ces and satisfaction to the civil rights
movement, had ceased to be a public issue. Abolishing segregated
units, they claimed, fulfilled the essential elements of the executive
order, leaving the armed forces only rare vestiges of discrimination
to correct. Others, at first principally the civil rights bloc in
Congress and civil rights organizations, but later black servicemen
themselves, contended that the Truman order committed the Department
of Defense to far more than integration of military units. They
believed that off-base discrimination, so much more apparent with the
improvement of on-base conditions, seriously affected morale and
efficiency. They wanted the department to challenge local laws and
customs when they discriminated against black servicemen.

This interpretation made little headway in the Department of Defense
during the first decade of integration. Both the Eisenhower and
Kennedy administrations made commitments to the principle of equal
treatment within the services, and both admitted the connection
between military efficiency and discrimination, but both presumed, at
least until 1963, severe limitations on their power to change local
laws and customs. For their part, the services constantly referred to
the same limitations, arguing that their writ in regard to racial
reform ran only to the gates of the military reservation.

Yet while there was no substantive change in the services' view of
their racial responsibilities, the Department of Defense was able to
make significant racial reforms between 1954 and 1962. More than
expressing the will of the Chief Executive, these changes reflected
the fact that military society was influenced by some of the same
forces that were operating on the larger American society. Possessed
of a discipline that enabled it to reform rapidly, military society
still shared the prejudices as well as the reform impulses of the (p. 474)
body politic. Racial changes in the services during the first decade
of integration were primarily parochial responses to special internal
needs; nevertheless, they took place at a time when civil rights
demands were stirring the whole country. Their effectiveness must be
measured against the expectations such demands were kindling in the
black community.

_The Civil Rights Revolution_

The post-World War II civil rights movement was unique in the nation's
history. Contrasting this era of black awakening with the post-Civil
War cam