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Desegregation in the military[edit]

Militias and US Army[edit]


During the Civil War, Blacks enlisted in large numbers. They were mostly enslaved blacks who escaped in the South, although there were many northern black Unionists as well. More than 180,000 blacks served with the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War, in segregated units known as the US Colored Troops, under the command of white officers.[2] They were recorded and are part of the National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System (CWSS).

While a handful of Blacks were commissioned as officers in World War I, blacks were severely underrepresented throughout the conflict, though the NAACP lobbied for the commission of greater numbers of black officers. During World War II, most officers were white and most black troops still served only as truck drivers and as stevedores.[3] The Red Ball Express was operated almost exclusively by African-American truck drivers and was instrumental in facilitating the rapid advance of Allied forces across France shortly after D-Day. In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was severely short of replacement troops for existing military units—all of which were totally white in composition. Consequently, he made the decision to allow African-American soldiers to pick up a gun and join the white military units to fight in combat for the first time.[4] This was the first step toward a desegregated United States military. Eisenhower's decision in this case was strongly opposed by his own army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith. Indeed, it was stated that Bedell Smith was outraged by the decision and had said that the American public would take offense at the integration of the military units.[5]

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 ordered the integration of the armed forces shortly after World War II, a major advance in civil rights.[6] Using the Executive Order (E.O.) meant that Truman could bypass Congress. Representatives of the Solid South, all white Democrats, would likely have stonewalled related legislation.

For instance, in May 1948, Richard B. Russell, Democratic Senator from Georgia, attached an amendment to the Selective Services bill then being debated in Congress. The Russell amendment would have granted draftees and new inductees an opportunity to choose whether or not they wanted to serve in segregated military units. Russell's amendment was defeated in committee. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948. In June 1950 when the Selective Services Law came up for renewal, Russell tried again to attach his segregation amendment, and again Congress defeated it.



Sailors and US Navy[edit]

Black naval service stretches back to the beginnings of the nation. Thousands of black men fought on the side of rebellious colonists in the American Revolutionary War, many in the new Continental Navy. Their names, accomplishments or total numbers are unknown because of poor record keeping.

Blacks also participated in the Union Navy during the American Civil War. Many were enslaved blacks who escaped to Union lines. About 18,000 blacks were sailors with Union forces.[7] They were recorded and are part of the National Park Service's War Soldiers & Sailors System (CWSS) (see External link below.) Upon entering office, President Woodrow Wilson segregated the United States Navy. Before this, the Navy had never been segregated.

In World War II, the US Navy first experimented with integrating the USCGC Sea Cloud, then later the USS Mason, (both commanded by Carlton Skinner) a ship with black crew members and commanded by white officers. Some called it "Eleanor's folly", after President Franklin Roosevelt's wife.[citation needed] The Mason's purpose was to allow black sailors to serve in the full range of billets (positions), rather than being restricted to stewards and messmen, as they were on most ships. The Navy had already been pressured to train black sailors for billets. Mrs. Roosevelt insisted that black sailors be given the jobs which they were trained to do. This experiment was a historic step on the long road to integration.

On October 12, 1972, a racially-frought riot occurred on the USS Kitty Hawk.[8] "Despite the presence of a black executive officer (XO), the ship’s second-in-command, many black sailors felt they were dealt harsher punishments and menial assignments because of their race."[9]

Residential desegregation[edit]

The practice of segregating and discriminating in housing opportunity based on race has a long history in the United States. Up until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, segregated neighborhoods were enforceable by law. The Fair Housing Act, which was the first national law to outlaw housing discrimination, ended discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, color, religion, and national origin. The passage of the Act was contentious. The Fair Housing Act was meant to be a direct follow up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however from 1966 to 1967 Congress failed to garner enough political support for its passage. At that time several states had passed their own fair housing laws and Congress was not convinced that a federal law was necessary. It was only after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 and the ensuing riots that Congress finally passed the bill. It was signed into law on April 11, 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, who was one of the Act's strongest supporters, called the new law one of the "promises of a century… it proclaims that fair housing for all—all human beings who live in this country—is now a part of the American way of life." Since the act was first passed in 1968 it has been amended to include sex, familial status, and disability. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is charged with administering and enforcing this law.

Modern civil rights movement[edit]

Impediments to integrated schools[edit]

Further information: Black school and White flight



According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated. As of 2005, the proportion of Black students at majority white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." [11]

Some critics of school desegregation have argued that court-enforced desegregation efforts were either unnecessary or self-defeating. Numerous middle-class and wealthy white people continued moving from cities to suburbs during the 1970s and later, in part to escape certain integrated school systems, but also as part of a suburbanization of the society, caused by movement of jobs to suburbs, continuing state and Federal support for expansion of highways, and changes in the economy.


Sociologist David Armor in court testimony and in his book Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (1995) said that efforts to change the racial compositions of schools had not contributed substantially to academic achievement by minorities. Carl L. Bankston III and Stephen J. Caldas, in their books A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana (2002) and Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation (2005), argued that continuing racial inequality in the larger American society had undermined efforts to force schools to desegregate. They maintained that racial inequality had resulted in popular associations between school achievement and race. Therefore, the achievement levels of American schools were generally associated with their class and racial compositions. This meant that even parents without racial prejudice tended to seek middle class or better residential neighborhoods in seeking the best schools for their children. As a result, efforts to impose court-ordered desegregation often led to school districts in which there were too few white students for effective desegregation, as white students increasingly left for majority white suburban districts or for private schools.

Problems of a diverse society[edit]

The increasing diversity of American society has led to more complex issues related to school and ethnic proportion. In the 1994 federal court case Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District, parents of Chinese American schoolchildren alleged that racial quotas under a 1983 consent decree constituted racial discrimination in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The desegregation plan did not allow any school to enroll more than 50 percent of any ethnic group. Originally intended to aid integration of blacks, the ruling had a negative effect on the admissions of Chinese students, who had become the largest ethnic group in the district.

Articles in the newspaper AsianWeek documented the Chinese American parents' challenge. Since Chinese Americans were already nearly half the student population, the consent decree had the effect of requiring competitive Lowell high school to apply much higher academic admission standards for Chinese American students than other students. The civil rights group Chinese for Affirmative Action, led by Henry Der, sided with the school district. They argued that such standards were not harmful to Chinese Americans, and were necessary to avoid resegregation of schools. In 2006, Chinese parents continued to protest race-based school assignments.[13]

See also[edit]


  2. ^ Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System, US National Park Service, accessed 3 April 2008,
  3. ^ Martin Blumenson, Eisenhower (Ballantine Books Inc.: New York, 1972) p. 127.
  4. ^ Ibid.
  5. ^ Ibid.
  8. ^ Gregory A. Freeman Troubled Water: race, mutiny, and bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY (2009) ISBN 9780230613614
  10. ^ Jonathan Kozol, Segregation and Its Calamitous Effects: America's "Apartheid" Schools, VUE (Voices in Urban Education), Number 10, Winter 2006, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University.
  12. ^, Year in Review.
  13. ^ Asianweek, "Back to School for Integration: The Catch-22 of Excellence and Diversity Without Race", Asian Week

External links[edit]