Military Service, A. Philip Randolph, and the Fight for Civil and Economic Freedom

Abstract

The Supreme Court's landmark 2023 decision reversing decades of affirmative action policy included a surprising exception: military academies. This contemporary debate is merely the latest event in the military's long history as an important site of civil rights activism and citizenship formation. In this article, we build on existing scholarship and emphasize that efforts led by A. Philip Randolph to desegregate the military and civil service during the 1940s and 1950s have been critical for securing more equal economic fortunes for African Americans. Relying on extensive archival and primary evidence, this article shows that mass mobilization against racial discrimination, culminating with the “civil rights revolution” of the 1960s, began with Randolph's efforts to pressure Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to reform the public sector, underscoring the constructive but contentious alliance civil rights groups forged with the modern presidency. We connect these historical and institutional developments to the contemporary military, analyzing its ongoing efforts to achieve racial equality and the economic and social consequences of these initiatives. As the Vietnam War dramatically revealed, the American state has exacted a heavy price from African Americans who have served their country; however, we contend that the military and other forms of national service have also been a critical terrain in America's unsteady march toward a society that fulfills its promise of equality for all.

military, civil rights, economic freedom, A. Philip Randolph, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman

In the summer of 2023, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision reversing decades of established precedent regarding affirmative action policies in institutions of higher education. The Court's majority, in an opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the other five conservatives on the bench, ruled that university and college policies giving students an advantage in the admissions process based on their race were unconstitutional violations of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. This sharp reversal of precedent and the stark divisions between the liberal and conservative justices were expected. However, the inclusion of an inconspicuous footnote in Roberts’ opinion, exempting military academies from the sweeping opinion, has garnered significant attention:

No military academy is a party to these cases … and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.¹

Roberts did not clarify what those “distinct interests” of the military academy might be. But he did reference an amicus brief submitted to the Court in the fall of 2022, signed by thirty-five former leaders of the armed services, which warned that prohibiting the use of “modest, race-conscious admissions policies” would “impair the military's ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness.”² Granting the military special consideration was not entirely unprecedented. In the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, military officials filed a similar brief stressing the importance of affirmative action programs for national security and military effectiveness, which factored prominently in the Court's decision to uphold affirmative action programs in higher education. Twenty years later, those same arguments only justified a military carveout in the eyes of the justices.³ Notably, the Court has remained committed to this exception. In February 2024, it declined to consider a specific challenge to military academies’ affirmative action programs in another case brought by the plaintiff in the original suit, Students for Fair Admission.⁴

These recent decisions by the Supreme Court speak to the political, social, and economic significance of the nexus between civil rights and the national service. The Court's granting the military considerable discretion in conducting its own affairs has led, in some cases, to significant abrogation of individual rights and freedoms.⁵ However, this autonomy has also granted presidents the power to implement reforms under the banner of military effectiveness that have advanced the civil rights and economic opportunities of Black soldiers. Indeed, the origin of race-conscious military admissions policies underscores the importance of these programs for promoting equality through public sector employment. These policies were born of the controversies during the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement's protests over Black service members receiving few opportunities for promotion to the officer corps. By the late 1960s, with the civil rights movement excoriating the disproportionate burdens that fell on Black soldiers, frustration over the lack of African American officers boiled over, leading to racial tension and violence.

Consequently, recruiting more Black officers became a priority during the 1970s and 1980s. Military leaders responded by adopting race-conscious admission policies at service academies and in Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, establishing the latter programs at historically Black colleges and universities, and requiring minority representation on officer promotion boards.⁶ In addition, the military also created fully funded preparatory schools dedicated to bringing (largely minority) candidates to spend a full school year taking small-group courses and preparing to reapply to military academies with further developed academic credentials. The military has relied heavily on the Army's U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School and similar preparatory schools in the Navy and Air Force to bring more Black candidates into their service academies.⁷ As we document in this article, the success of these different programs indicates that military affirmative action programs, in contrast to their counterparts at private elite colleges, have increased access to military schools, and subsequently military careers, to applicants from much broader racial and economic backgrounds.

In this article, we explore the deep historical roots of these contemporary military policies regarding racial and economic equality. We focus particularly on civil rights activists’ relentless struggles to end discriminatory practices that restricted opportunities for Black soldiers in the 1940s and 1950s—campaigns that eventually established the military as a leading institution in African Americans’ quest for economic freedom. As we explored in our previous research, the foundation for the importance of public sector employment in advancing Black Americans’ economic opportunities was forged in the 1940s and 1950s, when Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, pressured by civil rights activists, issued executive orders to end discrimination within the federal government. These pressure campaigns, led by the extraordinary (and underappreciated) union leader and civil rights activist, A. Philip Randolph, resulted in important, strongly contested presidential initiatives that began to establish racial job equity in the defense industry, civil service, and, most dramatically, the armed services. The pioneering tactics that Randolph and his political allies deployed were necessary to overcome the considerable reluctance they faced from the White House and to forge a fraught but enduring relationship with the modern presidency.⁸

The ideological and strategic significance of military desegregation also sparked important controversy among civil rights organizers, who vigorously debated whether reforming the military should be a leading objective of their mobilization tactics during the 1940s and 1950s. However, activists for racial justice eventually made integration of the armed services a priority. Other scholars have long recognized that civil rights activists’ efforts to reform the Jim Crow military were part of a long history that has made military service a critical dimension of citizenship and subsequently a training ground for civil rights organizing.⁹ This scholarship is part of a broader literature that examines critical civil rights campaigns in the first half of the twentieth century.¹⁰ Building on this scholarship, we argue that Randolph and his allies were also motivated by their view that the military could be a critical source of economic opportunity for Black Americans—an expectation, we show, that has been borne out in subsequent decades. Many scholars underplay the significance of Truman's civil rights legacy; particularly, the important relationship between desegregation of the military and economic opportunity for Black Americans. Even Ronald Krebs, who acknowledges “the significance of reducing racial discrimination in the nation's single-largest employer,” ultimately concludes that the economic benefits of military reform were limited—a “weak signal”—in African Americans’ struggle for full citizenship.¹¹

In contrast, we argue that that Randolph's pioneering pressure politics directed at the White House in the postwar period transformed racial justice activists’ persistent struggle to join civil rights and basic economic freedoms.¹² Given that African Americans’ economic opportunities were diminished in the private sector by the decline of unions and the stubborn tumor of Jim Crow, the desegregation of the military emerged as an especially important objective in their quest for economic freedom. Consequently, as Randolph saw clearly, military service was not a “weak signal” in animating the long struggle for civil rights. With the rise of America's “arsenal of democracy,” military service became an important source for attractive career opportunities for Black soldiers, leading them to volunteer for military service and reenlist more frequently than white soldiers. Moreover, desegregation of the armed services had spillover effects in other important policy arenas, such as education and housing.¹³

In the remainder of this article, we have three objectives. First, we explain how Roosevelt's executive actions to fight discrimination in the defense industry and federal government, which initially had modest policy results, were part of the emerging relationship between social movements and the expanding, executive-centered administrative state. Randolph and his political allies viewed this contentious alliance with the White House as the precursor to a larger campaign to establish racial job equity in the armed services and the civil service.

Second, we show that the organizations and tactics Randolph promoted resulted in strong disagreements among civil rights groups. These disagreements over tactics and objectives caused friction between activists who preferred insider lobbying and those committed to more militant protest; however, the pioneering combination of insider lobbying and direct confrontation that Randolph and his collaborators employed illustrates how effective movements can succeed in a complex political system that is resistant to change: as “formative” movements that can deploy both conventional and contentious strategies.¹⁴

Our final aim is to grapple with the complexity of the relationship between Black soldiers and civil rights. Randolph and his political allies, viewing economic rights as a sine qua non of full citizenship, believed that the modern armed forces might be especially important in enhancing the economic fortunes of African Americans. In the past, Black Americans had experienced exclusion from the military in times of peace and acceptance during times of war. Yet, with the desegregation of the armed forces, African American soldiers were still asked to risk their lives and participate in controversial military actions in order to obtain the benefits of public service. Nevertheless, as we detail in examining the policy consequences that followed in the wake of military desegregation, the armed services have been a critical terrain in America's long journey toward a society that fulfills its promise of equality for all.

World War II and the First Steps Toward Desegregation: 1940–1945

The approach of World War II gave civil rights groups new leverage to influence the White House. Yet, movement leaders debated whether they should support the war, animated by disagreements about what role the United States should play in world affairs that reverberated through the fight to desegregate the military. These debates and conflicts eventually convinced some civil rights leaders that the struggles to end Jim Crow in the defense industry and military required new organizations and strategies, a charge A. Phillip Randolph first took up in mounting the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in the summer of 1941.

Divisions among civil rights leaders first surfaced at the 1940 biennial meeting of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP)—the first all-Black labor union, which Randolph founded in 1925—where members of the organization, as well as members of other civil rights groups, considered two primary questions: how to use the war to advance racial equality and how to overcome industrial barriers, within unions and companies, to ensure that Black workers would benefit from wartime industrial growth. The BSCP passed a controversial resolution opposing the war, warning that America's entrance in the world conflict would lead to “some form of dictatorship in this country and the possible emergence of fascism, which would result in the militarism of the nation and the repression of minority groups and labor.”¹⁵ With this resolution, the BSCP joined many left-leaning unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in opposing U.S. involvement in the war. John Lewis, a CIO leader and president of the United Mine Workers of America, argued that a wartime economic model would “inevitably strengthen the domestic enemies of the labor movement and reduce the CIO's power to advance a progressive social agenda at home.”¹⁶

The BSCP's decision to oppose U.S. involvement in the war attracted significant attention. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, speaking at the 1940 BSCP convention, cautioned the union against the resolution, urging activists to recognize that fighting for democracy in the world would arouse a freedom struggle at home. “[E]very one of us,” she insisted, “has an obligation to try in every way we can to maintain and improve our democratic form of government here.”¹⁷ With the attack on Pearl Harbor a year later, Randolph's position shifted. For all America's flaws, he had come to believe that African Americans would be far worse off living under totalitarian Japan, Nazi Germany, or fascist Italy. In an essay for the Black Worker, Randolph wrote that African Americans “must fight [for] the cause of victory for the United States…” However, along with this support for the war, civil rights activists had the “obligation, responsibility and task…to fight with all their might for their constitutional democratic rights and freedom in America.” Anticipating that the development of America's arsenal of democracy would be especially important for enhancing the economic fortunes of African Americans, Randolph emphasized that economic freedom, the “equality of opportunity to work,” as well as “full and equal integration and participation in the army, navy, air corps, and marines,” was a critical element of the “full statute of constitutional citizenship.”¹⁸

Randolph and other civil rights leaders understood from the bitter experiences of Black soldiers in World War I that efforts to free the defense industry and military from the grip of Jim Crow would require an artful combination of lobbying and direct action. Indeed, efforts to end desegregation in the military began before World War II. In 1940, civil rights activists pressured Congress to add provisos prohibiting discrimination in two important pieces of legislation: the Selective Service Act and a military defense training appropriation law. However, the vague wording of both amendments, coupled with the fact that both were largely ignored by military leadership, weakened their impact.¹⁹ Without adequate enforcement and backing from the president, legislative nondiscrimination clauses would mean little.

Determined to gain the support of the White House in enforcing desegregation of the defense department and armed services, Randolph, Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Arnold Hill of the National Urban League (NUL) met with President Roosevelt and two of his military advisers (Assistant Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox) on 27 September 1940. The three civil rights leaders left the meeting feeling optimistic that they had persuaded Roosevelt to act; however, military officials soon squelched their hopefulness. It was not the time, they argued, to experiment with changes that might jeopardize morale. Adding insult to injury, the White House announced on October 9 that it remained committed to military segregation, going so far as to imply that the civil rights leaders who were part of the 27 September meeting had agreed to this policy. Randolph, White, and Hill vehemently denied they had agreed to such a policy, denouncing it in a statement that accused the president at such a perilous time in the country's history of surrendering “completely to the enemies of democracy who would destroy national unity.”²⁰

A mass protest meeting in Harlem attended by thousands of African Americans, combined with strong support from liberal white journalists in the press, coming just weeks before the 1940 election, sent the White House into retreat. Roosevelt conceded that the plan to maintain a segregated military “had not received the blessing of White, Randolph, and Hill”; furthermore, he took executive action to appease the fierce protest that his military segregation policy set off. The president promoted U.S. Army Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first African American to achieve the rank of general; and he also appointed William Hastie, dean of the Howard University Law School and formerly the first Black appointed to the federal bench, to be Civilian Adviser to the Secretary of War.²¹

Although these appointments were largely symbolic, Walter White and other pragmatic civil rights leaders praised the president's action. Groups like the NAACP and the National Urban League (NUL) continued to pursue an accommodationist strategy, launching a Double Victory campaign, which sought to end segregation against African Americans while also supporting the war effort, designed to ensure that Black support for the fight against fascism would help shift white attitudes about the “caste system” after the war. Both Lester Granger of the NUL and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP argued that channeling energy into the Double Victory campaign and pushing against discrimination in conscription was more strategic than a full-out assault on segregation.²²

Randolph settled on a different course. Roosevelt's pro forma response to civil rights leaders’ accommodationist tactics was a sign that more militant tactics were necessary. To meet this challenge, Randolph formed the MOWM, which set aside the BSCP's initial opposition to the war but deployed methods that were far more confrontational than the more conservative, accommodationist strategy favored by the NUL and NAACP. In January 1942, at one of the earliest meetings of the MOWM, the members engaged in a lengthy debate over the importance of not signaling “100 percent agreement” with the war effort, given the discriminatory practices of the armed forces and war industries. The group decided not to “go on record with opportunists and other leaders of Negro uplift organizations” but instead to take a more “radical” course demanding a Black member be appointed to FDR's War Labor Board as “prima facie evidence” that Roosevelt was centrally concerned with Black workers’ role in “industrial and economic life.”²³

These deliberations informed the more concentrated pressure tactics and objectives that MOWM directed at the White House. By early 1941, Randolph had begun to discuss plans to mobilize ten thousand African Americans to march on the capital, calling for an end to racial discrimination in the military and defense industries.²⁴ Frustrated by Roosevelt's vague assurances that he would seek incremental reforms, the MOWM threatened mass protest unless the president took more decisive action. Despite the NAACP and NUL's misgivings and disagreements over tactics and strategy, White and Granger decided to join the MOWM's crusade, complementing Randolph's more militant tactics.²⁵ Indeed, White helped persuade Roosevelt that the MOWM could mobilize a mass rally in the nation's capital.

Randolph's pressure tactics deeply troubled Roosevelt. The president was concerned not only about losing support among southern Democrats, hostile to civil rights reform, but also that his acquiescence to Randolph's demands would “stimulate other groups to plan marches on Washington” in the future.²⁶ However, once it became clear that Randolph and his political allies were gaining momentum—the enthusiastic response to Randolph's call for action led him to predict not 10,000, but 100,000 marchers—the president conceded to the demands of the broad civil rights coalition, issuing Executive Order 8802.²⁷ The order established the Fair Employment Practices Committer (FEPC)—the first federal agency formed to combat racial discrimination—and empowered the federal government to oversee efforts to contest discrimination in private employment attached to wartime production.

Although many scholars acknowledge the MOWM and FEPC as episodes in the development of a broader civil rights agenda in the United States, most emphasize the agency's limited impact on Congress, the Democratic Party, the courts, and state governments.²⁸ We agree that there were significant political constraints on the FEPC, yet the creation of the FEPC should not be seen as an isolated reform by a reluctant president in the face of a hostile Congress. Rather, to Randolph and his political allies, it was the entering wedge to challenge discrimination in the public sector, the best hope in their determination to join civil rights and economic freedom.²⁹ When it became clear that efforts to establish a permanent FEPC had been thwarted by conservative opponents in Congress, Randolph opted to keep his focus on the White House and to press Truman to fulfill the remaining mandates of Executive Order 8802 to end discrimination and segregation in the civil service and the military, which Roosevelt adamantly refused to address.³⁰

Truman and the Fight to Desegregate the United States Military: 1948–1954

For reasons that have been well documented—most notably, the mass migration of Black Americans to large northern and western states and the Cold War—President Truman was a more willing partner in pursing racial equality than his predecessor had been. He set the stage for a sweeping set of civil rights reforms on 5 December 1946 with the executive order establishing the President's Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). The new committee was tasked with determining “whether and in what respect current law enforcement measures and the authority and means possessed by Federal, State, and local governments may be strengthened and improved to safeguard the civil rights of the people.”³¹ Among the committee's recommendations were calls for federal action against lynching, responses to voting and transportation discrimination, and the restoration of the recently eliminated FEPC.³²

However, when presenting the PCCR's findings to Congress, Truman conspicuously omitted the committee's condemnation of the Jim Crow military, reflecting the strong opposition from military leaders and the former commander of Allied forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower.³³ This omission confirmed Randolph’s and the MOWM's belief that the need for direct action on the capital still applied: “In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure, through the tactic and strategy of broad, organized, aggressive mass action behind the vital and important issues of the Negro.”³⁴

During the all-consuming Cold War, the PCCR report warned, “equality in the military assumes great importance as a symbol of [democracy].”³⁵ But for Randolph, desegregating the military was more than a symbol. Although Roosevelt's first executive order had provided an avenue toward fair employment in the private sector, Randolph and his political allies believed that ending discrimination in the national service and desegregating the armed forces were essential to secure economic rights for Black Americans. How, Randolph wondered, could the FEPC “criticize job discrimination in private industry if the federal government itself [was] simultaneously discriminating against Negro youth in military installations all over the world.”³⁶ Moreover, with the consolidation of the welfare and national security states during the Roosevelt years, public sector jobs had become a critical source of economic opportunity.

Boycotting the Jim Crow Military

To spearhead the fight against Jim Crow in the armed forces, Randolph created a new organization in November 1947: the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training. He was particularly agitated when a draft law—in deference to strong army opposition to reforming the military—was enacted in early 1948 without any desegregation provision.³⁷ Randolph and Grant Reynolds, the prominent New York Republican who became the co-chair of the committee, requested a meeting with Truman in January of 1948. They hoped to persuade him that the success of his Cold War foreign policy “required the elimination of, rather than the extension of, segregation and discrimination in military training and armed forces.”³⁸ Although their efforts to convince members of Congress to make such a change in draft legislation failed, Randolph and Reynolds hoped the president would make the change through executive action. The White House initially refused to set up a meeting, a sign, Randolph feared, that Truman was not prepared to issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the military.³⁹

Randolph and Reynolds were finally received at the White House on 22 March, but only after David Niles, Truman's liaison with minority groups, assured the president that “the head of the Negro Pullman Porters” was not a “left-winger,” but rather “an important” leader of the Civil Rights Movement who had taken “pretty conservative positions” on the Cold War.⁴⁰ Like Roosevelt, Truman and his advisors wanted to avoid the perception that the president could be pressured by social activists. Niles suggested the meeting be postponed until after the Truman's 2 February message to Congress, in which there “would be some mention of Jim Crow in the military, and these people will not be able to say that the message is the result of their visit.”⁴¹ As mentioned, Truman's otherwise strong defense of civil rights ultimately said nothing about desegregating the military, ensuring a contentious Oval Office session with Randolph and Reynolds. Facing not only resistance from military leaders but also Southern Democrats who threatened to rally around a brewing Dixiecrat revolt, the administration decided to put off taking action against the Jim Crow military.⁴²

During this meeting, the president learned that Randolph's “conservative” anti-communism was joined to an unshakable believe that the elimination of the Jim Crow military was a fundamental right that must be fulfilled without further delay. Randolph told the president how he had learned in a recent trip around the country “that black Americans today are in no mood to shoulder a gun again in defense of this country so long as they are not full-fledged citizens of the country and recognized in the armed services.” Insisting that his call for mass protests was not an idle threat, Randolph emphasized that his observations of unrest in African American communities “was a definite statement …on the mood of the Negroes throughout the nation with respect to the manner in which they were treated in the armed forces. They are insisting upon total abolition of discrimination in the armed services.” Truman took offense at Randolph's demands, resenting the pressure to move further and more quickly on civil rights than he believed was politically prudent.⁴³ Not only did the military brass and Southern Democrats oppose desegregation, surveys showed that white public opinion was also overwhelmingly opposed to military integration.⁴⁴

When Randolph's direct appeals to Truman to remedy the deficiency of the draft law with an executive order failed to persuade the president, he and other civil rights activists maintained a steady drumbeat of public criticism, which resembled their fight to end discrimination in the defense industry under Roosevelt. However, Randolph, recognizing that military service had long been an important frontier for the recalibration of the relationship between civil rights and obligations to the state, prescribed a more militant strategy in challenging the Jim Crow military: civil disobedience. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 31, 1948 Randolph threatened to organize a mass demonstration of civil disobedience by mobilizing young African Americans to resist the draft. Although Randolph made his statement before Congress, his real target was the White House and African Americans who were eligible for the draft. Realizing the publicity potential of a public hearing conducted before the principal congressional military oversight committee, he alerted the widely read columnist Drew Pearson that he would raise the specter of a mass civil disobedience campaign.⁴⁵

For effect, Randolph, who was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's tactics, told the senators that the failure to address the injustices of the Jim Crow military would result in a “mass civil disobedience movement along the lines of the magnificent struggle of the people of India against British imperialism.”⁴⁶ Randolph's testimony so startled the committee that even liberal Senator Wayne Morse, a Republican from Oregon, warned Randolph that such a civil disobedience campaign would lead to charges of treason. Undaunted, Randolph replied that he and other Black Americans were “willing to pay that price.” In an alarm that sounded throughout the country, Morse warned that Randolph's threat was credible. “I don’t think we can minimize the position Randolph took,” he told the press. “He undoubtedly is an influential leader in his race.”⁴⁷

Randolph's influence was tested by the challenges he faced in holding together the variegated movement forged in pressuring Roosevelt to create and support the FEPC. Even Reynolds—Randolph's co-chair in the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training—though expressing sympathy for Randolph's call for civil disobedience, reported that he would continue to lobby the White House and pursue legislation by “constitutional means” rather than join a program of “passive revolt.”⁴⁸ However, both those who supported and those who opposed the civil disobedience tactics Randolph proposed acknowledged that he had accurately described Black resentment against the Jim Crow military. As Lester Granger of the NUL stated at a National Conference on Negro Affairs held at the Pentagon in late April, unless the armed forces were quickly desegregated, “there will be a reaction among our Negro public resulting in irreparable damage to the national welfare.”⁴⁹ Ultimately, accommodationists such as the NUL's Granger, despite their misgivings about threatened boycott, helped confirm the credibility of Randolph's threat to mobilize a draft boycott.

Randolph also formed a tenuous alliance with civil rights activists who believed he was too accommodating to the Truman administration and the military. Led by young pacifists such as Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and its offspring, the Congress on Racial Equality, were broadly opposed to military conscription and considered Randolph's objective of eliminating Jim Crow from the selective service too narrow. However, despite their contempt for the military, the young crusaders shared Randolph's view that eliminating Jim Crow from such an important American institution “would almost certainly have revolutionary effects in many sectors of American life.”⁵⁰ The FOR also shared Randolph's commitment to nonviolent disobedience, having used the tactic in fighting against segregated public transportation in the South. Despite their differences, then, Rustin and Muste, recognizing that Randolph had become a towering figure in the civil rights movement, agreed to join his coalition after his Senate testimony.⁵¹

The more militant and radical FOR activists significantly strengthened the draft boycott movement's presence on the ground. Rustin, who gained valuable organizing experience in the southern “Journey of Reconciliation,” pledged to organize cells across the nation to advise individuals on draft resistance and to provide spiritual, financial, and legal add to resisters.⁵² With the support of the FOR, Randolph organized the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience in late June 1948. He and Rustin, who assumed the position of executive secretary of the League, planned protest marches in major northern cities.⁵³ At public meetings in Harlem, Randolph urged young men to refuse induction into a segregated military.⁵⁴  Newsweek reported that 71 percent of Black college students were sympathetic to Randolph's plan; moreover, on the eve of a special session of Congress, more than thirty draft resisters were arrested.⁵⁵

Randolph's conception of civil disobedience marked a significant development in his position on civil rights protest-a “new repertoire of contention,” which signaled to the Truman White House that civil rights activists were committed to a more militant strategy in their struggle against job discrimination in the federal government.⁵⁶ To pressure Truman to make desegregation of the U.S. military a central theme of the 1948 campaign, Randolph led a march in front of the White House, carrying a sign that read, “If we must die for our country let us die as free men—not as Jim Crow slaves.” Demonstrators distributed buttons inscribed, “Don’t join a Jim Crow Army.” Randolph followed up this protest with a picket line in front of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, which met in mid-July, where he carried a new sign that read, “Prison is better than Jim Crow.”⁵⁷

Randolph's success in bridging the more moderate and militant wings of the movement formed to desegregate the Jim Crow military was rewarded when the NAACP gave reluctant but critical support to the draft boycott. Like Grant Reynolds and Walter Granger, White did not counsel civil disobedience and insisted that African Americans “must willingly share the burdens as well as the benefits of citizenship.” Yet, reprising the mediating role he played pressuring Roosevelt to create the FEPC, White voiced a clear warning to the president that “Mr. Randolph's blunt threat to lead a non-violent campaign of civil disobedience …points up in dramatic fashion the necessity for the United States to muster courage enough to face and solve this problem.” Although the NAACP did not “advise” young men to follow Randolph, it did announce it would give legal aid to those who did.⁵⁸

Randolph's League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience also received support from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. To counteract defections in the 1948 election on the left (where former Vice President Henry Wallace was preparing an independent Progressive Party campaign to challenge Truman's Cold War policy) and the right (where southern bourbons, deeply disaffected by Truman's civil rights program, were hoping to block his nomination), progressive presidential aides counseled a campaign dedicated to securely joining civil rights to Roosevelt's New Deal charter: Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.⁵⁹ Civil rights activists were also supported inside the gates of power by the crusading efforts of Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey and Andrew Biemiller, a former Wisconsin congressman, who, with the support of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, won a much stronger civil rights plank at the convention than the president, facing the threat of a Dixiecrat rebellion, had proposed. Among its commitments was a pledge to guarantee “the right of equal treatment in the service and defense of the nation.”⁶⁰

The combination of outside pressure and insider lobbying that Randolph and his collaborators employed illustrates, we contend, how successful activists operate. During the 1940s and 1950s, civil rights activism emerged as a “formative movement,” which, like the abolitionist movement of the 1860s, had the capacity to combine both grassroots activists capable of considerable societal disruption and movement pragmatists who can exploit these pressures to lobby effectively for enduring reform. This combination encourages presidents to join social movements in tense but productive relationships that bring about enduring change.⁶¹

Truman's Desegregation Orders

Soon after the 1948 Democratic convention, Truman issued two executive orders in the service of civil rights. Executive Order 9981 directly responded to the demands of Randolph, decreeing that “there should be equality of treatment and opportunity in the Armed Services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”⁶² However, the order made no mention of ending segregation, which aroused Randolph's suspicion that it was “deliberately calculated to obscure the issue.” Not until Randolph and Reynolds were assured, on the president's behalf, by Senator J. Howard McGrath, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that it was “unquestionably” the objective of the order, and the seven-man presidential Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity for the Armed Services that would enforce it created, to eliminate segregation in the armed forces did they call off the civil disobedience campaign.⁶³ Truman's other executive order (9980) built on the work started by Roosevelt and the FEPC to uproot discriminatory federal employment. It forbade racial and ethnic discrimination in the federal civil service and established the Fair Employment Board to monitor hiring.⁶⁴ Consequently, though neither order explicitly condemned racial segregation, Truman's executive initiatives established enforcement procedures that made progress on both fronts, especially in ending Jim Crow practices in the military.

Randolph's decision to end the civil disobedience campaign further tested the broad civil rights coalition. Bayard Rustin and other members of the more militant-pacifist wing of the of the civil disobedience league wanted to continue the campaign “until segregation [was] abolished by Congressional action or Executive Order.” Not only did Rustin and his allies fear that Truman's action would prove meaningless without the continuing threat of a boycott, they also wanted to continue the resistance to obtain broader objectives, most notably the elimination of conscription itself. Although sympathetic to his more militant allies’ objectives, Randolph believed that to pursue them would violate his pledge to Truman to end the boycott if the president and the committee he formed promised to end the Jim Crow draft. Without Randolph's support, the radical wing of the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience was marginalized and ultimately disbanded. However, some pacifists, recognizing the importance of the uneasy but potentially formative relationship Randolph had formed with the modern executive, continued to cooperate with him. The Congress on Racial Equality's James Worthy, Jr., agreed to become executive secretary of the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, which was redeployed to monitor Executive Order 9981 and collaborate with the presidential committee in enforcing it.⁶⁵

Although the struggle to reconstruct the armed forces continued for decades, Truman's executive order was a critical step in making the military among the most integrated institutions of American society, thus contributing extensively to economic gains and social mobility for African Americans. Contrary to the unsteady enforcement of the FEPC, the implementation of the executive order calling for the desegregation of the armed forces was resolute. Headed by former Solicitor General Charles Fahy, the Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity for the Armed Services achieved impressive results. It reported directly to Truman, who gave it steadfast support. He appointed what appeared to Randolph to be a “strong body” of five white men and two Black men who had a clear mandate to desegregate all branches of the armed services.⁶⁶

Southern Democrats in Congress, not to mention the military, resisted the White House's program to desegregate the armed services, especially when it intruded directly on life below the Mason-Dixon line. Nevertheless, the president's control over defense and the distinctive hierarchical structure of the military insulated Truman and the Fahy committee from the sort of political pressures that constantly threatened the FEPC. In an early critical case that occurred in the South—where most military installations were located—Black airmen at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama were admitted to a social club and swimming pool that previously were reserved for white soldiers and their families. When white airmen and staff resisted, the base commander forced the issue, insisting that all commanding officers “were directly charged with the responsibility” for carrying out Truman's executive order.⁶⁷

Although progress came swiftly in the Air Force as well as the Navy, the alliance between civil rights activists and the Fahy Committee proved critical in desegregating the Army, which had the largest percentage of Black personnel.⁶⁸ “The Army is not out to make social reform,” General Omar Bradley, the newly appointed chief of staff, insisted. Bradley was particularly adamant that his service should maintain its 10 percent quota on Black enlistments. The FEPC had criticized this quota system, arguing it imposed a racial limitation, which the Army brass admitted was designed to prevent “excessive numbers of Negroes in the Army.”⁶⁹ When Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson appeared to compromise in the face of the Army's recalcitrance, civil rights advocates, who had generally exhibited patience with the Fahy Committee as it struggled to get the Army's cooperation, raised a storm of protest.

Randolph and other leaders sent urgent telegrams to the White House, while their allies in the Americans for Democratic Action publicly denounced Secretary Johnson's “sellout on Jim Crow in the army.” The Amsterdam News, a widely read Black newspaper, viewed the Army's resistance as an “insult” to fifteen million Black Americans and “insubordination” to the president.⁷⁰ When Secretary Johnson spoke in New York City to the local lawyers’ association, reporting on successful efforts to unify the different services of the armed forces, Randolph's Committee Against Jim Crow in the Military Services and Training picketed outside, denouncing Johnson for his failure to end segregation in the Army. The demonstration was widely publicized by the Chicago Defender, the most prominent Black newspaper, which drew attention to the story with an above-the-fold banner headline.⁷¹

The Army, facing pressure from both civil rights organizations and the Fahy committee, eventually agreed to an integration plan, including ending the 10 percent quota. The outbreak of the Korean War put additional pressure on the Army brass to implement the integration order. The Army had 90 percent integration by the time the Korean War ended in August 1953, with only ninety-six Black units remaining. A year later, the Army reported that all units were integrated, except for a few small detachments that were still undergoing reform. In part, the Army's resistance was weakened by the success of the integration of the Air Force and Navy, which stripped the Army of its defense that desegregation would hurt service morale and arouse racial tension that would weaken national security. Indeed, army commanders of Korean troops found that integrating units increased the fighting effectiveness of their divisions. No less important, however, was the work of Black activists, who kept unrelenting pressure on the Secretary of Defense and Army officers to comply with President Truman's executive order.⁷²

Policy Legacies: 1950s to the Present

Dismantling Jim Crow in the military, Randolph stressed, was a critical step in bestowing full citizenship on Black Americans; moreover, it served his commitment to join civil rights and economic opportunity. By 1964, all four branches of the military had become a major avenue of career mobility for many Black men, evidenced by the overrepresentation of African Americans at the junior noncommissioned officer levels. Notably, Black soldiers were approximately twice as likely as white servicemen to reenlist. Indeed, about half of all Black servicemen chose to remain in the armed forces for at least a second term.⁷³

As the sociologist Charles Moskos, Jr., wrote, significant changes in the composition of noncommissioned officers’ core as result of higher Black enlistment “would reflect not only the “pull’ of the appeals offered by a racially egalitarian institution, but also the “push” generated by the plight of the Negro in the American economy.” It is not surprising that 93 percent of southern Black soldiers found the military to be more racially egalitarian than civilian life; however, 75 percent of northern Black soldiers also saw the desegregated military as more egalitarian than their home region. In less than two decades, Moskos concludes, the military had “leapt into the forefront of racial equality.”⁷⁴

As Randolph and his political allies hoped, the desegregation of the military also spilled over to other areas of civil rights contestation. For example, the Army's efforts to end Jim Crow in the military included progress to desegregate schools in the South for the children of military personnel. Progress was slow, but civil rights activists were pleasantly surprised when the elementary school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, opened in the fall of 1951 on an integrated basis and included a Black member of the faculty. “This army post has the distinction of operating the South's first unsegregated elementary schools,” rejoiced the Chicago Defender. “What's more it's working out beautifully with no incidents!”⁷⁵

Southern Democrats, unhappy with the integration of schools at Fort Bragg and three other army schools, managed to get a bill through Congress requiring the Commissioner of Education to operate military schools in conformance with the laws of the state in which the federal property was located. The bill moved rapidly through Congress, without any organized resistance; remarkably, liberals in the Senate permitted its passage with a simple voice vote. Perhaps they had been fooled by the sponsors’ claim that the purpose of the bill was to authorize federal construction, maintenance, and operation of elementary and secondary schools where national defense activities had put a burden on the local taxpayers. President Truman, however, having developed an uneasy but formative relationship with civil rights leaders, was not persuaded by these arguments and pocket vetoed the bill. The “basic purpose” of the legislation was good, he told the press. However, echoing the Chicago Defender's report on the success of the integrated school at Fort Bragg, he argued that the bill “would constitute a backward step in the efforts of the federal government to extend equal rights and opportunities to all our people.”⁷⁶ Truman's veto also anticipated the amicus curiae brief his administration would submit in support of desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education.⁷⁷

Military installations also became important sites of progress that wielded their economic and political influence to advance further desegregation in their communities. Beyond the progress made toward education desegregation at military bases, a study of installations in California and the District of Columbia found that a program instituted in the late 1960s resulted in a 30 percent increase in access to privately owned off-base housing to servicemembers of all races after commanders were instructed to limit referral to prospective military tenants of landlords who did not allow minorities to rent their properties.⁷⁸

Other scholars have demonstrated that federal-level directives to address discrimination in off-base housing still faced significant challenges—both from commanding officers and resistance in local communities, especially in the South.⁷⁹ But by the 1980s, the tide had turned. Although the weak enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act yielded disappointing results in the private market, the Nondiscriminatory Housing for Military Personnel program, also launched in the late 1960s, buttressed by the persistent and vigorous implementation of a hierarchical and autonomous institution, eventually worked. Since the mid-1990s, the most racially integrated communities in America are those with large military instillations, including Fayetteville (Fort Bragg) and Jacksonville (Camp Lejeune) in North Carolina; Killeen (Fort Hood) in Texas; and Lawton (Fort Sill) in Oklahoma.⁸⁰

Despite progress across these various policy arenas, the constriction of the public sector brought on by conservative policymakers in the final decades of the twentieth century has led to significant backsliding. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Republican administrations rolled back government programs on civil rights and simultaneously slowed the growth of overall government employment by 40 percent, causing wage inequality to creep back up. Black men earned only 74 percent of their white counterparts’ wages in 1990, compared with 82 percent in 1980.⁸¹ Black military enlistment also dropped. In the early 1980s, there were twice as many African Americans signing up for military service as white individuals; by the early 1990s, African Americans no longer enlisted at a greater rate than did whites.⁸² Moreover, the Department of Defense has downsized armed services personnel considerably since the end of the Cold War, limiting Black opportunity through this venue.⁸³

Nevertheless, the armed services still represent an important alternative for Black Americans who have found it increasingly difficult to gain access to and benefit from higher education since the Great Recession.⁸⁴ Not coincidently, Black enlistments have trended back up over the past two decades. Indeed, the active-duty percentage of Black soldiers has remained higher than the percentage of Black Americans in the U.S. population since 2002, demonstrating the continued legacy and enduring benefits of military service for Black citizens.⁸⁵ Though existing research has not systematically examined why soldiers pursue military careers, interviews and anecdotal evidence illuminate some important factors in this choice. Major Sean Brandon, a career Army officer and member of a military family, noted how Black soldiers who benefitted from the desegregation of the military “paved the way for people like me. And now, fast forward, as you go further down the timeline, it went from gaining acceptance and citizenship to providing a better way of life. And that's where my father and my aunt come in. The military became a way to gain the American Dream.”⁸⁶

Reports on work satisfaction reinforce such stories. As summarized in Table 1, Black servicemembers had the highest amount of satisfaction of any group, with 92 percent saying they were very satisfied or moderately satisfied with their job. Notably, they were 11 percent more satisfied than their Black nonmilitary counterparts. White military members, on the other hand, were 5 percent less satisfied with their work than their white nonmilitary counterparts, demonstrating the distinct racial experiences of Black and white citizens in the public and private sectors.

Table 1.

Work Satisfaction

Civilians		Military
Black	White	Black	White
81%	87%	92%	82%
n = 6,841	n = 39,290	n = 61	n = 298

Source: 2022 General Social Survey.

Note: “Military” indicates active-duty members coded as those indicating current occupation or industry as military, enlisted military, active-duty military, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, or U.S. Armed Forces. Veterans are included as civilians.

The affirmative action programs mounted by military academies further enhance the appeal of careers in the military, increasing Black soldiers’ opportunity to serve in the officer corps. In sharp contrast to the Vietnam era, when minority officers were almost nonexistent, by fiscal year 2020, African Americans composed approximately 9 percent of the officer corps. This progress is impressive; however, as the military amicus brief in the recent affirmative action case acknowledges, it should not be overstated: Black servicemembers account for roughly 19 percent of enlistees; moreover, they are particularly underrepresented in the Marine (5.7 percent) and Air Force (6.3 percent) officer corps.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, race-conscious programs like the military academies preparatory schools promise future progress, possibly more so than their counterparts in private universities. Greater than 40 percent of the approximately 240 would-be cadets who attend West Point's preparatory school (i.e., the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School) every year are Black, and many come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. These programs have enabled the military academies to build a more racially and economically diverse student body than most other selective schools. Black cadets, for example, make up about 15 percent of the West Point student body (double the percentage of most Ivy League colleges) and graduate at a similar rate as white cadets. Moreover, the military's affirmative action programs disproportionately benefit poor and working-class students of color; by contrast, at institutions like Harvard, just 3 percent of all students come from the bottom 20 percent of the income scale, and almost three-quarters of Black students are from the top fifth of the Black population's income bracket.⁸⁸ In short, these programs have provided more effective pathways to successful careers for minority candidates than private higher education has, especially those from poor and working-class backgrounds.

Military affirmative action programs also provide a critical avenue toward civil service careers for many African American veterans. Their veteran status supplements exams scores and provides other advantages in the hiring process. In both public and private sectors, former service members might earn preferential treatment if the veteran served in a war or during specific conflict periods, has a service-related disability, or was awarded honors such as a Purple Heart.⁸⁹ As a result of these policies, data as recent as 2021 show African American veterans are overrepresented in federal civil service positions, which provide higher wages, as well as better benefits and greater job security, than most positions available to Black workers in the private sector.⁹⁰

As Adolph Reed, Jr., has remarked, affirmative action as practiced in most sectors—celebrating the vaguely defined objective of “diversity”—is emblematic of the rupture between civil and economic rights during the late 1960s; as such, it is “not equipped to address broader economic inequality, which has steadily intensified throughout American society since the 1970s across race, gender, and sexual orientation.”⁹¹ Reed's apt characterization of the smokescreen affirmative action programs can provide in many sectors does not bear out in the case of the military. The trajectory of relative success of the armed forces’ affirmative action programs underscores how the military—a hierarchical institution once reviled by civil rights activists—has been transformed into the most successfully integrated institution in the country and a crucial grounds for forging civil and economic rights.⁹²

Conclusion: Opportunity and Sacrifice

The history of the desegregated military is an inspiring yet poignant tale of reciprocal responsibility. On the one hand, the armed forces have served as an important vehicle of economic opportunity for Black men and, increasingly, Black women.⁹³ Compared with their civilian counterparts, Black servicemembers fare much better on a number of economic metrics, including household income, family wealth, and home ownership rates.⁹⁴ This has led many African Americans to see enlisting in the military as one of the most promising routes to broader economic opportunities. On the other hand, opting for this path toward economic and financial stability through military service also requires extraordinary risk and sacrifice, particularly in a modern state of seemingly perpetual war. This uneasy combination of opportunity and sacrifice came into full view during the Vietnam War, the first war in which all branches of the military were fully integrated, when African American soldiers lost their lives at disproportionately high rates, particularly in the early phase of the war.⁹⁵ Sixty-four percent of all eligible African Americans were drafted, compared with thirty-one percent of eligible white men—a fact that embittered many civil rights leaders.⁹⁶

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, speech at the Riverside Church in New York City condemning the Vietnam War, which he delivered in April 1967, powerfully expressed this tension. While some more moderate leaders criticized King for taking a stand on an issue they saw as wholly disconnected from the civil rights struggle, he drew striking parallels between African Americans and Vietnamese people and bitterly stated the tragic consequences of the war for economic freedom: “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program….Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.”⁹⁷

King's opposition to the Vietnam War marked a departure from past periods of bellicosity when most social movement leaders tended to view wars as openings for seeking justice at home. However, his iconic speech spoke to recurring themes and tensions that had been the undercurrent of several decades of wartime civil rights organizing. In his contribution to Rayford Logan's 1944 volume What the Negro Wants, Randolph, though he supported the struggle against Japanese imperialism, German Nazis, and Italian fascists, penned an article lamenting that World War II was not a war for freedom and democracy, but rather stood as a “war to maintain the old imperialist systems.” Randolph called for action to make World War II “a People's Revolution—a Revolution whose dynamism against Axis tyranny will be greater and more powerful because it will possess the fighting faith and crusading confidence of the masses of all colors and races.”⁹⁸

As both King and Randolph's statements reflect, the wars of the twentieth century, which transformed the United States into a world power, presented unique and complex challenges for those advancing the cause of racial equality—the effects and consequences that are still being considered to this day. Military employment and veterans’ programs provide a path toward good jobs and federal benefits, yet the price for such rewards is high.⁹⁹ The War on Terror, which required soldiers to serve in controversial and polarizing theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq, testified to this vexing dilemma. Black soldiers did not disproportionately bear the burden in the War on Terror, as they did in Vietnam. In fact, their casualty rate was slightly less than that of their white counterparts. Significantly, this discrepancy related to the economic considerations that informed Black soldiers enlistment. Although Blacks sign up in greater numbers, they cluster in noncombat units whose training in mechanics, electronics, and logistics translates well into civilian careers upon leaving uniform.¹⁰⁰

Even one of the most impressive civil rights initiatives, the preparatory programs to make admissions to the prestigious military academies more inclusive—one that, for now, has been an exception to the Roberts Court's assault on affirmative action programs—represents a difficult balance between opportunity and sacrifice. Privileging race-based admissions policies at military academics appears to invite minority students to pursue an education and career in the armed forces that demands onerous reciprocal responsibilities. Military academies require a 5-year commitment after graduation, which may put cadets at a disadvantage should they ultimately desire a career in the private sector or the civil service. There also is evidence that the military's hierarchical structure has the defects of its own virtues. For example, seeking legal remedies against racist practices in a top-down institution, granted considerable deference by the judiciary, may be more burdensome than those available to civilians.¹⁰¹ In short, the important role the military has played in the quest for citizenship and economic freedom in the United States sheds light on how the national service factors in to America's long march toward a society that fulfills its promise of equality for all and, at the same time, emphasizes the heavy price the American state has exacted from Black Americans.

Footnotes

1

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was one of two affirmative action cases the Supreme Court considered during the 2022–2023 term, the other involving the University of North Carolina, a public institution. See Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181, footnote 4, p. 29, accessed 30 June 2023, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf.

2

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard footnote 4, p. 29. See also p. 3 of the Amicus Brief submitted by Adm. Charles S. Abbot et al., accessed 30 June 2023, https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232531/20220801183329801_20-1199percent20and%2021-707_Brief%20of%20Amici%20Curiae%20Former%20Military%20Leaders.pdf.

3

The majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), authored by moderate and often-swing justice Sandra Day O’Connor, includes five separate references to the “Becton brief,” authored by 29 military officials (908–909). Steven B. Lichtman, “The Justices and the Generals: A Critical Examination of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Tradition of Deference to the Military, 1918–2004,” Maryland Law Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 907–66.

4

Amy Howe, “Justices Turn Away West Point Admissions Challenge,” SCOTUSblog, 2 February 2024, accessed 23 February 2024, https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/justices-turn-away-west-point-admissions-challenge/.

5

One of the Court’s earliest articulations of military deference was in Burns v. Wilson 346 U.S. 137 (1953), which confirmed a rule that the scope of habeas corpus was narrower in military cases than when a prisoner was in civil custody. In the 1980s, the Court handed down a handful of decisions upholding this principle of military deference, even in cases involving First Amendment and other individual rights violations. In Rotsker v. Goldberg 453 U.S. 57 (1981), the court rejected a Fifth Amendment objection to the draft exemption for women. In Goldman v. Weinberger 475 U.S. 503(1986), the Court similarly upheld an Air Force policy that precluded the wearing of yarmulkes against a religious liberty claim. Finally, in Chappell v. Wallace 462 U.S. 296 (1983), the Court rejected claims from Black naval officers that their race had been taken into account in disciplinary proceedings. Lichtman, “The Justices and the Generals,” 915, 917–18, 923–24, and 928–29.

6

John Sibley Butler, “Affirmative Action in the Military,” Annals 523, September 1992, accessed 30 June 2023, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1047591?seq=1; Robert Knowles, “The Intertwined Fates of Affirmative Action and the Military,” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 45, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 1027–83, accessed 30 June 2023, https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1481&context=luclj.

7

For an introduction to the military academies’ affirmative action programs, see Will Norris, “How the Military Can Save Affirmative Action,” Washington Monthly, 18 July 2023.

8

Sidney Milkis and Katherine Rader, “The March on Washington Movement, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the Long Quest for Racial Justice,” Studies in American Political Development 38, no. 1 (April 2024): 16–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X23000044.

9

Julie Novkov, discussion with Julie Novkov about forthcoming book Sacrifice and Civic Membership, 1 April 2021; Jack D. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History (New York: Praeger, 1974); Richard Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten’ Years of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History 55, no. 1 (June 1968): 90–106; Steven White, World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South. Illustrated edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

10

For example, see Megan Ming Francis, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Shamira Gelbman, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021); Anthony S. Chen, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Risa Lauren Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

11

Ronald R. Krebs, Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship. 1st ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 177.

12

On the relationship between the modern presidency and social movements, see Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor, Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

13

William J. Collins, “African-American Economic Mobility in the 1940s: A Portrait from the Palmer Survey,” The Journal of Economic History 60, no. 3 (2000): 756–81.

14

Milkis and Tichenor, Rivalry and Reform, chap. 2.

15

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, “Biennial Conference and 15th Anniversary Celebration of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” meeting transcript, September 1940, Box 2, Folder 8, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY, 1940: 140.

16

Lewis’s position on the war and his attempts to break the uneasy alliance with FDR (he backed Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, in the 1940 election) resulted in a “spectacular failure.” The majority of the CIO remained supportive of Roosevelt’s plan to build an “arsenal of democracy.” Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 26–43.

17

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, “Biennial Conference and 15th Anniversary Celebration,” 89.

18

Andrew E. Kersten and David Lucander, eds, “The Negro and the War,” in For Jobs and Freedom: Selected Speeches and Writings of A. Philip Randolph (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 297–98.

19

Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 150–51.

20

Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, 153.

21

Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, 153–54.

22

Lee Finkle, “The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest during World War II,” Journal of American History, 60 (December 1973): 692–93 and 703–704.

23

Letter from Ervin to A. Philip Randolph, 14 January 1942, Box 28, Folder 11: MOWM Minutes of Meetings 1941–1943, A. Philip Randolph papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

24

Randolph to Eleanor Roosevelt, and attached call, “To March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense,” 5 June 1941, in Susan Ware and William Chafe, eds., “The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1933–1945,” housed jointly in the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (Hyde Park, NY); and Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, 155.

25

Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, 155.

26

Transcript, A. Philip Randolph Oral History Interview I, interview by Thomas H. Baker, 29 October 1969, LBJ Library.

27

Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, 157–160.

28

Anthony S. Chen, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941–1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Shamira Gelbman, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021).

29

As Roosevelt’s commitment to the FEPC waned, Randolph and his allies continued to use a combination of persuasion and direct mass action to pressure the president to recommit to the agency’s work. This approach was most evident in the FEPC’s case against the southern railroad industry, which became a lightning rod for opposition from conservatives and southern Democrats in Congress. See Milkis and Rader, “The March on Washington Movement.”

30

Although the FEPC’s purview did not include the military, the agency did begin to take measures to address the discriminatory practices in the national government, first put in place by Woodrow Wilson. Most importantly, it documented Black employment and discrimination in the federal government in the 1940s, including the various branches of the military. In 1943, the FEPC released a report, “Employment of Negroes in the Federal Government,” which detailed promising changes in the federal workforce.” Report on Employment of Negroes in the Federal Government” (December 1943), President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, Division of Review & Analysis: 1 May 1945, RG 228, Box 432, Section 34, Folder 1, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. William J. Collins pointed to the “magnitude of change in the 1940s” as a significant “turning point in African-American economic history” in “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets,” The American Economic Review 91, no. 1 (2001): 272. However, just as the Roosevelt administration stubbornly refused to take direct action against the segregated military, so the report also noted attempts to conceal employment patterns in the war departments and confirmed that very little progress had been made in the Armed Forces.

31

Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9808, Establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 5 December 1946, in William Goldsmith, ed. The Growth of Presidential Power: A Documented History, vol. 3 (New York: Chelsea, 1974), 1568–69.

32

Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to Congress on Civil Rights,” 2 February 1948, accessed 10 July 2023, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/20/special-message-congress-civil-rights.

33

“Eisenhower Oks Jim Crow in U.S. Army,” New Pittsburgh Courier, 10 April 1948, 1, 4.

34

A. Philip Randolph, “Call to Negro America: To March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense,” 1 July 1940, attached to a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, 5 June 1941.

35

President's Committee on Civil Rights, “To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights,” Washington, DC; 1947, accessed 22 May 2021, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to-secure-these-rights.

36

Randolph quoted in Cornelius Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana-Champaigne: University of Illinois, 2010), 186.

37

A. Philip Randolph to Harry Truman, 28 December 1947, Truman Library, Online Documents, accessed 17 June 2023, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/philip-randolph-harry-s-truman-attached-white-house-memos?documentid=1&pagenumber=4.

38

See footnote 36.

39

A. Philip Randolph to Harry Truman, 12 January 1948, Truman Library, Online Documents, accessed 23 May 2023, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/philip-randolph-harry-s-truman-attached-white-house-memos?documentid=1&pagenumber=2.

40

Randolph—a democratic socialist—fought aggressively against civil rights organizations forming alliances with communists and Soviet sympathizers. He resigned as president of the National Negro Congress in 1940 when communist party members took control of the group and supported Soviet foreign policy. “The Danger of Communists and Communism to Labor and the Negro,” The Black Worker (December 1948), 5. Randolph also refused to support or collaborate with Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign, complaining that it drew support from Communists. The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 24 May 1948, 1.

41

David Niles, “Memo for Honorable Matt Connelly,” 20 January 1948, Truman Library, online documents, accessed 1 June 2023, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/philip-randolph-harry-s-truman-attached-white-house-memos?documentid=1&pagenumber=11.

42

Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 180.

43

A. Philip Randolph, Oral History Interview with Thomas H. Baker, 10 September 1969, LBJ Library, “The Papers of A. Philip Randolph” (John H. Bracey and August Meier, eds.) housed by the Library of Congress; see also Paula F. Pfeffer A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 137–38.

44

Steven White, World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 141.

45

Drew Pearson, “Pullman Porter Chief at White House,” Washington Merry-Go-Round, Suffolk News-Herald, 5 April 1948, 4.

46

A. Philip Randolph, “Testimony Before the Senate Armed Services Committee,” in Kersten and Lucander, For Jobs and Freedom, 307–10.

47

“Solon Alarmed Over Negroes’ Strike Threats,” Times News (Twin Falls, Idaho), 1 April 1948, 1; “Civil Disobedience Movement Urged,” New Pittsburgh Courier, 10 April 1948, 1, 5.

48

Kermit Jaedicker, “Nego Leader Opens Drive to Boycott Draft,” New York Daily News, 27 June 1948, 1.

49

Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 181.

50

A. J. Muste to Elver A. Baker, 27 May 1948, cited in Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 151.

51

See footnote 50.

52

Pfeiffer, A. Philip Randolph, 150; “Bayard Rustin Pledges Support to Randolph Civil Disobedience Program,” Los Angeles Tribune, 17 April 1948, 17.

53

Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 139–40.

54

Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 182.

55

L. D. Reddick, “The Negro Policy of the American Army since World War II.” Journal of Negro History 38 (April 1953): 194–215; Pfeffer, A. Phillip Randolph, 147.

56

SidneyTarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 4th edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 73.

57

“Pickets Protesting Army Jim Crow March on Dems,” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 July 1948, 1.

58

White cited in Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 194; On the NAACP's support of the boycot, see Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 158–59.

59

Clark Clifford, “Memo, Clark Clifford to Harry S. Truman, November 19, 1947,” Harry S. Truman Library, accessed 30 April 2020, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/memo-clark-clifford-harry-s-truman?documentid=NA&pagenumber=1.

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Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 1.

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Milkis and Tichenor, Rivalry and Reform.

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Harry S. Truman, “Executive Order 9981, ‘Establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services,’” 26 July 1948, accessed 15 September 2024, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=84.

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Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 184.

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Harry S. Truman, “Executive Order 9980, ‘Regulations Governing Fair Employment Practices within the Federal Establishment,’” 26 July 1948, accessed 15 September 2024, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=78208.

65

“Bayard Rustin Heads New Strike Group,” Los Angeles Tribune, 28 August 1948, 1, 7; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 152–62. Rustin later expressed guilt for his “treachery”; he reconciled with Randolph 2 years later, forging a partnership that culminated with their crowning achievement: the 1963 Washington March for Jobs and Freedom. Bayard Rustin, “A Philip Randolph,” The Yale Review, 1 April 1987, accessed 1 May 2024, https://yalereview.org/article/bayard-rustin-a-philip-randolph.

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In addition to Fahy, the Committee included William E. Stevenson (president of Oberlin College); Dwight R. G. Palmer (president of General Cable Corporation); business executives Alphonsus Donahue and Charles Luckman; E. W. Kenworthy (freelance journalist); and the two Black members, John H. Sengstack (publisher of the Chicago Defender) and the National Urban League’s head Lester Granger. Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Reutten, Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration (Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 1973), 221.

67

Foster Haley, “Negro Airmen Are Admitted to White Club and Pool at Maxwell on Truman’s Order,” The Montgomery Advertiser, 23 June 1949, 1.

68

For a more detailed analysis of the implementation of Executive Order 9981, see Milkis and Rader, “The March on Washington Movement”

69

Initial Recommendations of the Fahey Committee, 24 May 1949; Monroe Billington, “Freedom to Serve: The President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces, 1949–1950.” The Journal of Negro History 54, no. 1 (October 1965), 272: 262–74.

70

Quotes in McCoy and Reutten, Quest and Response, 229.

71

“Picket Defense Chief: Say Johnson Failed to Act on Army Bias,” Chicago Defender, 31 December 1949, 1.

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McCoy and Reutten, Quest and Response, 233–38; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 161–68.

73

Charles C. Moskos, Jr., “Racial Integration in the Armed Services,” American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 2 (September 1966): 139, 132–48.

74

Moskos, “Racial Integration in the Armed Services,” 140.

75

“Mix Schools at Fort Bragg, No Riots,” Chicago Defender, 27 October 1951.

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“School Bill Killed as Peril to Rights,” New York Times, 3 November 1951; McCoy and Reutten, Quest and Response, 243–44; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 166.

77

Oliver Brown et al., Appellants v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee Country, Kansas et al. Brief amicus curiae of American Federation of Teachers, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1952, No. 8.

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David C. Hershfield, “Attacking Housing Discrimination: Economic Power of the Military in Desegregating Off-Base Rental Housing,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 44, no. 1 (1985): 23–28.

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David Sutton, “The Military Mission against Off-Base Discrimination,” in ed. Charles C. Moskos, Public Opinion and the Military Establishment (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1971).

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Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 2–3; Sujata Gupta, “Military Towns Are the Most Racially Integrated Places in the United States, Here’s Why,” ScienceNews, 8 February 2022, accessed 15 August 2023, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/military-towns-integration-segregation-united-states?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email_share.

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93

Black men accounting for 14 percent of the U.S. population, but greater than 17 percent of active-duty service members; Black women make up 29 percent of active service members. Statista Research Department, “Distribution of active duty enlisted women and men in the U.S. Military in 2019, by race and ethnicity,” Statista, 9 February 2023, accessed 15 July 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/214869/share-of-active-duty-enlisted-women-and-men-in-the-us-military/.

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98

A. Philip Randolph, “March on Washington Movement Presents the Program for the Negro,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford Logan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 135.

99

Roger D. Little and J. Eric Fredland, “Veteran Status, Earnings, and Race: Some Long Term Results,” Armed Forces and Society 5, no. 20 (1979): 244–60; Joshua D. Angrist, “Using Social Security Data on Military Applicants to Estimate the Effects of Voluntary Military Service on Earnings,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995; Richard R. Bryant, V. A. Samaranayake, and Allen Wilhite, “The Effect of Military Service on the Subsequent Civilian Wage of the Post-Vietnam Veteran,” The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 33, no. 1 (1993): 15–31.

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Author notes

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on presidents, political parties, and social movements. His most recent book is Subverting the Republic: Donald J Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism, with Nicholas Jacobs. Katherine Rader is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Christopher Newport University. Her research areas include American political development, political economy, race, and labor politics. Haley Stiles is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research centers on questions of voting, community, and democracy.