les.]

While service responsibility for countering off-base discrimination
against servicemen was still highly debatable in 1946, the right of
men on a military base to protection was uncontestable. Yet even
service practices on military bases were under attack as racial
conflicts and threats of violence multiplied. "Dear Mother," one
soldier stationed at Sheppard Field, Texas, felt compelled to write in
early 1946, "I don't know how long I'll stay whole because when those
Whites come over to start [trouble] again I'll be right with the rest
of the fellows. Nothing to worry about. Love,..."[5-16] If the
soldier's letter revealed continuing racial conflict in the service,
it also testified to a growing racial unity among black servicemen
that paralleled the trend in the black community. When Negroes could
resolve with a new self-consciousness to "be right with the rest of
the fellows," their cause was immeasurably strengthened and their
goals brought appreciably nearer.

[Footnote 5-16: Ltr, 28 Feb 46, copy in SW 291.2.]

Civil rights spokesmen had several points to make regarding the use of
Negroes in the postwar armed forces. Referring to the fact that World
War II began with Negroes fighting for the right to fight, they
demanded that the services guarantee a fair representation of Negroes
in the postwar forces. Furthermore, to avoid the frustration suffered
by Negroes trained for combat and then converted into service troops,
they demanded that Negroes be trained and employed in all military
specialties. They particularly stressed the correlation between poor
leaders and poor units. The services' command practices, they charged,
had frequently led to the appointment of the wrong men, either black
or white, to command black units. Their principal solution was to
provide for the promotion and proper employment of a proportionate
share of competent black officers and noncommissioned officers. Above
all, they pointed to the humiliations black soldiers suffered in (p. 130)
the community outside the limits of the base.[5-17] One particularly
telling example of such discrimination that circulated in the black
press in 1945 described German prisoners of war being fed in a
railroad restaurant while their black Army guards were forced to eat
outside. But such discrimination toward black servicemen was hardly
unique, and the civil rights advocates were quick to point to the
connection between such practic