Earl D. Johnson to Sen. Robert
Taft, 19 Jul 51; both in CS 291.2 (27 Apr 51).]

[Footnote 19-17: Memo, Dep Chief, NavPers for ASD
(M&P), 19 Feb 53, sub: Alleged Race Segregation at
U.S. Naval Base, Key West, Florida, P 8 (4)/NB Key
West, GenRecs Nav.]

These excuses for not dealing with off-base discrimination continued
throughout the decade. As late as 1959, discussing a case of racial
discrimination near an Army base in Germany, a Defense Department
spokesman explained to Congressman James Roosevelt that "since the
incident did not take place on one of our military bases, we are not
in a position to offer direct relief in the situation...."[19-18] Even
James Evans, the racial counselor, came to use this explanation.
"Community mores with respect to race vary," Evans wrote in 1956, and
"such matters are largely beyond direct purview of the Department (p. 480)
of Defense."[19-19]

[Footnote 19-18: Ltr, ASD (MP&R) Charles C. Finucane
to James Roosevelt, 3 Jun 59, ASD (MP&R) files.]

[Footnote 19-19: Evans and Lane, "Integration in the
Armed Services," p. 83.]

Understandably, in view of the difficulties they perceived, the
services tried to avoid the whole problem. In 1954, for example, a
group of forty-eight black soldiers traveling on a bus in Columbia,
South Carolina, were arrested and fined when they protested the
attempted arrest of one of them for failing to comply with the state's
segregated seating law. In the ensuing furor, Secretary of Defense
Charles E. Wilson explained to President Eisenhower that soldiers were
subject to community law and his department contemplated no
investigation or disciplinary action in the case. In view of the civil
rights issues involved, Wilson continued,[19-20] the Judge Advocate
General of the Army discussed the matter with the Justice Department
and referred related correspondence to that department "for whatever
disposition it considered appropriate." "This reply," an assistant
noted on Wilson's file copy of the memo for the President, "gets them
off our neck, but I don't know about Brownell's [the Attorney
General]."[19-21]

[Footnote 19-20: Wilson, former president of General
Motors Corporation, became President Eisenhower's
first Secretary of De