al Opportunity Office of
the Secretary of Defense. The records of the Personnel Policy Board
and the Office of the General Counsel, both part of the files of the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, are two more important sources of
materials on black manpower.

A subject classification system was not universally applied in the
Navy Department during the 1940's and even where used proved
exceedingly complicated. The records of the Office of the Secretary of
the Navy are especially strong in the World War II period, but they
must be supplemented with the National Archives' separate Forrestal
papers file. Despite the recent loss of records, the files of the
Bureau of Naval Personnel remain the primary source for documents on
the employment of black personnel in the Navy. Research in all these
files, even for the World War II period, is best begun in the Records
Management offices of those two agencies. More readily accessible, the
records of the Chief of Naval Operations and the General Board, both
of considerable importance in understanding the Navy's World War II
racial history, are located in the Operational Archives Branch, Naval
Historical Division, Washington Navy Yard. This office has recently
created a special miscellaneous file containing important documents of
interest to the researcher on racial matters that have been gleaned
from various sources not easily available to the researcher.

Copies of all known staff papers concerning black marines and the (p. 628)
development of the Marine Corps' equal opportunity program during
the integration period have been collected and filed in the reference
section of the Director of Marine Corps History and Museums,
Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps. Likewise, most of the very small
selection of extant official Coast Guard records on the employment of
Negroes have been identified and collected by the Coast Guard
historian. The log of the _Sea Cloud_, the first Coast Guard vessel in
modern times to boast a racially mixed crew, is located in the
Archives Branch at Suitland.

The Air Force has retained control of a significant portion of its
postwar personnel records, and the researcher would best begin work in
the Office of the Administrative Assistant, Secretary of the Air
Force. This office has custody of the files of the Secretary of the
Air Force, his assistant secretaries, the Office of the Chief of
Staff, and the staff agencies pertinent to this story, especially the