, serving in the integrated general service
while 17,300, or 84 percent, were classified as stewards. By mid-1948
the outlook was somewhat brighter, but still on the average only 38
percent of the Negroes in the Navy held jobs in the general service
while 62 percent remained in the nonwhite Steward's Branch. At this
time only three black officers remained on active duty. Again, what
Navy officials saw as military efficiency helps explain this postwar
retreat. Because of its rapidly sinking manpower needs, the Navy could
afford to set higher enlistment standards than the Army, and the fewer
available spaces in the general service went overwhelmingly to the
many more eligible whites who applied. Only in the Steward's Branch,
with its separate quotas and lower enlistment standards, did the (p. 237)
Navy find a place for the many black enlistees as well as the
thousands of stewards ready and willing to reenlist for peacetime
service.

If efficiency explains why the Navy's general service remained
disproportionately white, tradition explains how segregation and
racial exclusion could coexist with integration in an organization
that had so recently announced a progressive racial policy. Along with
its tradition of an integrated general service, the Navy had a
tradition of a white officer corps. It was natural for the Navy to
exclude black officers from the Regular Navy, Secretary John L.
Sullivan said later, just as it was common to place Negroes in mess
jobs.[9-9] A _modus vivendi_ could be seen emerging from the twin
dictates of efficiency and tradition: integrate a few thousand black
sailors throughout the general service in fulfillment of the letter of
the Bureau of Naval Personnel circular; as for the nonwhite Steward's
Branch and the lack of black officers, these conditions were ordinary
and socially comfortable. Since most Navy leaders agreed that the new
policy was fair and practical, no further changes seemed necessary in
the absence of a pressing military need or a demand from the White
House or Congress.

[Footnote 9-9: Interv, Nichols with Secretary John L.
Sullivan, Dec 52, in Nichols Collection, CMH.
Sullivan succeeded James Forrestal as secretary on
18 September 1947.]

To black publicists and other advocates of civil rights, the Navy's
postwar manpower statistics were self-explanatory: the Navy was
discriminating against the Negr