eir championship and were
winning adherents to their view that the number should be increased. The
selective draft with its firm dictum that all men within certain ages
should be called and the fit ones chosen, put an end to all contention.
The act was not passed without bitter opposition which developed in its
greatest intensity among the Southern senators and representatives;
feelings that were inspired entirely by opposition to the Negro.

It would have been a bad thing for the country and would have prolonged
the war, and possibly might have lost it, if the selective draft had
been delayed. But it would have been interesting to see how far the
country, especially the South, would have progressed in the matter of
raising a volunteer army without accepting Negroes. Undoubtedly they
soon would have been glad to recruit them, even in the South.

Unfortunately for the Negro, the draft was not able to prevent their
being kept out of the Navy. It is a very desirable branch of the service
vitiated and clouded, however, with many disgusting and aristocratic
traditions. When the Navy was young and the service more arduous; when
its vessels were merely armed merchantmen, many of them simply tubs and
death traps and not the floating castles of today, the services of
Negroes were not disdained; but times and national ideals had changed,
and, the shame of it, not to the credit of a Commonwealth, for whose
birth a Negro had shed the first blood, and a Washington had faced the
rigors of a Valley Forge, a Lincoln the bullet of an assassin.

The annual report of the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, rendered to
the Secretary of the Navy and covering the fiscal year ending June 30,
1918, showed that in the United States Navy, the United States Naval
Reserve Force and the National Naval Volunteers, there was a total of
435,398 men. Of that great number only 5,328 were Negroes, a trifle over
one percent. Between June and November 1918, the Navy was recruited to a
total force somewhat in excess of 500,000 men. Carrying out the same
percentage, it is apparent that the aggregate number of Negroes serving,
in the Navy at the close of the war, could not have been much in excess
of 6,000.

Some extra enlistments of Negroes were contemplated, as the Navy had in
process of establishment just prior to the armistice, a new service for
Negro recruits. It was to be somewhat similar to the Pioneer units of
the army, partaking in some degree of t