on
Universal Training, 29 May 1947_ (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1947), p. 42.]

The showdown between civil rights organizations and the administration
over universal military training never materialized. Faced with
chronic opposition to the program and the exigencies of the cold war,
the administration quietly shelved universal training and concentrated
instead on the reestablishment of the selective service system. When
black attention naturally shifted to the new draft legislation,
Randolph was able to capitalize on the determination of many leaders
in the civil rights movement to defeat any draft law that countenanced
the Army's racial policy. Appearing at the Senate Armed Services
Committee hearings on the draft bill, Randolph raised the specter of
civil disobedience, pledging

to openly counsel, aid, and abet youth, both white and Negro, to
quarantine any Jim Crow conscription system, whether it bear the
label of universal military training or selective service....

From coast to coast in my travels I shall call upon all Negro
veterans to join this civil disobedience movement and to recruit
their younger brothers in an organized refusal to register and be
drafted....

I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths ... to
demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the
entire registration and induction machinery....

I shall appeal to the Negro parents to lend their moral support
to their sons, to stand behind them as they march with heads held
high to Federal prisons as a telling demonstration to the world
that Negroes have reached the limit of human endurance, that, in
the words of the spiritual, we will be buried in our graves
before we will be slaves.[12-36]

[Footnote 12-36: Senate, Hearings Before the Committee
on Armed Services, _Universal Military Training_,
80th Cong., 2d sess., 1948, p. 688.]

Randolph argued that hard-won gains in education, job opportunity, and
housing would be nullified by federal legislation supporting
segregation. How could a Fair Employment Practices Commission, he
asked, dare criticize discrimination in industry if the government
itself was discriminating against Negroes in the services? "Negroes
are just sick and tired of being pushed around," he concluded, "and we
just do