rincipal cause of
racial unrest and poor morale among Negroes. The committee urged the
gradual integration of the general service in the name of military
efficiency. Granger and the committee also shared certain blind spots.
Both were encouraged by the progress toward full-scale integration
that occurred during the war, but this improvement was nominal at
best, a token bow to changing conditions. Their assumption that
integration would spread to all branches of the Navy neglected the
widespread and deeply entrenched opposition to integration that would
yield only to a strategy imposed by the Navy's civilian and military
leaders. Finally, the hope that integration would spread ignored the
fact that after the war few Negroes except stewards would be able to
meet the enlistment requirements for the Regular Navy. In short, the
postwar Navy, so far as Negroes were concerned, was likely to resemble
the prewar Navy.

The search for a postwar racial policy led the Army and Navy down some
of the same paths. The Army manpower planners decided that the best
way to avoid the inefficient black divisions was to organize Negroes
into smaller, and therefore, in their view, more efficient segregated
units in all the arms and services. At the same time Secretary
Forrestal's advisers decided that the best way to avoid the
concentration of Negroes who could not be readily assimilated in the
general service was to integrate the small remnant of black
specialists and leave the majority of black sailors in the separate
Steward's Branch. In both instances the experiences of World War II
had successfully demonstrated to the traditionalists that large-scale
segregated units were unacceptable, but neither service was yet ready
to accept large-scale integration as an alternative.

CHAPTER 6 (p. 152)

New Directions

All the services developed new racial policies in the immediate
postwar period. Because these policies were responses to racial
stresses peculiar to each service and were influenced by the varied
experiences of each, they were, predictably, disparate in both
substance and approach; because they were also reactions to a common
set of pressures on the services they proved to be, perhaps not so
predictably, quite similar in practical consequences. One pressure
felt by all the services was the recently acquired knowledge that the
nation's military manpower was not only v