Problem

An order last week transformed the 369th Infantry, New York National Guard, into a Coast Artillery anti-aircraft outfit. From commanding officer to rawest recruit, it is an all-Negro regiment, one of two in the Guard (the other: Chicago's 8th Illinois).

For the U. S. Army the Negro enlisted man is no trouble at all. Today the 4,719 Negro soldiers in the regular Army are in four regiments (9th and 10th Cavalry, 24th and 25th Infantry), a few smaller outfits. All are led by white officers. But in World War I (as he will be soon again), the Negro officer was a problem that continually harried white men. In the U. S. and in France, white enlisted soldiers often refused to salute Negro rankers.

Yet the Negro can be a first-class fighting man. Of the 404,348 black soldiers drafted and enlisted during World War I, only about 10% were put into overseas combat outfits. With one exception their battlefield record was not so good. Exception was Harlem's 369th. Officered mostly by white men the 369th was brigaded with the French who called its black men les enfants perdus (the lost children) because of their separation from the rest of the A. E. F. The regiment lost 1,100 men killed and wounded, won 172 individual French and American decorations, was able to brag that it had never lost a foot of ground to the enemy or surrendered a prisoner to him. By Armistice, it had spent more time in action (191 days) than any other U. S. outfit, and when it marched up Fifth Avenue in February 1919, the green-and-red ribbon of the French Croix de Guerre floated from the staff of its regimental standard.

Today, with its white officers superseded by a group of lean, soldierly Negroes, the 369th is a concentrated figure of the problem the U. S. Army faces with expansion. For the call of the National Guard into active service will put many another Negro officer on duty, and about 500 Negro reserve officers are also subject to call. Based on Negro population, 10% of the men drafted under a conscription bill may well be black soldiers. Today, while recruiting officers are beating the bushes for white soldiers, Negro applicants are clogged up on a waiting list. There is no place for them. Meanwhile no Negro has ever served in the Army Air Corps or U. S. Marine Corps, and the Navy now recruits black men only for mess attendants.

In 1940's regular Army there are five Negro officers. Three of them are chaplains, two combat officers. One of the combat soldiers is the commanding officer of Harlem's 369th: blocky, tea-colored Colonel Benjamin Oliver Davis, who came up from the ranks in 1901, has spent a large part of his service on such details as military attache to Liberia, professor of military science and tactics at Negro colleges. The other is his son, Lieutenant B.O. Davis Jr., who was graduated from West Point in 1936, the fourth of his race to make the grade at the Army school since the first Negro West Pointer (Henry O. Flipper) got his diploma in 1877. Graduated 35th in his class of 276 at the Military Academy, young Lieutenant Davis could not really hope to command white officers in a peacetime army, is now instructor of R. O. T. C. students at Tuskegee Institute.

Like other Army officers, 63-year-old Colonel Davis would rather not worry about the service's race problem, is happy with his first regimental command.

But to one famed U. S. Negro, interviewed last week before he refereed a white soldiers' boxing match at Fort Hamilton, N. Y., the question of Negro service in the U. S. armed forces came down to a simple question. Inspecting a Garand rifle, Joe Louis was asked what he thought of conscription and the Army. "Me fight?" drawled the heavyweight champion. "I'd do anything for this country. Look what this country did for me."

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