to
officer advancement to the highest rank."[22-49]

[Footnote 22-48: Ibid.]

[Footnote 22-49: Shulman, "The Civil Rights Policies
of the Department of Defense," 4 May 65.]

Since promotion in the military ranks depended to a great extent on a
man's skills, training in and assignment to vital job categories were
important to enlisted men. Here, too, the statistics revealed that the
percentage of Negroes in the technical occupations, which had begun to
rise in the years after Korea, had continued to increase but that a
large proportion still held unskilled or semiskilled military
occupational specialties (_Table 29_). Eligibility for the various
military occupations depended to a great extent on the servicemen's
mental aptitude, with men scoring in the higher categories usually
winning assignment to technical occupations. When the Army began
drafting large numbers of men in the mid-1960's, the number of men in
category IV, which included many Negroes, began to go up. Given the
fact that many Negroes with the qualifications for technical training
were ignoring the services for other vocations while the less
qualified were once again swelling the ranks, the Department of
Defense could do little to insure a fair representation of Negroes in
technical occupations or increase the number of black soldiers in
higher grades. The problem tended to feed upon itself. Not only were
the statistics the bane of civil rights organizations, but they also
influenced talented young blacks to decide against a service career,
in effect creating a variation of Gresham's law in the Army wherein
men of low mentality were keeping out men of high intelligence. There
seemed little to be done, although the department's civil rights
office pressed the services to establish remedial training for
category IV men so that they might become eligible for more technical
assignments.

Table 29--Distribution of Servicemen in Occupational Groups by Race, 1967

| White | Black |Unknown|Total
| | | | | Percent| |
| | | | |of Total| |
| |Percent| |Percent| in Each| |
Group/Activity | Number| Dist. | Number| Dist. | Group/ | Number|Number
| | | | |Activity| |
Comba