he subsequent establishment of a black quota for each component
of the naval establishment meant that in the next year some 15,400
more Negroes, 10 percent of all Marine Corps inductees, would be added
to the corps.[4-17] As it turned out the monthly draft calls were never
completely filled, and by December 1943 only 9,916 of the scheduled
black inductions had been completed, but by the time the corps stopped
drafting men in 1946 it had received over 16,000 Negroes through the
Selective Service. Including the 3,129 black volunteers, the number of
Negroes in the Marine Corps during World War II totaled 19,168,
approximately 4 percent of the corps' enlisted men.

[Footnote 4-17: Memo, CMC for Chief, NavPers, 1 Apr
43, sub: Negro Registrants To Be Inducted Into the
Marine Corps, AO-320-2350-60, MC files.]

The immediate problem of what to do with this sudden influx of Negroes
was complicated by the fact that many of the draftees, the product of
vastly inferior schooling, were incompetent. Where black volunteers
had to pass the corps' rigid entrance requirements, draftees had (p. 104)
only to meet the lowest selective service standards. An exact
breakdown of black Marine Corps draftees by General Classification
Test category is unavailable for the war period. A breakdown of some
15,000 black enlisted men, however, was compiled ten weeks after V-J
day and included many of those drafted during the war. Category I
represents the most gifted men:[4-18]

Category: I II III IV V
Percentage: 0.11 5.14 24.08 59.63 11.04

[Footnote 4-18: Memo, Dir, Pers, for Dir, Div of
Plans and Policies, 21 Jul 48, sub: GCT Percentile
Equivalents for Colored Enlisted Marines in
November 1945 and in March 1948, sub file: Negro
Marines--Test and Testing, Ref Br, Hist Div, HQMC.]

If these figures are used as a base, slightly more than 70 percent of
all black enlisted men, more than 11,000, scored in the two lowest
categories, a meaningless racial statistic in terms of actual numbers
because the smaller percentage of the much larger group of white
draftees in these categories gave the corps more whites than blacks in
groups IV and V. Yet the statistic was important because low-scoring
Negroes, unlike the low-scoring whites who could be scattered
throughou