Note (Back) — CHAPTER 15

For the most part those racial issues that did involve the Secretary of Defense centered on the status of the Negro in the armed forces in general and were extraneous to the issue of integration. One of the most persistent status problems was classification by race. First posed during the great World War II draft calls, the question of how to determine a serviceman's race, and indeed the related one of who had the right to make such a determination, remained unanswered five years later. In August 1944 the Selective Service System decided that the definition of a man's race should be left to the man himself. While this solution no doubt pleased racial progressives and certainly simplified the induction process, not to speak of protecting the War Department from a ticklish court review, it still left the services the difficult and important task of designating racial categories into which men could be assigned. As late as April 1949 the Army and the Air Force listed a number of specific racial categories, one of which had to be chosen by the applicant or recruiter—the regulation left the point unclear—to identify the applicant's race. The regulation listed "white, Negro, Indian (referring to American Indian only), Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese, East Indian, etc.," and specifically included mulattoes and "others of negroid race or extraction" in the Negro category, leaving other men of mixed race to be entered under their predominant race.[15-3]