the next to end segregation. Again, immediate
outside influences appeared to be slight. Despite the timing of the
Air Force integration directive in early 1949 and Secretary Stuart
Symington's discussions of the subject with Truman and the Fahy
Committee, plans to drop many racial barriers in the Air Force had
already been formulated at the time of the President's equal
opportunity order in 1948. Nor is there any evidence of special
concern among Air Force officials about the growing criticism of their
segregation policy. The record clearly reveals, however, that by late
1947 the Air staff had become anxious over the manpower requirements
of the Gillem Board Report, which enunciated the postwar racial policy
that the Air Force shared with the Army.

The Gillem Board Report would hardly be classified as progressive by
later standards; its provisions for reducing the size of black units
and integrating a small number of black specialists were, in a way, an
effort to make segregation less wasteful. Nevertheless, with all its
shortcomings, this postwar policy contained the germ of integration.
It committed the Army and Air Force to total integration as a
long-range objective, and, more important, it made permanent the
wartime policy of allotting 10 percent of the Army's strength to
Negroes. Later branded by the civil rights spokesmen as an instrument
for limiting black enlistment, the racial quota committed the Army and
its offspring, the Air Force, not only to maintaining at least 10
percent black strength but also to assigning black servicemen to all
branches and all job categories, thereby significantly weakening (p. 616)
the segregated system. Although never filled in either service, the
quotas guaranteed that a large number of Negroes would remain in
uniform after the war and thus gave both services an incentive to
desegregate.

Once again the Army could postpone the logical consequences of its
racial policy by the continued proliferation of its segregated combat
and service units. But the new Air Force almost immediately felt the
full force of the Gillem Board policy, quickly learning that it could
not maintain 10 percent black strength separate but equal. It too
might have continued indefinitely enlarging the number of service
units in order to absorb black airmen. Like the Army, it might even
have ignored the injunction to assign a quota of blacks to every
military occupation and to every school. But it was pol