t had never before seen
blacks and whites educated together. It had even ordered the
integration of classes conducted on post by local universities and (p. 496)
voluntarily attended by servicemen in off-duty hours.[19-87] Yet many
dependent schools were untouched because Wilson's order applied only
to schools on federal property. It ignored the largest category of
dependent schools, those in the local community that because of heavy
enrollment of federal dependents were supported in whole or part by
federal funds. In these institutions some 28,000 federal dependents
were being educated in segregated classes. Integration for them would
have to await the long court battles that followed _Brown_ v. _Board
of Education_.

[Footnote 19-87: Ltr, Sen. Herbert Lehman to SecDef,
10 Oct 56; Ltr, SecDef to Lehman, 15 Oct 56, both
in SD 291.2.]

This dreary prospect had not always seemed so inevitable. Although
Wilson's order ignored local public schools, civil rights advocates
did not, and the problem of off-base segregation, typified by the
highly publicized school at the Little Rock Air Force Base in 1958,
became an issue involving not only the Department of Defense but the
whole administration. The decision to withhold federal aid to school
districts that remained segregated in defiance of court orders was
clearly beyond the power of the Department of Defense. In a memorandum
circulated among Pentagon officials in October 1958, Assistant
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot C. Richardson
discussed the legal background of federal aid to schools attended by
military dependents, especially congressional intent and the
definition of "suitable" facilities as expressed in Public Laws 815
and 874. He also took up the question of whether to provide off-base
integrated schooling, balancing the difficult problem of protecting
the civil rights of federal employees against the educational
advantages of a state-sponsored education system. Richardson mentioned
the great variation in school population--some bases having seven high
school aged children one year, none the next--and the fact that the
cost of educating the 28,087 dependents attending segregated schools
in 1957 would amount to more than $49 million for facilities and $8.7
million annually for operations. He was left with one possible
conclusion, that "irrespective of our feelings about the unsuitability
of s