the James C. Evans
Collection, AMHRC.]

[Footnote 20-8: Ltr, Diggs to President, 27 Jun 62,
copy in Gesell Collection, John F. Kennedy
Library.]

[Illustration: CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS AT THE WHITE HOUSE. _Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy poses with (from left) Martin Luther King,
Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney M. Young, Jr., and A. Philip Randolph._]

Especially galling to civil rights leaders was the conviction that the
armed forces had set up artificial and self-imposed barriers to a
needed social reform. In the end this conviction seemed to spur them
on. The American Veterans Committee, for example, demanded that when a
community "mistreats American troops, such as in Montgomery, Alabama,
or flaunts its Ku Klux Klan membership, as does Selma, Alabama, the
entire area should be placed 'off limits' to purchases by Defense
installations and by Servicemen."[20-9] Others were convinced that the
federal government was in effect supporting segregation through its
widespread economic assistance programs to state and local governments
and to private institutions in the fields of employment, housing,
education, health service, military affairs, and agriculture. In
August 1961 a group of fifty civil rights leaders petitioned the (p. 504)
President to end such federal support.[20-10] On a more modest scale,
the Congress of Racial Equality asked the Army in August 1962 to
declare segregated restaurants in Aberdeen, Maryland, off limits to
all military personnel. The activist group justified its demand by
stating that "the Army declares dangerous or immoral establishments
off limits to soldiers and what is more dangerous or immoral in a
democracy than racial intolerance?"[20-11] In this they failed to
distinguish between the commander's proper response to what was
illegal, for example prostitution, and what was still legal, for
example, segregated housing.

[Footnote 20-9: American Veterans Committee, "Audit of
Negro Veterans and Servicemen," 1960, p. 16, copy
in CMH.]

[Footnote 20-10: Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights, "Proposals for Executive Action to End
Federally Supported Segregation and Other Forms of
Racial Discrimination," August 1961, copy in SD
291.2. See also U.S. Commission on Civil Rig