ints concerning the number, promotion,
assignment, and punishment of black servicemen, a limited problem in
the mid-1960's, went mostly unrecognized. Relatively speaking, they
were ignored by the Gesell Committee and the civil rights
organizations in the face of the more pressing off-base problems and
only summarily treated by the services, which remained largely silent
about on-base and in-house discrimination. Long after off-base
discrimination had disappeared as a specific military problem, this
neglected on-base discrimination would rise up again to trouble the
armed forces in more militant times.[23-101]

[Footnote 23-101: Interv, author with Bennett, 13 Dec
73.]

CHAPTER 24 (p. 609)

Conclusion

The Defense Department's response to the recommendations of the Gesell
Committee marked the close of a well-defined chapter in the racial
history of the armed forces. Within a single generation, the services
had recognized the rights of black Americans to serve freely in the
defense of their country, to be racially integrated, and to have, with
their dependents, equal treatment and opportunity not only on the
military reservation but also in nearby communities. The gradual
compliance with Secretary McNamara's directives in the mid-1960's
marked the crumbling of the last legal and administrative barriers to
these goals.

_Why the Services Integrated_

In retrospect, several causes for the elimination of these barriers
can be identified. First, if only for the constancy and fervor of its
demands, was the civil rights movement. An obvious correlation exists
between the development of this movement and the shift in the
services' racial attitudes. The civil rights advocates--that is, those
spokesmen of the rapidly proliferating civil rights organizations and
their allies in Congress, the White House, and the media--formed a
pressure group that zealously enlisted political support for equal
opportunity measures. Their metier was presidential politics. In
several elections they successfully traded their political assistance,
an unknown quantity, for specific reform. Their influence was crucial,
for example, in Roosevelt's decision to enlist Negroes for general
service in the World War II Navy and in all branches of the Army and
in Truman's proclamation of equal treatment and opportunity; it was
notable in the adjudicati