administration.
Clearly, the Department of Defense would be hearing more about race in
the reserve components in the months to come.

The sudden reemergence in the early 1960's of complaints of
discrimination in the regular forces centered around a familiar
litany: the number of Negroes in some of the services still fell
significantly short of the black percentage of the national
population; and separate standards, favorable to whites, prevailed in
the promotion and assignment systems of all the services. There had to
be some discrimination involved, Congressman Diggs pointed out to the
Secretary of the Air Force in July 1960. With extensive help from the
services, Diggs had been investigating servicemen's complaints for
some time. While his major concern remained the discrimination
suffered by black servicemen off base, he nevertheless concluded that
the service regulations developed in consultation with the Fahy
Committee more than a decade earlier had not been fully implemented
and discriminatory practices existed "in varying degrees" at (p. 521)
military installations around the world. Diggs admitted that a black
serviceman might well charge discrimination to mask his failure to
compete successfully for a job or grade, but to accept such failures
as a universal explanation for the disproportionate number of Negroes
in the lower ranks and undesirable occupations was to accept as true
the canard that Negroes as a group were deficient. Diggs's conclusion,
which he pressed upon the department with some notice in the press,
was that some black servicemen were being subtly but deliberately and
arbitrarily restricted to inferior positions because their military
superiors exercised judgments based on racial considerations. These
judgments, he charged, were inconsistent with the spirit of the Truman
order.[20-78]

[Footnote 20-78: Ltr, Diggs to SecAF, 7 Jul 60; see
also Memo, Dir, AF Legis Liaison, for Spec Asst for
Manpower, Personnel, and Reserve Forces, USAF, 14
Jul 60, with attached Summary of Findings and
Highlights of the Diggs Report Concerning Alleged
Discriminatory Practices in the Armed Forces; both
in SecAF files.]

At first glance the 1963 study of racial discrimination by the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights seemed to contradict Diggs's charges. The
commission concluded t