Race Rumblings at McClellan

Butting up against the heel of the Appalachian Mountains near Anniston, Ala., Fort McClellan appears to be the most placid of military bases. It is pastorally appointed with sweeping greensward, tall stands of shortleaf pine and pleasing arrangements of whitewashed command buildings fronted by old-fashioned verandas. It is a small post, with slightly more than 5,000 people. But McClellan is unique in that 2,000 of those are WACs; it is the largest WAC base in the world. What is more, 20% of the WACs are black. More than any other single factor, that probably accounts for the disturbances that ended last week in which five black WACs were run down by a panicky white driver, a white soldier was beaten by a group of angry blacks and a disastrous demonstration resulted in the arrest of 140 blacks --71 men and 69 women. The presence of black women probably spurred the black men on. Says Colonel William McKean, the post commander: "If I could have separated the girls from the guys during that demonstration, they would have gone home in a minute."

White Panic. The trouble began on Saturday night, Nov. 13, at the enlisted men's club. Tension flared at closing time when a white civilian bus driver was overheard to say, "I don't want no niggers on my bus." A group of blacks descended on another bus and ejected a white couple, but they in turn were run off by a black military policeman. Later the black soldiers began filing back to their barracks; their number grew as they paraded past the officers' quarters. Then an off-duty white MP who found himself driving in their midst panicked and sped off, knocking down five women. None was seriously injured, but by then the crowd had grown ugly. A white worker who wandered out at the wrong time was severely beaten, as one black admitted later, "just because he was white."

A list of black grievances was submitted to the race-relations officer; they revolved mainly around a few alleged white bigots in command positions, recreational facilities and dress regulations relating to Afros and dashikis. Although many of the complaints were dealt with over the same weekend that the uprising occurred, a muttering mob began to congregate on the athletic field Monday morning. At least 150 black men and women had assembled by the time Colonel McKean arrived with two carloads of brass, as requested by the blacks. It was a doomed colloquy. A white race-relations officer and a black major were both shouted down. When Beverly Bradford, a white reporter for the Anniston Star, was discovered in the midst of the WACs, she was subjected to some unladylike pummeling. "It was wild," says Colonel Richard Hines, the deputy post commander. "It would have taken 50 MPs to stop those women."

The meeting--if it could be called that --completely fell apart, and McKean brought in the MPs. No force was used, thanks partly to the efforts of some black MPs, but the 140 who were arrested were taken to the city and county jails because McClellan has no stockade.

Colonel McKean has made sincere efforts to ameliorate racial problems; singlehanded, he forced the local Boy Scouts to integrate by refusing to allow McClellan Scouts to attend a summer camp that excluded blacks. He finds the latest events fearfully frustrating. "I constantly hear about what it's like growing up in a black ghetto," he says. "I can't talk to them about 400 years of bondage, goddammit. I want to know what's wrong now." If an officer like McKean cannot find the answer, the incident at Anniston will not be the last.

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