Most histories of military integration end with Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 in 1948 or the integration of the last segregated unit in 1954. Historian Beth Bailey takes this as her starting point. Her subject in Army Afire is the three decades that followed, when the military struggled to cope with the challenges of its new policy.
Bailey opens with a litany of incidents that give the reader an idea of the nature and scale of the problem:
On August 23, 1968, between sixty and 100 black soldiers at Fort Hood announced their refusal to be deployed for anti-riot duty at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “The people we are supposed to control, the rioters, are probably our own race,” one said. “We shouldn’t have to go out there and do wrong to our own people.”
On August 29, 1968, Long Binh Jail, a U.S. military prison in Vietnam, erupted in a weeks-long riot that destroyed several buildings and left the commanding officer so badly beaten that he soon took medical retirement. One white inmate, Private Edward Haskett, was beaten to death with a shovel. The prison had been built to house 400 inmates but at the time housed over 700, the vast majority of them black. The part of the stockade where the rebellious prisoners holed up was declared the “Soul Brothers Compound.” One participant later recalled, “We used the blankets to make African robes and the tent poles for spears.”
On October 14, 1968, Major Lavell Merritt staged an unofficial press conference in Saigon where he denounced the Army as racist and distributed a written statement detailing his grievances. “Army Denounced by Negro Major,” reported the New York Times. An investigation revealed that Major Merritt had become obsessive on the subject of race, interrogating his white subordinates about their hidden prejudices. He was forcibly retired in January 1969.
On May 21, 1970, a grenade was hurled through the window of the mess hall at Hohenfels training ground near Augsburg, Germany, after the commanding officer had refused to meet with a mob of forty to fifty black soldiers who demanded to air their grievances. An unexploded Molotov cocktail was found on the ground outside, as well as a truck with a burning broom handle stuck in its diesel tank.
Bailey spins these incidents (and there were many more) as protests. It is a stretch. Major Merritt, for example, was clearly a crank. The written statement he distributed to the press contained gratuitous sexual insults directed at the “seventy-five percent” of white officers who were raised by “mammy who was also his fathers [sic] mistress.” Subordinates told investigators that Merritt’s constant racial badgering included his claim that “once a white woman had a negro she would never go back to a white man.”