ved strong enough to resist the
progressive impulses that were pushing the other services toward some
relaxation of their segregation policies. Committed to limiting
Negroes to a token representation and employing black marines in
rigidly self-contained units, the Marine Corps could not establish a
quota for Negroes based on national racial proportions and could offer
no promise of equal treatment and opportunity in work assignments and
promotions.

Thus all the services emerged from their deliberations with postwar
policies that were markedly different in several respects but had in
common a degree of segregation. The Army, declaring that military
efficiency demanded ultimate integration, temporized, guaranteeing as
a first step an intricate system of separate but equal treatment and
opportunity for Negroes. The Marine Corps began with the idea that
separate but equal service was not discriminatory, but when equal
service proved unattainable, black marines were left with separatism
alone. The Navy announced the most progressive policy of all,
providing for integration of its general service. Yet it failed to
break the heavy concentration of Negroes in the Steward's Branch, (p. 175)
where no whites served. And unlike the segregated Army, the integrated
Navy, its admission standards too high to encourage black enlistments,
did not guarantee to take any black officers or specialists.

None of these policies provided for the equal treatment and
opportunity guaranteed to every black serviceman under the
Constitution, although the racial practices of all the services stood
far in advance of those of most institutions in the society from which
they were derived. The very weaknesses and inadequacies inherent in
these policies would in themselves become a major cause of the reforms
that were less than a decade away.

CHAPTER 7 (p. 176)

A Problem of Quotas

The War Department encountered overwhelming problems when it tried to
put the Gillem Board's recommendations into practice, and in the end
only parts of the new policy for the use of black manpower were ever
carried out. The policy foundered for a variety of reasons: some
implicit in the nature of the policy itself, others the result of
manpower exigencies, and still others because of prejudices lingering
in the staff, the Army, and the nation at large.

Even before the Army postwar racial policy was pu