Truman's unpopular but very right decision

The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell†was a great achievement, another major step in America’s never-ending, but often frustrated, pursuit of liberty and justice for all, but not even this law to end discrimination against gays in the military approaches Harry Truman’s courageous order ending racial segregation in the armed forces more than 60 years ago.

President Obama and his congressional majority were dealing with a highly supportive public — about 75 percent — in repealing the anti-gay law. Truman ordered the integration of the armed forces two weeks after an unenthusiastic Democratic Party nominated him for president and 100 days before the November election his opponent was virtually guaranteed to win. At about the same time, a Gallup Poll reported just 13 percent of the public supported the proposition that “Negro and white troops live and work together.â€

But as Truman asked in his diary, “How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?â€

The border-state grandson of a Confederate soldier who bore many of the prejudices of his generation and region, Truman was not expected to be a civil rights president. But soon after becoming president, he told the Urban League that the government was obliged “to see that the civil rights of every citizen are fully and equally protected.â€

He was reacting to an awful incident in Aiken, Ga., where two recently discharged soldiers and their wives were dragged from their car by a white mob and shot to death. There were 60 bullets in the four bodies.

Truman’s response was the formation of a commission on civil rights that issued, in 1947, a landmark report, “To Secure These Rights,†which recommended, among many other reforms, an end to segregation in the armed forces. Truman agreed and the following July issued his executive order.

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The high-ranking military’s opposition was nearly unanimous, up to and including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, who thought integration would destroy his Army. Adm. Chester Nimitz, a hero of the Pacific war, said, “Negro officers aboard ship†would constitute a minority that wouldn’t be assimilated and “would inevitably form a source of discord that would be harmful to the service.â€

Yet Truman went ahead. He couldn’t rely on Congress, where much of the opposition came from southern Democrats whose longevity made them powerful, even in the minority. But segregation, unlike “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,†was a tradition, not a law. Truman could act alone but implementation would take years.

A year after Truman issued his executive order, the Marines had only one black officer and only five of the Navy’s 45,000 officers were black. The Army was insisting on maintaining a quota of no more than 10 percent of blacks in its ranks and it didn’t become truly integrated until the Korean War in the early 1950s.

When the war started, blacks were still in support units, serving as stevedores and truck drivers, but when the Chinese came into the war, front line commanders found themselves without enough white replacements and integration accelerated.

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This tends to contradict the view of some generals and admirals and Sen. John McCain that making a social change this radical in time of war would be a disaster. By the end of the Korean War in 1954, 95 percent of the Army was integrated and the military became an integration success story.

From a quota system that allowed only 10 percent of the army to be black when Truman was president, today’s armed forces are 37 percent minority. Of that total, 20 percent are black, 11 percent Hispanic and 6 percent other minorities.

I was drafted into the army in 1956, only eight years after Truman issued his integration order and only two years after it was fully implemented.

My basic training was in Kentucky, where they still maintained “colored and white†drinking fountains in the Louisville Greyhound terminal. But at nearby Fort Knox, the barracks were fully integrated. Two of our platoon sergeants were black and two were white southerners and to us recruits, they were equally proficient tormentors.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.