Truman’s Executive Order 9981: Advancing Military Policy Ahead of American Attitudes

For seventy-five years, the military departments of the United States have implemented personnel policies that favor equality “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”[i] President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981—“Establishing the President’s Committee on Equality of the Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services”—on 26 July 1948. At the time of the signing, the Navy and the Air Force were already in the process of establishing policies of complete racial integration. The Army, however, had not yet reached that level of dedication, even defending “its segregation policy as a military necessity and as one that had proved successful in the past.”[ii] General Omar Bradley told reporters two weeks after the signing, “The Army is not out to make any social reforms. . . It will change that policy when the nation as a whole changes it.”[iii] Bradley’s comments reflected a common attitude among many military and civilian officials at the time: the armed services and the National Military Establishment, renamed the Department of Defense (DOD) in 1949, should certainly “keep abreast of civilian sentiment and practice,” but not advance, or appear to advance, social reform ahead of American society.[iv] Despite those norms, however, President Truman signed E.O. 9981—a decision to implement social change across the armed services that preceded broader public opinion.[v]

After consolidating the armed forces under what would become the DOD, uniform personnel policies and instructions were necessary, including those centering racial integration. Truman’s executive order, therefore, established a committee, led by Georgia Democrat Charles Fahy, “to examine the rules, procedures, and practices of the armed services in order to determine in what respect they might be altered or improved with a view toward carrying out the policy of the order.”[vi] With extensive legal qualifications as the first general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board as well as former Solicitor General of the United States, Fahy was a suitable candidate to lead the committee. Additional participants included National Urban League (NUL) Executive Director Lester Blackwell Granger (who had also worked with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to begin the efforts to integrate the Navy), Oberlin College President William E. Stevenson, NUL member Dwight R.G. Palmer, and Chicago Defender publisher John H. Sengstacke.[vii]
 
After a series of interviews and hearings, the committee identified that the services had operated under two assumptions: “(1) Negroes do not have the education and skills to perform efficiently in the more technical military occupations, and (2) Negroes must be utilized, with few exceptions, in segregated units.” The military departments acknowledged “that Negroes as a group have not enjoyed comparable educational advantages with whites, and have not had the same opportunity to learn skilled trades.” Irrespective of the causes for this skill differential, the military best utilized Black manpower “in the interest of military efficiency.” The leading justifications, the committee cited, were “precedent and custom” and “morale.” It was therefore “expediency,” the report concluded, and “not racial prejudice” that kept African Americans in segregated units until 1948. Freedom to Serve—as with many of the Cold War-era reports that interrogated the social conditions of minority soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen—reported the common refrain echoed by officials: the military departments should under no circumstances initiate dramatic social changes in advance of society at large.[viii] In the same August 1948 New York Times article that quoted Gen. Bradley, journalist Hanson W. Baldwin affirmed, “There is definite prejudice among white Southerners, and among many Northerners against . . . intermingling; at the very best it would cause friction.”[ix] Executive Order 9981, nevertheless, desegregated the armed services over five years before the Supreme Court unanimously mandated desegregation in public education “with all deliberate speed” in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, and sixteen years before Title II of the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in places of public accommodation.[x] With limited postwar resources, desegregation in each branch occurred at varying paces, with the Air Force and the Navy leading the effort to integrate Black sailors and airmen into every billet.
 
As a newly-independent military department, the US Air Force was more efficient than most other branches at integrating African Americans into all-white units. In fact, the Department of the Air Force notified the Secretary of Defense and the American public that it would integrate along racial lines—three months before Truman’s executive order.[xi] With many bases dotting the southern landscape, the Air Force circumvented state and municipal Jim Crow-era segregation laws by integrating all buildings and structures on post. The Air Force integrated completely in 1952.[xii] Historian Morris MacGregor cites six percent of the Navy’s African American sailors in general service at the close of demobilization. That number grew to thirty-eight percent only two years later, with these men and women living and working in entirely integrated spaces. However, sixty-two percent of all African Americans in the Navy—10,871 men in December 1948—remained in the separate Steward’s Branch (Table 1).[xiii]
 
Table 1. Racial and Ethnic Breakdown of the Stewards Branch, ca. May 1949

Negro	10,499	Hawaiian	5
Filipino	4,707	Puerto Rican	4
Chamorro	641	Japanese	1
Chinese	55	American Indian	1
Samoan	25	Caucasian	1
Korean	9	Total	15,945

Reprinted from Morris MacGregor, Integration in the Armed Forces, 1940-1965, Defense Studies Series (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), 332. Figures taken from BuPers, “Steward Group Personnel by Race,” 24 May 1945, Pers 25, BuPersRecs.
 
At the time of the Fahy Committee report, the Navy cited African Americans “serving in every job classification in general service.” The Navy’s technical schools, too, were open to qualified personnel and “without racial quotas,” officials added.[xiv] “The thing that most impressed the Committee about the Navy’s experience was that in the relatively short space of five years the Navy had moved from a policy of complete exclusion of Negroes from general service to a policy of complete integration.” The Navy “had not been primarily motivated by moral considerations,” rather “the Navy had been influenced by considerations of military efficiency and the need to economize human resources.”[xv] Subject to Navy policy, the Marine Corps abolished its segregated training units as per policy changes the department adopted on June 7, 1949. While integrated training centers were a step toward complete desegregation, “some” Black marines received assignments to segregated units after basic training. The Fahy Committee reasoned that the execution of Navy policy by the Marine Corps was neither uniform nor complete by the report’s publication in 1950.[xvi]
 
The Fahy Committee leveraged the military efficiency argument against intractable Army officials, contending that the new complexities of war warranted a greater infusion of skilled manpower. In the nuclear age, the nation could not afford to train its soldiers inadequately. Maximum military efficiency demanded that every member of the armed services exploit their talents and, the Committee reasoned, an inseparable link therefore existed between military efficiency and equal opportunity.[xvii] The Committee found that the Army “had underestimated the progress which the Negro had made in education and technical skill” and recommended “that the Army must henceforth utilize effectively every individual in the position for which he was best fitted.”[xviii] The Committee supplied ten specialty ratings in which the Army was deficient, citing “the denial of opportunity and potential waste of manpower resulting from segregation” as cause (Table 2).[xix] To obtain parity, the Army agreed to place in the hands of commanders a list of vacant specialties and allow them to fill any open billets with Black soldiers possessing the necessary skills.[xx]
 
Table 2. Select Army Occupational Specialties with Manpower Vacancies, ca. February 1949.

Occupational Specialty	Number of Men Short	Negro Authorization
Telephone Operator	75	0
Portable Power Generator Repairman	66	0
Shop Maintenance Mechanic	53	2
Radio Repairman Single Channel	79	0
Transmitter Attendant, Fixed Station	143	0
Telephone and Telegraph Repairman	79	0
Artillery Mechanic AA Minor maintenance	79	0
Repeaterman	528	4
Pharmacist	188	3
Welder Armor Plate	89	7

Reprinted from Charles Fahy et al., Freedom to Serve: Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950), 58.
 
When word reached A. Philip Randolph that the House Armed Services Committee wrote racial segregation provisions into a proposed bill on Universal Military Training (UMT) three years after the executive order, Randolph channeled his shock into a telegram to the White House. “The United States Armed Forces with a racial segregation pattern is utterly inconsistent with our democratic pronouncements,” Randolph reasoned. “Racial segregation,” he continued, “cannot convince anyone at home or abroad to our avowed determination to democratize the world.” He implored President Truman, “to do everything in your power to defeat any provision which will result in racial discrimination and segregation against any American citizens who bears arms in defense of the nation.”[xxi] The final draft, however, provided that “there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color.”[xxii] Ultimately, Congress preferred the Selective Service program and reserve training over UMT, and the legislation died in 1957.[xxiii]
 
As this truncated history shows, desegregation was neither complete nor immediate and almost entirely dependent upon which branch of the military invested resources to eliminate racial segregation. Like Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Truman’s Executive Order 9981 was, effectively, an instruction to the DOD and the armed services to desegregate military units with all deliberate speed. This directive from the Commander-in-Chief had the added—and, to some officials like Army General Bradley, insidious—effect of  substantially altering the social conventions of the armed forces prior to those changes in the larger American consciousness and practice. The start of the Korean War in 1950, too, helped to eliminate the final vestiges of segregated units with the influx of Black soldiers in general service.[24]