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From the Civil War through World War II, Negro soldiers were kept in segregated units. Despite individual bravery, their morale and performance were generally low. In World War II there were some outstanding Negro units, but of all the Negroes in uniform (about 1,000.000), 90% were kept in rear-area service outfits. During the Battle of the Bulge, when he urgently needed reinforcements, General Eisenhower put Negro service troops through a quick combat training course, attached them in platoon strength to line companies. The experiment worked: the Negro troops, more or less unsegregated for the first time, made a good combat showing. This experience became an argument for postwar integration policy.
The Air Force was the first to abolish separate units for Negroes. The Army followed. By 1951, in the U.S., Europe and the Far East, Negro soldiers were scattered through the regular units. Today the Army has 200,000 Negro enlisted men (n% of total strength) and nearly 4,000 officers. The Air Force has 70,000 enlisted men (7%) and nearly 1,000 officers. The Navy, lagging behind the others in giving equality to the Negro, has 34,000 enlisted men (a little less than 3%, half of them still in the mess steward's branch) and 65 officers.
In Army camps and Air Force bases across the nation, there have been virtually no "incidents" between white and colored soldiers. The only difficulty has occurred at Southern Army camps, where children of colored officers and enlisted men are still sent to segregated colored schools off the post (the President has recently promised to remedy that situation). In Korea the integration policy has worked wonders with the morale of white as well as Negro troops. Negro officers command white troops without any friction. The matter is no longer even discussed. Says Lieut. Colonel Robert W. Wilson of Washington, D.C., a G-1 officer, and a Negro: "I think about the color problem about once a day: when I shave in the morning."
There are other emancipators at work. Among them:
THE MACHINE. It was fashionable, in the '20s and '30s, particularly among pink-eyed young economists, to say that the machine degraded man. Actually, it has proved a great equalizer. It tests a man coldly and without prejudice: he can either run it or he cannot. North & South, thousands of Negroes are experiencing equality for the first time in their lives—the equality of doing exactly the same work as whites on the assembly line.
THE COURTS. For years, liberals have argued that only new, drastic and specific legislation, i.e., FEPC, would do the Negroes any good. Yet in the past decade, the Negro has made tremendous progress not, in the main, through new legislation, but through a long series of court decisions interpreting the basic law of the land, the Constitution. These rulings, it was usually warned, were "out of step" with popular sentiment and would provoke trouble; yet, accepted virtually without protest, they have quietly accomplished a variety of things, from forcing Southern state universities to