Notebook McNamara, Carmichael, and the GI Bill
Rader, Jack
Defense Secretary McNamara recently announced to the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars a "salvage" operation aimed at bringing tens of thousands of "SubStandard" youths into the...
...Too many teachers end by causing them [students] to retreat into a mental fog of boredom, confusion, and non-comprehension...
...There will be many more before this damnable war is over...
...GI Bill benefits are given only to those who apply for them, and that is not as simple as it sounds...
...Thus spoke McNamara, and who can question the essential truth of this statement...
...Between 1906 and 1940, Negroes in the military were pretty much excluded from fighting units...
...McNamara's proposals intensify the injustice of the whole recruitment system, with its collegiate exemption privileges, with the sanctuaries afforded to National Guard units, etc...
...Thirty per cent of the 40,000 draft rejects and substandard volunteers are Negro...
...Will all Negro veterans who are entitled to these benefits use them...
...The natural biases of a segregated society, reinforced by deliberate exclusions, have resulted in lily-white draft boards virtually everywhere...
...The question is vital for the future of the American Negro and American society as a whole...
...Robert M. Greenstein...
...aid to dependents—the small matter that one's family may not be evicted from its home while one of its members is in the armed forces—and other advantages rarely acquired by ghetto dwellers...
...The virtual exclusion of Negroes, following the Brownsville riot in 1906, except for the most menial chores, restored the commanding authority of the Southern officer corps, which had collapsed with the Civil War...
...As with so many other ambiguous SNCC postures today, its attitude toward the Negro soldier in Vietnam rejects present realities along with the history of Negro aspirations...
...Defense Secretary McNamara recently announced to the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars a "salvage" operation aimed at bringing tens of thousands of "SubStandard" youths into the armed forces—for their own good, of course...
...American miserliness toward its downtrodden—the flimsy sums alotted to the poverty programs, for example —is completely reversed in the treatment of veterans...
...Any Negro who gets caught out there fighting—not primarily a wrong or bad or stupid war, but a white man's war —is a hireling of the white world, therefore a mercenary...
...11 Stokely Carmichael has also been having his say about the Negro recruit...
...He proposed—and has since instituted— a revision of standards for military admissions, so as to render acceptable many who now are rejected for educational or physical deficiencies...
...Financing should present no overwhelming difficulty...
...credo of the whole armed establishment and the basis for limitations and exclusions that lasted for decades...
...It is modest to the extreme...
...This is a referral system, and it has long been noted that many of the poor get lost between agencies during the process of referral...
...McNamara would rather have them enlist in the war in Vietnam than in the War on Poverty, and he offers the lure of the world's most "efficient educator" (his description) to do the 212 job...
...Since the Revolutionary War, Negroes have fought to gain equal admission to the armed forces and to obtain equality of advancement and conditions...
...None of which implies advocating more Negro soldiers for Vietnam or anywhere else...
...They are simply availing themselves of an escape hatch from an otherwise airtight cage...
...The targets are the Job Corps, the Manpower Training Development Services, and other aspects of the War on Poverty...
...ity of treatment and opportunity for all persons within the Armed Forces without regard to race...
...The proposal is merely an attempt to turn this one aspect of the American reality into a lever for social improvement...
...But I would like to call attention to a limited possibility that is worth consideration, and action...
...better housing and living conditions...
...It simply requires doing...
...The message refers to the McNamara plan to induct former ineligibles, said to number 140,000, as a program already in operation...
...III There are some 300,000 Negroes in the armed forces...
...The terms of these benefits were written into law in the "Cold War GI Bill," which became effective in March of this year...
...Correct...
...The heart of the problem is how to minimize the successive hurdles so that the discharged Negro soldier knows, really knows, what he can apply for, what makes sense to him as an individual, and that he is helped to span the gaps along the way...
...There is criticism here, but no threat to the traditional jurisdiction of the schools...
...Most important is a direct link all the way through, a link strong enough to stay with the Negro veteran during his first months after demobilization...
...Just what will they be...
...to grant "equal...
...Provision is made for the estimated one in five demobilized soldiers who have not had a high school education to get one while receiving government stipends, and then to be able to continue to college...
...Carmichael, by implication at least, would welcome this ignoble victory...
...loans for the purchase of homes up to $17,500...
...It is sad, but true that the armed forces are probably the most integrated institutions in American life...
...GI insurance...
...Eligibility revisions are routine and seldom announced except in form circulars to draft boards...
...Will they simply go back to the cage...
...It requires knowing what you have a right to, how to select what is right for you, where to go for it, and how to tread your way through the bureaucratic maze and papers...
...In this respect, equality is still more talk than reality...
...The aging delegates at the convention probably didn't care one way or the other, but McNamara's thrust should have shaken the educational establishment: There is now ample evidence that many aptitude evaluations have less to do with how well students can learn than with the cultural valuesystem of the educator...
...point allowances on examinations for government jobs...
...Now, this is probably of little concern to Carmichael, but it is, vitally so, to the Negro community...
...The right to serve in all levels of the armed forces became a major commitment of the Negro struggle...
...It is a rarity indeed for the head of the military establishment to take this upon himself...
...What effort and struggle it took to get that far...
...a measure of equality...
...And it is in this militarization as a substitute for social policy that the danger lies, omitting for the moment the serious question of whether the army's achievement in educating the poor is quite as valuable as the claims made for it...
...The rate of Negro voluntary enlistment substantially exceeds that of whites...
...Carmichael is apparently not interested now in opposition to this inane and hopeless war on all the grounds that have been argued...
...Here there is unmatched largesse...
...Like everyone else who has been a soldier, the demobilized Negro is entitled to his share, not because he is a Negro or because he is poor, but simply as a matter of right...
...little upward mobility is visible...
...The rate of Negro re-enlistment after a first hitch is growing...
...A full 50 per cent must be trained in technical skills...
...Many Negro veterans will manage somehow, but there is no certainty of this...
...During World War I, Southern officers spread canards about the cowardice of the Negro soldier under fire, which became the...
...free care in Veterans Administration hospitals for both service and non-service medical problems...
...A casework approach to assist the Negro GI from the point of discharge to his return home and through the Veterans Administration proceedings would develop such individual plans...
...A few may decide to make a career of soldiering, but the great majority will be discharged at the end of their enlistment terms...
...The segregationists made it a fixed feature of their stereotype...
...They will be given special consideration and saved ("rehabilitated") educationally, occupationally, and socially (and, of course, rendered useful for army service...
...Whether Carmichael is aware of it or cares is beside the point...
...On various platforms he has declared Negro soldiers in Vietnam to be "nothing but mercenaries...
...The educators, however, were more foil than target...
...In most cases, it would be more realistic for the instructor to take a hard, honest look in the mirror and conclude: I am a low aptitude teacher...
...it merely asserts their right to the same treatment accorded others...
...But there are more difficult problems...
...Neither the American Legion nor the VFW is exactly attuned to servicing the Negro ex-soldier...
...he is interested solely in Negro opposition...
...Nor can the law be relied upon to be self-enforcing...
...The reasons for this are not hard to find: better pay, in many cases, than could be earned in civilian life...
...Few Negroes—somewhat over I,200 in all— have achieved officer status...
...The main trend is indisputable, though...
...It requires no special legislation, no civil rights bills, not even a demonstration of strength...
...This impugning of Negro manhood was corrosive to his self-image...
...Its features are essentially the same as those of previous GI bills: monthly allotments during up to three years of schooling (any kind of education from literacy to occupational to college) ; job counseling and placement...
...Political, moral, and even military considerations of the Vietnam War apart, why compound the blows already inflicted on the poor by militarizing them...
...He even offers assurance that most of them will not be killed, at least not in combat, "since only 14 per cent of the more than 3,000,000 men in out armed forces fire weapons as their primary duty...
...I don't pretend to have the answer —the whole course of American social policy and economy will determine that...
...Segregationist authority will operate in some areas to deprive the Negro veteran of his rights...
...McNamara has, in effect, posited the military as the social alternative to the War on Poverty...
...Not until 1940 were the bars lowered and then only for the formation of segregated units...
...and it is sheer irresponsibility to talk as if it does not matter...
...Too many instructors look at a reticent or apathetic or even hostile student and conclude: He is a low aptitude learner...
...This would move 40,000 young men into the military in the first year, and 100,000 in subsequent years, none of whom would have qualified under existing norms...
...There is, furthermore, a gap between the point of discharge, at which time everything is "explained," and the veteran's return home, and the steps he must take to obtain his rights...
...Who is there who took part in World War II and did not hear time and again rumors about this or that Negro unit having acquitted itself with shame in battle, unable to stand up to the fighting, and the other little scurrilities that were the common currency of military scuttlebut...
...That too many ghetto youth take this way out is a damning indictment of America, but it hardly makes the Negro soldiers "mercenaries...
...W. E. B. Dubois conducted the most scrupulous investigation to disprove the charges, but to no avail...
...It flowed from the triumph of Jim Crow and segregation after the Compromise of 1876 and the extension of these policies to all national institutions...
...They will no longer be Carmichael's "mercenaries" or McNamara's salvaged, though militarized, poor...
...The disproportionate number of Negroes in the Marines, Paratroopers, and other special forces got there by volunteering, volunteering twice in many cases, first for the military and then for the picked unit...
...He offers the military as the utopia of the poor, where at least they will be made into acceptable men...
...That is why over 17 per cent of army sergeants are Negroes...
...There is nothing "radical" in this proposal...
...The kinds 215 of services required could, for example, be discharged by the Urban League, through the medium of a veterans' department...
...Monthly allowances for ex-GI's going to school would be raised...
...hence the particular relevance for Negro youth...
...There is no Negro veterans' organization...
...The large number of Negro combat troops in Vietnam only partially reflect discrimination and a policy of militarizing the poor...
...a chance to do something regarded within the prevailing scale of values as socially useful...
...Society's rejects, black and white, are to be embraced by the armed forces where they will find a welcome not elsewhere available...
...Not until Truman's executive order of July 26, 1948 did it become the official policy of the U.S...
...Armed Forces is the only [emphasis in original] experience open to the Negro American in which he is truly treated as an equal: not as a Negro equal to a white, but as an equal to any other man in the world where the categories 'Negro' and 'white' do not exist...
...While many of LB J's legislative proposals seem in for tough sledding, she history of Congressional action for veterans leaves little doubt that these broader benefits will be approved...
...Moynihan: "The U.S...
...For example, there is growing concern about the composition of draft boards...
...There is ample precedent—such services have been established by veterans' organizations, situated within the discharge centers and in the local Veterans Administration offices...
...McNamara's particular twist here was the tie-in with the War on Poverty...
...On January 31, in a special message to Congress, President Johnson proposed the amplification of benefits to veterans, with specific reference to those in Vietnam...
...Even within the framework of his call for Black Power, it is cruel and factually inaccurate to pin a "mercenary" label on Negro soldiers...
...But McNamara's assertion that there is equal opportunity for advancement is not borne out by the evidence...
...And there is nothing shameful, from whatever political perspective, in assuring several hundred thousand Negro men a chance to elevate themselves in occupation, education, and housing...
...It is part of a record of achievement won through struggle...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
