After all,
others, most notably the Civil Rights Commission, had recently
documented the problems encountered by black servicemen, although not
in the detail offered by the Gesell group, and had convincingly tied
this discrimination to black morale and military efficiency. The (p. 542)
committee's major contribution lay rather in its establishment of
a new concept in command responsibility that directly attacked the
traditional parochialism of the services' social concerns:

It should be the policy of the Department of Defense and part of
the mission of the chain of command from the Secretaries of the
Services to the local base commander not only to remove
discrimination within the Armed Forces, but also to make every
effort to eliminate discriminatory practices as they affect
members of the Armed Forces and their dependents within the
neighboring civilian communities.[21-41]

[Footnote 21-41: "Initial Rpt," p. 61.]

In effect the committee proposed a new racial policy for the
Department of Defense, one that would translate the services' promise
of equality of treatment and opportunity into a declaration of civil
liberties. To that end it recommended the adoption of a set of
techniques radically new to the thinking of the military commanders,
one that grew out of the committee's own experiences in the field.

Chairman Gesell later recollected how this recommendation developed:

I remember in particular our experiences at the bases at Augusta
and Pensacola. This made a strong impression on me. I saw
discrimination on bases right under the noses of the commanders
who were often not even aware of it. And I saw much
discrimination in communities around the bases. Sometimes
unbelievable. At Pensacola, for example, I found that the Station
had never used Negroes for guard duty at the main gate where they
would be seen by the public, black and white. We told this to the
commander and reminded him of the effect that it had on black
morale. He changed it immediately. On base the housing for blacks
was segregated off to one side in poor run-down shacks below the
railroad tracks. We told the commander who admitted that he had
some substandard housing units but was unaware of any segregation
in housing. The commander promised to report to us about this in
two weeks. He did later report: "the whole