their dependents, equal treatment and opportunity not only on the military reservation but also in nearby communities. The gradual compliance with Secretary McNamara's directives in the mid-1960's marked the crumbling of the last legal and administrative barriers to these goals.
Why the Services Integrated
In retrospect, several causes for the elimination of these barriers can be identified. First, if only for the constancy and fervor of its demands, was the civil rights movement. An obvious correlation exists between the development of this movement and the shift in the services' racial attitudes. The civil rights advocates—that is, those spokesmen of the rapidly proliferating civil rights organizations and their allies in Congress, the White House, and the media—formed a pressure group that zealously enlisted political support for equal opportunity measures. Their metier was presidential politics. In several elections they successfully traded their political assistance, an unknown quantity, for specific reform. Their influence was crucial, for example, in Roosevelt's decision to enlist Negroes for general service in the World War II Navy and in all branches of the Army and in Truman's proclamation of equal treatment and opportunity; it was notable in the adjudication of countless discrimination cases involving individual black servicemen both on and off the military base. Running through all their demands and expressed more and more clearly during this period was the conviction that segregation itself was discrimination. The success of their campaign against segregation in the armed forces can be measured by the extent to which this proposition came to be accepted in the counsels of the White House and the Pentagon.