Armed Forces: Black Powerlessness

FOR years the military rested comfortably on its largely unfounded reputation as a fastness of racial fair play and equality. Because it beat chopping cotton or pushing brooms, blacks viewed the armed forces as an escape from a hostile world. That, it turns out, was a mistake. Even as civilian society makes slow, painful progress in civil rights, and black radicalism heightens blacks' sense of injustice, it has become increasingly clear that the military too has its full share of racism.

The unhappy facts surfaced last week during ad hoc hearings chaired by Representatives Shirley Chisholm of New York and Ron Dellums of California. A succession of witnesses told the committee that racism is so pervasive both in the U.S. and overseas as to make the armed services virtually intolerable for thousands of black Americans.

Specifically, members of the Democratic Black Caucus repeatedly heard that black troops: 1) receive a disproportionately low number of honorable discharges and are more widely subject to pretrial confinement; 2) suffer harassment and intimidation for wearing Afro hair styles or Black Power symbols; 3) fail to win key command positions over less qualified whites; 4) get the most dangerous combat jobs in Viet Nam if they show signs of black militancy; and 5) often receive indifferent medical attention there while in the field.

Permanent Tinder. The most spectacular piece of testimony to surface came from Dellums himself, who released secret papers that explicitly indicated that the Department of Defense had a policy restricting the number of blacks sent to bases in Iceland. He said that the Government had reached a verbal agreement with Iceland at that nation's request. By 1963, the Icelandic government accepted two married black servicemen into the country, and the number has now increased to about 40. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird could only plead that he had no control over previous administrations and that no such understandings now exist.

Thaddeus Garrett Jr., a member of Mrs. Chisholm's staff, toured overseas bases for six weeks last summer. He quoted one black serviceman as saying that blacks there "are already talking in terms of revolution, and that some type of violence is inevitable. They just do not care anymore." Blacks make up 12% of the G.I.s in Germany, and racial tensions there run high. Wallace Terry III, a former TIME correspondent in Viet Nam and author of a forthcoming book, The Bloods: The Black Soldier from Viet Nam to America, has made the oft-repeated--and oft-denied--charge: "The cost of being too militant was to be sent to serve as a point man on the Demilitarized Zone."

Representative Parren Mitchell of Maryland concluded that "racism in the military is so deep, so wide and so effective that we can't possibly cope with it." Frank Render, a black former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Equal Opportunity, observed that in the Defense Department "one must necessarily plow through layers of bureaucracy, but even when that was done, too often bigotry and basic racism thwarted our attempts to help those who are oppressed." Render complained that at the Pentagon he was "treated like a 21-star general." At one point, Mrs. Chisholm was so moved by the angry testimony of one black ex-G.I. that she averted her eyes from the witness and wept.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.