Note (Back) — CHAPTER 23

Although committed to a nationwide imposition of sanctions on housing if necessary, the Secretary of Defense hoped that the example of a few cases would be sufficient to break the intransigence of offending landlords; certainly a successful test case would strengthen the hand of the commanders in their negotiations with community leaders. Metropolitan Washington was the obvious area for the first test case, and the Maryland General Assembly further focused attention on that region when on 28 February 1967 it called on the Secretary of Defense to end housing discrimination for all military personnel in the state.[23-88] On the night of 21 June, Gerhard Gesell received an unexpected phone call: there would be something in tomorrow's paper, Robert McNamara told him, that should be especially interesting to the judge.[23-89] And there was, indeed, on the front page. As of 1 July, all military personnel would be forbidden to lease or rent housing in any segregated apartment building or trailer court within a three-and-a-half-mile radius of Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. Citing the special housing problems of servicemen returning from Vietnam, McNamara pointed out that in the Andrews area of Maryland less than 3 percent of some 22,000 local apartment units were open to black servicemen. The Andrews situation, he declared, was causing problems "detrimental to the morale and welfare of the majority of our Negro military families and thus to the operational effectiveness of the base."[23-90]