Flushing Racism, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #178

July 12, 2010 Mike Gold 9 Comments

Which government building has 142 more bathrooms than it needs?

That would be the Pentagon. According to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not last week (yes, Ripley’s newspaper strip is still in business), “the Pentagon Building has 284 bathrooms, twice what a building its size requires. But in was built that way to meet racial segregation standards for the state of Virginia.”

That means half of the bathrooms were marked “for colored only.”

Ground was broken for the Pentagon on September 11, 1941 – exactly 60 years to the day before Al Qaeda rammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building, killing 189 people. Back then segregation was still the law of the land, particularly but not exclusively in our southern states. We think of ourselves as being more civilized in the 1940s, but the fact is back in 1941 our armed forces were racially segregated. Our post-war movies and comic books lie to us. They weren’t integrated until President Harry S. Truman, himself a former Ku Klux Klan leader, dropped the racial barriers by presidential order. But he certainly took his time.

In September of 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson appointed a board of three general officers to investigate the Army’s racial policies. They issued their report the following April, titled “Utilization of Negro Manpower in the Postwar Army Policy.” They urged the Army “eliminate, at the earliest practicable moment, any special consideration based on race.” Okay, that’s really soft, but it’s a start, I guess.

In October 1947, The President’s Committee on Civil Rights issued report condemning segregation in general and, specifically, segregation in the armed forces. The report stated the government must “end immediately all discrimination and segregation based on race, color, creed or national origin in … all branches of the Armed Services.” Black groups began to organize around the issue.

More important – most important, actually – Presidential advisor Clark Clifford (one of America’s more interesting characters) told Truman that in a likely four-way race Truman needed the black vote if he had any hope of winning. The southern Democrats, led by Strom Thurmond, were going to bolt the party and push Strom as their “Dixiecrat” candidate. With left-winger and recent vice-president Henry Wallace already spitting off of the Democrats to form the Progressive Party, Truman had to expand the center of his party in order to beat Republican Thomas Dewey.

On July 26, 1948, three months before the election, Truman put away his robes and hood and issued the integration edict. Truman beat Dewey by an impressive 4½ points; even if Thurmond didn’t run and all those votes went to Dewey, which was very unlikely, Truman still would have won, by more than two points.

For the record, implementation didn’t really start until the Korean War, two years later. The black recruitment target was set at 10%, so integration was statistically inevitable.

Have we come a long way since World War II?

Don’t ask – and don’t tell.

Artwork ©2010 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!, All Rights Reserved.

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.