Least-Racist Society : Military’s Unending War on Bias

The first shocks for recruits entering basic training at Ft. Knox are the barber’s buzz cut, the 0430 reveille and the cold clang of a ladle on a metal meal tray.

But that’s nothing; the recruits expect all that.

The real eye-opener is the drill sergeant, who is very likely to be black. For most white recruits, the Army is the first place they will find themselves taking orders from a black man, because about 40% of the Army’s drill sergeants are black.

‘In Their Interest’

“Some of them have to learn how to show respect,” said Staff Sgt. John Campbell, a black 30-year-old drill instructor from Orangeburg, S.C. “We convince them in the first two or three days that it’s in their interest.”

It has become a cliche that the Army is the most colorblind institution in American society, and by most available measures it is.

The most dramatic demonstration will come today, when the Senate is expected to swiftly confirm the appointment of Gen. Colin L. Powell, a black, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s senior military job. For at least the next two years, all 2.1 million men and women in the American military will be taking orders from a black man.

But despite their growing numbers in the enlisted and officer ranks and despite the symbolism of Powell’s elevation, blacks and other minorities in the military still suffer from subtle but pervasive discrimination. Powell, speaking to an audience of black journalists last month, acknowledged that the promise of full racial equality in the military remains unredeemed.

“The real story is that, yes, I climbed well and I climbed hard, but that I climbed over the cliffs on the backs of those that went before,” the 52-year-old general said. “But now that we’re on top and looking over that cliff, there are still more rivers to cross.”

Disciplinary Actions

Blacks are under-represented at the highest ranks in all the services and overrepresented in disciplinary actions. Black officers often are denied critical command assignments that lead to promotions; black enlisted men tend to be grouped in non-technical specialties that limit their job opportunities when they leave the service.

And while blacks and whites and Latinos mesh smoothly in training and in their daily assignments on post, they still tend to segregate themselves by race off duty.

“We have a racist and sexist society, and the Army mirrors it,” said Sgt. 1st Class Stephen R. Odum, who monitors race relations at Ft. Knox. “The race problem (in the military) definitely still needs to be addressed. But we’re head and shoulders above other sectors of society.”

Odum’s observation clearly applies to Ft. Knox and the surrounding communities of rural Kentucky.

Walk into any mess hall or social club on this sprawling military post--in the enlisted men’s barracks, the noncommissioned officers’ club or the elegant officers’ club--and you are struck by the casual and unconscious mixing of the races. Men and women on post tend to congregate by rank, not by race.

But just outside the gates of Ft. Knox, in the town of Radcliffe, Ky., which exists almost exclusively to serve the base and its 10,000 servicemen, bias against blacks is “rampant,” according to Staff Sgt. Stanley Parton of Ft. Knox’s equal opportunity office.

“Just for a test, a white NCO (noncommissioned officer) went with a black couple, with their baby, to a restaurant in Radcliffe,” Parton said. “It took an hour and a half to get their order taken, then another hour and a half to get served.”

That could never happen on a U.S. military installation anywhere in the world, officials said. The people responsible would be court-martialed and dismissed from the service.

Sees Klansmen

About 20 miles up the road from Ft. Knox, in Valley Station, Ky., Staff Sgt. Anthony McCormick recently stopped for a traffic light to find a band of Ku Klux Klansmen in full regalia passing out racist literature.

“This shocked the hell out of me,” said McCormick, a black 27-year-old rifle instructor from the small town of Evergreen, N.C. “It was really a trip, after living in the South all my life, to actually see them.”

Military base commanders are theoretically responsible for monitoring the off-post treatment of their subordinates. A highly publicized effort begun in the 1960s under former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to end off-base discrimination had little success and has been virtually abandoned.

But within the military, sensitivity to racial and sexual differences is now an important factor in all promotion decisions. The periodic performance report for every officer and NCO includes a section assessing his or her attitude toward and treatment of blacks, Latinos, Asians and women.

The ban on bias is strictly enforced. “Openly expressing racism is professional suicide for any officer,” one black Army colonel said. “I know of a colonel taken off the general officers’ (promotion) list because he made a racist remark. It ended his career.”

Far Less Segregated

It is an almost universally accepted sentiment within the Army that the military is far less segregated than civilian life and that open discrimination has all but disappeared.

“We’re stretched thin in the Army these days,” said Lt. Col. Tony Jayjock, deputy commander of the 4th Training Brigade at Ft. Knox. “We can’t afford the luxury of discriminating against anybody.”

Or as Sgt. McCormick put it: “There’s just something that forces a soldier to treat another soldier fair, whether he’s black or white, knowing that someday, God forbid, he may have to give you his last drink of water.”

The military was officially desegregated on July 26, 1948, when President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 requiring “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

For some years afterward, the services maintained segregated combat units and assigned blacks at bases and headquarters chiefly to menial work as waiters, drivers, ditch-diggers, supply officers and telephone operators. In the Navy, then the most segregated of the services, virtually the only blacks in uniform were dining room stewards.

The Navy and the newly formed Air Force quickly responded to the presidential order by outlawing discrimination and moving to integrate all units, although today they lag far behind the Army in numbers of black NCOs and officers.

Called Unreliable

The postwar Army, with more blacks than the other services combined, moved more slowly. Senior commanders complained that blacks were unreliable in combat, lacked basic verbal and technical skills and could not be assigned side by side with whites without creating uncontrollable frictions. The Army’s officer corps was traditionally white, Southern and deeply resistant to change.

Retired Gen. Roscoe Robinson, the Army’s first black four-star general, entered the service from West Point in 1951 as a second lieutenant, one of only five blacks in his cadet class and only the 16th black to graduate in the academy’s 150-year history. He was assigned to an all-black unit of the 11th Airborne Division and sent to Korea.

“It took more than a presidential proclamation” to desegregate the Army, said Robinson, who retired in 1985 and is now a consultant in Washington. “That was virtually ignored for some time. It took a realization that we were not getting the maximum from all our people.”

Although Robinson won rapid promotion, as late as the mid-1960s he was denied career-enhancing posts that were then open only to whites. “I can tell you without thinking about it, there were regions of the world blacks could not go,” he said. “There were very few blacks assigned to visible jobs at higher headquarters. None of these opened up until the 1960s.”

He noted that in the mid-1960s, there were no more than five black colonels in the entire Army. Virtually no blacks were sent to the command and staff colleges, ensuring that they would not be given essential regimental or divisional commands.

Warning on Racism

Robinson, while defending the Army’s record on race, cautions that without constant vigilance, subtle or overt forms of racism could quietly reappear. “We have to be careful, be very alert that those things do not creep back in because of attitudes individuals might hold,” Robinson said.

The military is unique in American society because of its strict hierarchy and its insistence on obedience to orders. It could move more swiftly to bar discrimination than any other institution.

“If I give someone an order, they’re going to abide by it whether they like it or not,” said Lt. Col. Johnny Smith, a black 18-year Army veteran assigned to the headquarters company at Ft. Knox.

Orders from a superior can halt racist behavior. But attitudes have deeper roots.

“Segregation was over when I got in as far as the rules were concerned, but not as far as attitudes,” said Command Sgt. Maj. John M. Stephens, 50, a white 32-year Army veteran who is the senior NCO at Ft. Knox. “You can control a man’s actions; it’s very difficult to control his thoughts.”

Perhaps the most troubling remnant of bias in the armed forces is the undeniable over-representation of blacks in disciplinary actions. The Pentagon claims not to keep statistics on such disparities, but black and white officers agree that blacks face charges under the military justice code more often and receive stiffer penalties than white GIs.

“A disproportionate number of blacks are brought up on charges in comparison to the population,” said Julius E. Williams, a black retired Army colonel who is the NAACP’s national director of military affairs. “There is a disproportionate number of blacks in the penal institutions of the military. The natural question is why.”

Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas L. Bain of the Pentagon’s equal opportunity office acknowledges disparities in discipline. But he says that there is no system for tracking them nor has a cause ever been established. A study of the problem is now under way, said Bain, who is black.

At Ft. Knox, the same pattern holds: more blacks charged, more severe penalties levied.

“Blacks are notoriously overrepresented, consistently overrepresented in disciplinary actions,” said Odum, equal opportunity monitor for the 4th Training Brigade.

Why? “There are so many variables,” Odum said. “The power structure is white. That’s just a fact of life.”

Many soldiers say that white and black NCOs are tougher on black privates than on whites. Many of the white sergeants are closet racists, young black enlisted men contend. And black NCOs, by their own admission, are harder on black enlistees because they want them to succeed.

“My biggest problem is that the black kids expect preferential treatment,” said Sgt. Campbell, a 4th Brigade drill instructor. “The blacks expect favors. Sometimes I have to treat them a little harsher.”

Others on post observe that the towns nearest Ft. Knox are virtually all white and have no clubs or bars where black GIs feel welcome, a pattern repeated at dozens of military bases throughout the South and West.

So blacks on liberty from Ft. Knox drive 30 miles to tough West Louisville, where they hang out in black bars and often run into trouble. And when they drive back to the post on a highway patrolled by Kentucky state troopers, many of them find themselves jailed on drunk-driving charges.

Another factor cited by Odum is that blacks tend to stay in the military and take their punishment because they have so few economic alternatives in civilian society. Whites are more likely to quietly leave the service because they are more confident they can find jobs outside, even with a tainted service record.

Similar disparities exist in the civilian justice system, where blacks are imprisoned at far higher rates than whites. The explanation, say civil rights officials, includes police forces and judges who are overwhelmingly white and disposed to impose harsher penalties on black offenders.

Inadequate legal representation for poor defendants--a problem cited by military rights monitors as well--is also to blame for the high proportion of blacks in prison, according to NAACP officials.

Despite the remaining racial problems within the military, the armed services probably provide the broadest avenue for black upward mobility of any institution in contemporary America.

“It’s been great for me,” said Sgt. 1st Class Charles M. Mooney, 38, a black recruiter from Washington who now runs the Army recruiting office in the ghetto neighborhood where he grew up.

“I left this neighborhood in 1970 with a pair of Converse shoes and a pair of khaki pants,” he said. “Now I’ve got two homes, two cars, three kids and a silver medal from the 1976 Olympics (for boxing). The Army allowed me to pursue a dream I had. I wanted to go to the Games. I tried to do it on the streets and it didn’t work.”

He said that recruiting black kids from the ghetto is relatively easy, given the dearth of opportunities for black dropouts or even high school graduates. The Army pays more than McDonald’s, teaches marketable skills and finances a college education, he said.

“It’s easy to sell the Army as an alternative, as a way out of a system that is not going to give them a chance,” Mooney said. “I just point out the window and they can see what the alternative is.”

BLACKS IN THE MILITARY, 1971-1989

Total numbers, and as a percentage of everyone in the category.

1971 1980 1989 Total all races 2,701,208 2,036,672 2,116,232 Blacks 274,966 399,729 421,423 Total 10.2% 19.6% 19.9% Enlisted men 266,531 385,860 400,923 and women 11.4% 21.9% 22.1% Noncommissioned 107,668 126,097 176,304 officers 11.5% 18.3% 22.4% Officers 8,435 13,869 20,500 2.3% 5.0% 6.8% Colonels/captains 109 336 367 0.6% 2.4% 2.6% Generals/admirals 2 38 37 1.5% 3.5% 3.5%

SOURCE: Defense Department