Note (Back) — CHAPTER 18

The perennial problem of an all-black Steward's Branch persisted into the 1960's. Stewards served a necessary though unglamorous function in the Marine Corps, and education standards for such duty were considerably lower than those for the rest of the service. Everyone understood this, and beyond the stigma many young people felt was attached to such duties, many Negroes particularly resented the fact that while the branch was officially open to all, somehow none of the less gifted whites ever joined. Stewards were acquired either by recruiting new marines with stewards-duty-only contracts or by accepting volunteers from the general service. The evidence suggests that there was truth in the commonly held assumption among stewards that when a need for more stewards arose, "volunteers" were secured by tampering with the classification test scores of men in the general service.[18-26]