Date of Award
1951
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
First Advisor
Dudley T. Cornish
Second Advisor
Elizabeth Cochran
Keywords
African Americans, United States Armed Forces, Racism
Abstract
Despite the fact that Negro men in the United States have served their country loyally and well in every war in which it has participated, they have been subjected to almost every imaginable form of discrimination, both in the Armed Forces and in civilian life.
Although studies of civilian race prejudice and the segregation and discrimination resulting from it are numerous, the subject or racial proscriptions suffered by the Negro serviceman has not received adequate scrutiny. If the Negro is to be accorded his unalienable right to participate fully in the defense of his country, the nature of the proscriptions imposed upon him must be studied and analyzed, and logical proposals must be made for their extirpation from the unwritten policies of service administration.
Every effort was made by the writer to procure source material; where it was not available, the secondary material consulted, from the standpoint of the author's experience, scholarship and objectivity, was the best obtainable. The following government publications were consulted: the Congressional Record, the Statutes at Large of the United States of America, Report of the Major-General Commanding the Army, [1898] (House of Representatives Document), Report of the Lieutenant-General Commanding the Army [1899-1900] (House of Representatives Document), the Senate documents on the " Affray at Brownsville, Texas," the United States Army in the World War 1917-1919, Reports of Commander-in-Chief, A.E.F., Staff Sections and Services, XII, the Abstract of the Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1915, with a supplement including the laws of the Sixty-fourth Congress, to March 5, 1917 (Fifth Edition).
Indispensable in the study of the Spanish-American War period was the volume, A New Negro for a New Century, by Booker T. Washington. One of the first nationally recognized Negro leaders in the United States, his comments and opinions are in themselves historically significant. A Social History of the American Negro, by Benjamin Brawley, one of the first of America's Negro intellectuals, lends the perspective of the contemporary Negro scholar.
Letters of inquiry were written to government agencies and newspapers either when the accuracy of the source consulted was doubtful or when the information source was unavailable. Information contained in replies from the United States Military Academy, the United States Naval Academy and the Adjutant General of the Department of the Army was included in the body of the survey. A substantial majority of the authors of the periodical articles were white writers, Bonsal and Villard being the most eminently qualified. The individually recorded testimony of the ex-soldiers interviewed is reported exactly as given.
The writer found that anti-negro race prejudice, segregation and discrimination in the armed services followed civilian patterns closely, and administrative officials must bear a major share of the blame for the injustices done the Negro serviceman. Their failure to attempt to discourage the perpetration of undemocratic practices and their ill-concealed advocacy of the doctrine of "white supremacy" have resulted in the implementation of race prejudice in the Armed Forces of the United States.
Recommended Citation
Graham, Thurston M., "A Survey of the Administrative Implementation of Race Prejudice in the Armed Forces of the United States, 1898-1918" (1951). Electronic Theses & Dissertations. 499.
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/etd/499
Comments
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