Beginning in the Forties small articles like this one began appearing across the nation - snippets indicating that the American people (ie. whites) were slowly catching on to the apartheid system they had inherited, and wondering aloud as to the injustice of it all:
"To 13 co-eds at Upsala College, East Orange, N.J., democracy is something more than a worn text-book theory. It is a living, though thorny, reality. Shortly before school's end, they formed one of the nation's first interracial, interfaith college social sororities."
Our hats are off to one Naomi Charner, who, in 1947, made the the heroic stand and resigned her post as vice-president of her sorority after it had refused to admit an applicant on purely racial grounds. Miss Charner, in the company of eight other co-eds, then proceeded to establish Delta Beta Delta on the Upsala campus, a sorority with far "lower" admission standards.
The article concludes by making mention of a White lass who, some months earlier, was admitted to an all Black sorority in California. More about Naomi Charner can be read on this website.
Inasmuch as racial integration was the social goal for a vast majority of Americans in 1960, this article made it clear that racial harmony in the U.S. Armed Forces was not simply the goal, it was the reality. Written by a journalist who visited as many as ten U.S. Military establishments throughout Europe and North Africa in order to see how President Truman's Executive Order 9981 had effected American military culture. He was surprised to find that although Truman had banished Jim Crow from the armed services in 1948, the Defense Department had not seen fit to integrate the on-base housing and schools until 1954. Perhaps this is a good example of the differences between the Department of Defense and the actual military: the DoD is run by civilians and the military is run by generals and admirals who are attuned to obeying the orders of their commander-in-chief, whoever that may be.
The article is filled with pleasing anecdotes about how easily racial integration was manifested and how quickly the bonds between men of all shades were quickly established.
Read about racism in the U.S. Army of W.W. I
