ery little to change the Army's racial
practices in the year following their agreements with the Fahy
Committee. The periodic increase in the number of critical specialties
for which Negroes were to be trained and freely assigned did not
materialize. The number of trained black specialists increased, and
some were assigned to white units, but this practice, while
substantially different from the Gillem Board's idea of limiting such
integration to overhead spaces, nevertheless produced similar results.
Black specialists continued to be assigned to segregated units in the
majority of cases, and in the minds of most commanders such assignment
automatically limited black soldiers to certain jobs and schools no
matter what their qualifications. Kenworthy's blunt conclusion in May
1951 was that the Army had not carried out the policy it had agreed
to.[17-4] Certainly the Army staff had failed to develop a successful
mechanism for gauging its commanders' compliance with its new policy.
Despite the generally progressive sentiments of General Collins and
Secretary Gray's agreement with the Fahy Committee, much of the Army
clung to old sentiments and practices for the same old reasons.

[Footnote 17-4: Kenworthy, "The Case Against Army
Segregation," p. 32.]

The catalyst for the sudden shift away from these sentiments and
practices was the Korean War. Ranking among the nation's major
conflicts, the war caused the Army to double in size in five months.
By June 1951 it numbered 1.6 million, with 230,000 men serving in
Korea in the Eighth Army. This vast expansion of manpower and combat
commitment severely tested the Army's racial policy and immediately
affected the racial balance of the quota-free Army. When the quota was
lifted in April 1950, Negroes accounted for 10.2 percent of the total
enlisted strength; by August this figure reached 11.4 percent. On 1
January 1951, Negroes comprised 11.7 percent of the Army, and in
December 1952 the ratio was 13.2 percent. The cause of this striking
rise in black strength was the large number of Negroes among wartime
enlistments. The percentage of Negroes among those enlisting in the
Army for the first time jumped from 8.2 in March 1950 to 25.2 in
August, averaging 18 percent of all first-term enlistments during the
first nine months of the war. Black reenlistment increased from 8.5 to
12.9 percent of the total reenlistment during the same period, and th