Though thirteen million American Negroes have more often than not been denied democracy, they are American citizens and will as in every war give unqualified support to the protection of their country. At the same time we shall not abate one iota our struggle for full citizenship rights here in the United States. We will fight but we demand the right to fight as equals in every branch of military, naval and aviation service. | ||
| --From minutes of NAACP Board of Directors meeting, 8 December 1941[1] | ||
The African-American experience at Arlington Hall Station (AHS), home of the National Security Agency and its Army predecessor organizations from 1942 to the mid-fifties, was shaped by a complex set of forces. In the simplest terms, African-American employment, as was that of individuals in any other group, was dictated by the intelligence needs of the nation's political and military leaders. The volume of target communications to be exploited that would provide the needed information and the systems available to process the data translated into manpower requirements. The nature of that employment, however, and the surrounding cultural environment reflected broader issues – the racial policies of the U.S. Army and the state of racial integration in America at large.
Although, to its credit, the racially integrated U.S. Army of the mid-fifties was a decade ahead of most civilian institutions on civil rights issues, the army of the early forties was viciously Jim Crow:
. . . The policy of the War department is not to intermingle colored and white personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has been proven satisfactory over a long period of years and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense. | ||
| --Memo from Robert P. Patterson, Assistant Secretary of War, to President Roosevelt, 27 September 1940[2] | ||
In December 1941, nearly 100,000 African-Americans were serving in the racially segregated U.S. Army, the vast majority in infantry, engineering, and quartermaster units. Less than 2 percent of enlistees were in the Signal Corps, and over the next seven months that percentage declined to less than 1 percent.[3] The basis for the Army position on African-American integration[4] was threefold. The two most commonly cited reasons were that the Army reflected the desires of the American people and was not an instrument for social change, and that it was efficient to use personnel according to their skills and capabilities. General George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff, articulated these arguments in a 1 December 1941 memorandum to Secretary of War Henry Stimson:
The problems presented with reference to utilizing Negro personnel in the army should be faced squarely. In doing so, the following facts must be recognized: first that the War Department cannot ignore the social relationship between Negroes and whites which has been established by the American people through custom and habit; second, that either through lack of educational opportunities or other causes the level of intelligence and occupational skill of the Negro population is considerably below that of the white; third, that the army will attain its maximum strength only if its personnel is [sic] properly placed in accordance with the capabilities of individuals; and fourth, that experiments within the army in the solution of social problems are fraught with danger to efficiency, discipline, and morale.[5]
". . . the level of intelligence and occupational skill of the Negro population is considerably below that of the white." The third plank underpinning the Army's rigid segregationist policies was the belief that African-Americans were inferior. An Army War College (AWC) study published in October 1925 concluded that "the black man was physically unqualified for combat duty; was by nature subservient, mentally inferior, and believed himself to be inferior to the white man; was susceptible to the influence of crowd psychology; could not control himself in the face of danger; and did not have the initiative and resourcefulness of the white man." [6]
Twelve years later, a similar "study" purported to present the Negro personality characteristics that commanders were likely to meet: "As an individual the negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free and good-natured. If unjustly treated he is likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive. He resents censure and is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is unmoral, untruthful and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior." [7]
The significance of these and other AWC studies cannot be underestimated. Historian Alan Osur concluded that the 1925 study "establishes the impact of racism upon the minds of these field grade officers of the 1920s who, generally speaking, would become the commanders in World War II. The importance of their early learning cannot be overstated in understanding their subsequent behavior."[8]
Clarence Toomer, an African-American NSA retiree, was a young Army enlistee in 1942. Interviewed in January 2000, he recalled his personal experience with army mandated segregation during World War II:
I grew up and went to school in Fayetteville, North Carolina. After the third year of high school, I decided that I wanted to see the world and I went off and joined the army. This was in 1942.
I was in the Quartermaster Corps. It's transportation now. We moved trucks and supplies or anything that had to be moved. It was an all-black regiment except for the officers. We first went to the West Coast, then we were shipped to Australia. In fact, I was on the maiden voyage of the Queen Elizabeth. They brought the ship to San Francisco to protect it from being damaged by the Germans while it was still under construction. Then they converted it to a troop ship. We had 10,000 troops on that ship, stacked four high in elaborate cabins which had forty people in them. It took thirty-nine days to zigzag across the Pacific.
You hear all kinds of stories about Australians not liking blacks, but the citizens were cordial. They received us with open arms. The people in Melbourne had Sunday teas in their homes and churches and would invite the black troops, and we went. They also had skating rinks in the city, but the white Americans identified a recreation area for black troops only. The American government, the American military did that – not the Australians.
Of course, the Army was right about one thing; it did largely reflect civilian attitudes. Schools, housing, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and recreational facilities were legally segregated by race in much of the country. Carl Dodd, the grandson of slaves, was a War Department messenger and clerk for approximately six years before joining the Army Security Agency, an NSA forerunner, in 1948. He vividly remembers the discrimination and intimidation endured by blacks in rural North Carolina during the Depression:
I grew up poor in Smithville. I went to school many days in coveralls and bare feet, and my parents couldn't afford to buy books. In North Carolina, they didn't furnish [blacks with] books until somewhere around 1936 or 1937. Of course, the schools were segregated. Some black kids could buy books, but many couldn't. I used to borrow books from my classmates during activity periods and read in the library. There was a large family of us and we just couldn't do things. We owned our land and home. That's it. My daddy sold a tremendous amount of land during the '30s trying to survive. Nobody worked much but my dad, and he was born of a slave parent. When I speak about him, it hurts me. He couldn't read or write, but he wanted his kids to get an education. We got what we could.
I came to Washington in 1941, because the Ku Klux Klan activity was terrible, and I had many, many fights with white people. My uncle was hit by a car, and I still don't understand it. An automobile at that time, mostly an A-model Ford or a T-model Ford, came by maybe every thirty minutes. So he had to have been put in front of a car and then hit. Many blacks were killed, and nobody ever knew and nobody ever cared. My mother and father thought it best that I leave. I was seventeen years old.[9]
The African-American press and civil rights organizations pressed the Roosevelt administration, the military, and the nation's political parties for change. The contradiction between an America at war against fascism abroad while inflicting racial injustices on its citizens at home was inescapable. This national struggle over equality became the impetus for a sea change in the employment of African-Americans at AHS.