Essay On Marine Corps Segregation

The United States military was the first organization to end segregation and integrate, with the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps being the first two to fully integrate they became the shining example that the American population should have followed. What caused the Army and Marine Corps to become the first to integrate is because of the way there are both structured and controlled. The military is an organization that if rules are not followed then people are either kicked out, put in jail, or possibly even killed. When joining the military one gives up a certain amount of freedoms that allow the machine to work properly, and with the loss of freedoms comes a command structure that demands orders be followed with no questions asked. With

One provision of the document referred specifically to the Marines separate basic training facility at Montford-Point in North Carolina. It required the Marines to abolish this facility and integrate blacks into the white training camps. The Corps displayed its customary stubbornness and refused the order, however, the Corps soon saw that it was expensive to maintain a separate training facility for the small number of blacks that were in the Corps. Because of budget cutbacks the Marine Corps the training base was abandoned, black and white platoons were combined into the same companies. Marine Commandant, General Clifton B. Cates defended segregation in terms of military efficiency, arguing that “(the armed forces) could not be an agency for experimentation in civil liberty without detriment to its ability to maintain the efficiency and the high state of readiness so essential to national defense.” However, since the number of blacks in the Marines was so small, only 1,504 on active duty, and more likely because the Marine Corps fell under the Department of the Navy the Corps received little attention from the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, also known as the Fahy

Its explanation for this refusal was a thorough assertion that it could not fully attain the goal of equal treatment and opportunity with the desegregation of Army units. Because the Army contained the most blacks within the military and the fact that they publicly and blatantly refused to desegregate, the committee could neither ignore nor sidestep the Army’s situation. The negotiations between the committee and the Army, often leading to direct confrontations, occupied most of the committee’s time during early 1950. These negotiations revealed the tense relationship that existed between the White House, the Defense Department, and the Army. The Army was vastly different from the other services when it came to race. The idea of desegregation appeared intimidating and too difficult t many Army officials. The Army had the greatest number of blacks serving within its ranks, many of whom were poorly educated. In 1949 the number of black enlistees was 12.4 percent, compared to the Air Force with 5.1 percent, 4.7 percent in the Navy, and 2.1 percent in the Marine Corps. The Army was the only service that was not, and did not perceive itself as, an elite organization. With the Army’s traditional southern cast of the Army’s officer corps and Noncommissioned officers meant that regional differences in racial attitudes were prominent in internal Army thinking. Army officials worried about the