Note (Back) — CHAPTER 17

But integration did more than demonstrate a new form of military efficiency. It also stilled several genuine fears long entertained by military leaders. Many thoughtful officials had feared that the social mingling that would inevitably accompany integration in the continental United States might lead to racial incidents and a breakdown in discipline. The new policy seemed to prove this fear groundless.[17-99] A 1953 Army-sponsored survey reported that, with the single major exception of racially separate dances for enlisted men at post-operated service clubs on southern bases, segregation involving uniformed men and women now stopped at the gates of the military reservation.[17-100] Army headquarters, carefully monitoring the progress of social integration, found it without incident.[17-101] At the same time the survey revealed that some noncommissioned officers' clubs and enlisted men's clubs tended to segregate themselves, but no official notice was taken of this tendency, and not one such instance was a source of racial complaint in 1953. The survey also discovered that racial attitudes in adjacent communities had surprisingly little influence on the relations between white and black soldiers on post. Nor was there evidence of any appreciable resentment toward integration on the part of white civilian employees, even when they worked with or under black officers and enlisted men.