African Americans -- History; Slavery -- United States -- History
In 1948 A. Philip Randolph began to advocate civil disobedience on the
part of Afro-Americans, rather than ever again allowing themselves to be
part of a segregated army. He recommended that they refuse to serve in
future wars, and the idea received widespread attention. In a Senate
comittee inquiry, Senator Wayne Morse from Oregon suggested to him that
such civil disobedience in wartime could well be viewed as treason and
not merely as civil disobedience. Clearly, Randolph's suggestion had hit
a sensitive nerve. A nation which had been skeptical about permitting
Afro-Americans in its armed forces was now becoming extremely uneasy at
the thought that Afro-Americans might not want to serve. In the same
year President Truman appointed a commission to study race relations in
the military. Its report, Freedom to Serve, recommended that the Armed
Forces open up all jobs regardless of race, color, or creed. As a result,
the military began to move slowly in the direction of integration.
However, when the communists invaded South Korea, the issue quickly came
to a head. Unless integration was achieved, America would have to fight
communists and colored Asiatics with a segregated army and would have to
do it in the name of the United Nations.
In 1950 General Matthew Ridgway began to accelerate integration
in the forces under his command. He did this partly as a matter
of philosophy and partly from necessity. The Army needed the fullest and
most efficient use of the few troops available in order to stem the flow
of a much larger communist force into South Korea. This integration
proceeded very well, and when he was put in charge of all forces in the
Far East, he asked the Defense Department for permission to integrate all
of the forces in the area. Within three months, the extent of
integration in the Armed Forces jumped from nine percent to thirty
percent. While Afro-Americans were pleased, they were also convinced
that it had been done more from the pressure of world opinion than from a
genuine humanitarian conscience.
During this period, the Federal Government took a more active role in
several other ways in regard to improving race relations. How much of
this action sprang from internal motivation and how much resulted from
the pressure of world opinion is a matter of conjecture. In any case, the
Truman Administration deliberately created an atmosphere favorable to
changing race relations within America. In 1946 Truman appointed a
comittee on civil rights which, after intensive study, published its
report, To Secure These Rights.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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