or
of pride in service, a pride that could hardly be restored by the
postwar image of the black sailor not as a fighting man but as
a servant or laborer. Always a loyal member of the Navy team, (p. 252)
Granger was anxious to improve the Navy's public image in the black
community, and he and others often advanced plans for doing so.[9-59]
But any discussion of image quickly foundered on one point: the Navy
would remain suspect in the eyes of black youth and be condemned by
civil rights leaders as long as it retained that symbol of racism, the
racially separate Steward's Branch.

[Footnote 9-59: See, for example, Ltr, Granger to
SecNav, 10 Jun 47, 54-1-13, Forrestal file,
GenRecsNav, and Granger's extensive comments and
questions at the National Defense Conference on
Negro Affairs, 26 Apr 48.]

[Illustration: SUBMARINER.]

Here the practical need for change ran headlong into strong military
tradition. An integrated general service was traditional and therefore
acceptable; an integrated servants' branch was not. Faced with the
choice of a small number of Negroes in the Navy and the attendant
charges of racism or a change in its traditions, the Navy accepted the
former. Lack of interest on the part of the black community was not a
particularly pressing problem for the Navy in the immediate postwar
years. Indeed, it might well have been a source of comfort for the
military traditionalists who, armed with an unassailable integration
policy, could still enjoy a Navy little changed from its prewar
condition. Nevertheless, the lack of black volunteers for general
service was soon to be discussed by a presidential commission, and in
the next fifteen years would become a pressing problem when the Navy,
the first service with a policy of integration, would find itself
running behind in the race to attract minority members.

CHAPTER 10 (p. 253)

The Postwar Marine Corps

Unlike the Army and Navy, the all-white Marine Corps seemed to
consider the wartime enlistment of over 19,000 Negroes a temporary
aberration. Forced by the Navy's nondiscrimination policy to retain
Negroes after the war, Marine Corps officials at first decided on a
black representation of some 2,200 men, roughly the same proportion as
during the war. But the old tradition of racial exclusion remai