The Unbunching

Mom, this is something I want you or Dad to do quick. They are mixing the niggers in the same barracks with us. If everyone's parents write their Congressmen to ask for something to be done about it, it will. Mom, please don't let me down. Quick!

Such anguished pleas were suddenly commonplace in June 1949, a month after the U.S. Air Force set out to abolish its all-Negro units. The integration of whites and Negroes, everyone agreed, would take many years, perhaps decades. Yet within a few months, the Air Force had broken through its color barrier. And by 1954, in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, white and colored men worked together, marched together and learned to fight side by side. Not all of them liked it; but everyone accepted it.

Across the desk of Lee Nichols, a night rewrite man for the United Press in Washington, passed the terse Pentagon announcements and the brief press dispatches that were the communiques in the war against armed-forces segregation --the Unknown War, as Nichols came to know it. Nichols became fascinated in the subject, and his interest led to previously secret files, to military bases, to scores of interviews. His book, Breakthrough on the Color Front (Random House; $3.50), published this week, is the most complete report to date on a war already in the mop-up stage.

The Bug-Out Song. Throughout U.S. history, Negroes have fought--and died --in the nation's wars (and Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre of 1770, prelude to the American Revolution). Yet always the verdict was the same: in combat, Negro units were "unreliable"--a euphemism for an uglier word. Even in the Korean war--nearly three years after President Truman's 1948 order for armed-forces equality--the classic story was of Negroes who fled from battle, then huddled around a campfire singing The Bug Out Boogie, the "official song of the [Negro] 24th Infantry Regiment":

When them Chinese mortars begins to

thud, The old Deuce-Four begins to bug . . .

But even as that tale went its round, segregation was ending--and with it the old belief in "bug out" as an inborn Negro weakness. The Navy, under the firm hand of James Forrestal, had started integration first of all, but soon began to run aground on service traditions. The Air Force started its successful program less than a year after the Truman order, and the Marine Corps moved ahead. The Army, as Author Nichols says, was "the mule of the military team." Korea changed that; there simply were not enough white replacements, and field commanders were forced to fill in with Negroes. Once away from his Jim Crow unit, the Negro was a different soldier. How different became readily apparent in the results of Project Clear, an Army survey of the new racial policy. Items: P: On the test of standing up to mass attack, where Negro soldiers had had a reputation for taking to their heels, 85% of the officers interviewed in Korea said that Negroes in mixed units performed "about the same" as whites.

P:In care of weapons, a phase of soldiering in which the Negro had been charged with laxity, 90% of the officers said "integrated" Negroes were on a par with whites.

Nichols found only about 10,000 persons still serving in the Army's all-Negro units, with some 190,000 absorbed in regular outfits. The Air Force, with about 66,000 Negroes, has no segregated groups. Neither has the Marine Corps. Only the Navy trails in the wake: its stewards' branch (ships' servants) has one white enlisted man and more than 11,000 Negroes, about 48% of the service's Negroes. Instead of breaking up the stewards' branch, the Navy is recruiting Filipinos to dilute the Negro concentration of the stewards, a solution that is not going to solve anything.

Even Chaplains & Psychiatrists. How does the policy of nonsegregation work in human terms? To find out, Nichols visited military and naval bases, most of them in the South. There are, he learned, virtually no race incidents at posts. Swimming pools, athletics, post exchanges, movies--and work--are shared (although Negroes are generally "discouraged" from attending white dances). At Camp Lejeune, N.C., Nichols saw a white Marine waiter approach a billiards-playing Negro sergeant and ask, in a respectful Southern drawl: "May I get you something, sir?" A Negro chaplain offhandedly told Nichols: "I'm just another chaplain; fellows come to see me regardless of race." A Negro Air Force psychiatrist said he had successfully treated several difficult mental cases involving the wives of white officers and men; it was a matter of routine. On the bases, the wives of Negroes and white men chatted casually over their clotheslines. An Army post commander described the situation simply: "There are no problems."

But there is a problem: the civilian world now lags far behind the military. Said an Army brigadier general: "What worries me is that a military career for a Negro is about the top he can get." A Negro G.I. said it in a different way: the Negro "begins to see the fellows getting along in the Army and begins to say to himself, it would be so goddam nice if it could be like that all over."

Although Jim Crow still applies in most Southern communities, even there the breakthrough is felt. Pentagon files tell of Southern restaurants being opened to Negro soldiers in uniform, and of white Southern families inviting Negro servicemen home to dinner or for a weekend. A significant then-n.-now example of the social change: on Aug. 13, 1906, Negro soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment rode into Brownsville, Texas, a hotbed of racial disorder, shooting into homes where people lay sleeping, killing a bartender, wounding a policeman. Brownsville did not forget quickly--but last year the First Presbyterian Church of Brownsville invited Negroes from a nearby air base to attend any or all of its services, right along with whites.

Early last year, an Army general saw the whole problem clearly. Said he of Negroes: "In civilian life, they are bunched. They've got to be unbundled." In 1954, the unbunching was well under way.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.