Navy had
four black nurses on active duty.]

[Footnote 3-135: Ltr, Chief, NavPers, to Cmdts, All
Naval Districts, 11 Jun 45, sub: Negro Recruit
Training--Discontinuance of Special Program and
Camps for, P16-3/MM, BuPersRecs.]

[Footnote 3-136: Memo, SecNav for Artemus L. Gates,
Asst Sec for Air, et al. 16 Jul 45; Ltr, SecNav to
Granger, 14 Jul 45; both in 54-1-20, GenRecsNav.]

[Footnote 3-137: Ltr, Granger to Forrestal, 4 Aug 45,
54-1-13, GenRecsNav.]

[Illustration: THE 22D SPECIAL CONSTRUCTION BATTALION CELEBRATES V-J
DAY.]

The Navy's wartime progress in race relations was the product of
several forces. At first Negroes were restricted to service as
messmen, but political pressure forced the Navy to open general
service billets to them. In this the influence of the civil rights
spokesmen was paramount. They and their allies in Congress and the
national political parties led President Roosevelt to demand an end to
exclusion and the Navy to accept Negroes for segregated general
service. The presence of large numbers of black inductees and the
limited number of assignments for them in segregated units prevented
the Bureau of Naval Personnel from providing even a semblance of
separate but equal conditions. Deteriorating black morale and the
specter of racial disturbance drove the bureau to experiment with
all-black crews, but the experiment led nowhere. The Navy could never
operate a separate but equal fleet. Finally in 1944 Forrestal began to
experiment with integration in seagoing assignments.

The influence of the civil rights forces can be overstated. Their
attention tended to focus on the Army, especially in the later years
of the war; their attacks on the Navy were mostly sporadic and
uncoordinated and easily deflected by naval spokesmen. Equally
important to race reform was the fact that the Navy was developing its
own group of civil rights advocates during the war, influential men in
key positions who had been dissatisfied with the prewar status of the
Negro and who pressed for racial change in the name of military
efficiency. Under the leadership of a sympathetic secretary, (p. 098)
himself aided and abetted by Stevenson and other advisers in his
office and in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, the Navy was laying