Chapter 14: (p. 343) (3)

The Fahy Committee won from the services a commitment to equal treatment and opportunity and a practical program to achieve that end. Yet even with this victory and the strong support of many senior military officials, the possibility that determined foes of integration might erect roadblocks or that simple bureaucratic inertia would delay progress could not be discounted. There was, for example, nothing in the postwar practices of the Marine Corps, even the temporary integration of its few black recruits during basic training, that hinted at any long-range intention of adopting the Navy's integration program. And the fate of one of the committee's major recommendations, that all the services adopt equal enlistment standards, had yet to be decided. The acceptance of this recommendation hinged on the results of a Defense Department study to determine the jobs in each service that could be filled by men in the lowest mental classification category acceptable to all three services. Although the Navy and the Air Force had agreed to reexamine the matter, they had consistently opposed the application of enlistment parity in the past, and the Secretary of Defense's Personnel Policy Board had indorsed their position. Secretary Forrestal, himself, had rejected the concept, and there was nothing in the record to suggest that his successor would do otherwise. Yet the parity of enlistment standards was a vital part of the committee's argument for the abolition of the Army's racial quota. If enlistment standards were not equalized, especially in a period when the Army was turning to Selective Service for much of its manpower, the number of men in the Army's categories IV and V was bound to increase, and that increase would provide strong justification for reviving the racial quota. The Army staff was aware, if the public was not, that a resurrected quota was possible, for the President had given the Secretary of the Army authority to take such action if there was "a disproportionate balance of racial strengths."[14-142]

[Footnote 14-142: Ltr, SA to President, 1 Mar 50, Fahy
Papers, Truman Library.]

The Army's concern with disproportionate balance was always linked to a concern with the influx of men, mostly black, who scored poorly on the classification tests. The problem, the Army repeatedly claimed, was not the quantity of black troops but their quality. Yet at the time the Army agreed to the committee's demand to drop the quota, some 40 percent of all black soldiers scored below eighty. These men could rarely profit from the Army's agreement to integrate all specialist training and assignments. The committee, aware of the problem, had strongly urged the Army to refuse reenlistment, with few exceptions, to anyone scoring below eighty. On 11 May 1950 Fahy reminded Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., that despite the Army's promise to eliminate its low scorers it continued to reenlist men scoring (p. 377) less than seventy.[14-143] But by July even the test score for first-time enlistment into the Army had declined to seventy because men were needed for the Korean War. The law required that whenever Selective Service began drafting men the Army would automatically lower its enlistment standards to seventy. Thus, despite the committee's recommendations, the concentration of low-scoring Negroes in the lower grades continued to increase, creating an even greater pool of men incapable of assignment to the schools and specialties open without regard to race.

[Footnote 14-143: Memo, Fahy for SA, 11 May 50, Fahy
Papers, Truman Library. Frank Pace, an Arkansas
lawyer and former Assistant Director of the Bureau
of the Budget, succeeded Gordon Gray as Secretary
of the Army on 12 April 1950.]

Even the Army's promise to enlarge gradually the number of specialties open to Negroes was not carried out expeditiously. By July 1950, the last month of the Fahy Committee's life, the Army had added only seven more specialties with openings for Negroes to the list of forty published seven months before at the time of its agreement with the committee. In a pessimistic mood, Kenworthy confessed to Judge (p. 378) Fahy[14-144] that "so long as additions are not progressively made to the critical list of MOS in which Negroes can serve, and so long as segregated units continue to be the rule, all MOS and schools can not be said to be open to Negroes because Negro units do not have calls for many of the advanced MOS." Kenworthy was also disturbed because the Army had disbanded the staff agency created to monitor the new policies and make future recommendations and had transferred both its two members to other duties. In the light of progress registered in the half year since the Army had adopted the committee's proposal, Kenworthy concluded that "the Army intends to do as little as possible towards implementing the policy which it adopted and published."[14-145]

[Footnote 14-144: President Truman appointed Charles
Fahy to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia on 15 October 1949. Fahy did
not assume his judicial duties, however, until 15
December after concluding his responsibilities as a
member of the American delegation to the United
Nations General Assembly.]

[Footnote 14-145: Memo, Kenworthy for Fahy, 25 Jul 50,
Fahy Papers, Truman Library. In the memorandum the
number of additional specialties is erroneously
given as six; see DCSPER Summary Sheet, 23 Apr 50,
sub: List of Critical Specialties Referred to in SR
600-629-1, G-1 291.2 (25 Oct 49).]

Roy Davenport later suggested that such pessimism was ill-founded. Other factors were at work within the Army in 1950, particularly after the outbreak of war in Korea.[14-146] Davenport alluded principally to the integration of basic training centers and the assignment of greater numbers of black inductees to combat specialties--developments that were pushing the Army ahead of the integration timetable envisioned by committee members and making concern over black eligibility for an increased number of occupation categories less important.

[Footnote 14-146: Ltr, Davenport to OSD Historian, 31
Aug 76, copy in CMH. For a discussion of these
war-related factors, see Chapters 14 and 17.]

The Fahy Committee has been given full credit for proving that segregation could not be defended on grounds of military efficiency, thereby laying the foundation for the integration of the Army. But perhaps in the long run the group's idealism proved to be equally important. The committee never lost sight of the moral implications of the services' racial policies. Concern for the rightness and wrongness of things is readily apparent in all its deliberations, and in the end the committee would invoke the words of Saint Paul to the Philippians to remind men who perhaps should have needed no such reminder that they should heed "whatsoever things are true ... whatsoever things are just." What was right and just, the committee concluded, would "strengthen the nation."[14-147]

[Footnote 14-147: _Freedom to Serve_, pp. 66-67.]

The same ethics stood forth in the conclusion of the committee's final report, raising that practical summary of events to the status of an eloquent state paper. The committee reminded the President and its fellow citizens that the status of the individual, "his equal worth in the sight of God, his equal protection under the law, his equal rights and obligations of citizenship and his equal opportunity to make just and constructive use of his endowment--these are the very foundation of the American system of values."[14-148]

[Footnote 14-148: _Ibid._, p. 67.]

To its lasting honor the Fahy Committee succeeded in spelling out for the nation's military leaders how these principles, these "high standards of democracy" as President Truman called them in his order, must be applied in the services.