First Step

It was nearly a year since President Truman had ordered an end to discrimination in the Armed Forces, but with few exceptions, the Negro in uniform still had to eat Jim Crow and live in a second-class world. Prodded again by the White House, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson ordered the Army, Navy & Air Force to tell what they had done to carry out the Commander in Chief's order. Last week the answers were in.

The Army & Navy, Johnson decided, had pussyfooted; he ordered the admirals and generals to give him "additional clarifying information" about their programs. The Air Force came off better. As a first step, the Air Force said that within ten days it would begin disbanding its all-Negro 332 Fighter Wing at Lockbourne Air Force Base in Ohio. By the end of the year its 2,000 men would be sprinkled through the Air Force; other Negro units in the Air Force, but not all of them, would be broken up in the same way.

The Navy insisted that it had already "integrated" its 17,500 Negroes, but it was a strange sort of integration: 10,500 of them were steward's mates in mess halls, and only five were officers. In the Marine Corps there are about 1,500 Negroes, none of them officers. The Army has given its 71,189 Negroes better assignments, more chances for promotion (there are 1,267 Negro Army officers), but all along the line Negroes and whites have been generally segregated.

Whether the Air Force really meant to end discrimination remained to be seen. "There won't be an end to segregation in the services," remarked one Negro officer, "until they call a roll some day and you can look and see black & white, black & white. It's a long way off."

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