Note (Back) — CHAPTER 19

The Department of Defense could look with pride at its progress. In less than three years after President Eisenhower had promised to look into segregated schools for military dependents, the department had integrated hundreds of classrooms, inducing local authorities to integrate a series of schools in areas that had never before seen blacks and whites educated together. It had even ordered the integration of classes conducted on post by local universities and voluntarily attended by servicemen in off-duty hours.[19-87] Yet many dependent schools were untouched because Wilson's order applied only to schools on federal property. It ignored the largest category of dependent schools, those in the local community that because of heavy enrollment of federal dependents were supported in whole or part by federal funds. In these institutions some 28,000 federal dependents were being educated in segregated classes. Integration for them would have to await the long court battles that followed Brown v. Board of Education.