Racial Conflict in the U.S. Army During the Vietnam War Era

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On this week's episode, we're discussing how the United States Army dealt with the challenge of racial tensions during the Vietnam War era. In the late 19th century, the French colonial empire assumed control over Vietnam, including it in a grouping of French colonial territories that they called French Indochina, which also eventually included Cambodia, Laos, and the Chinese territory of Kouang-Tceou-Wan. In May, 1890, a boy named Nguyen Sinh Cung was born in the village of Kim Lien in French Indochina. After traveling the world as a cook's helper on merchant ships, he lived for a while in France, where he wrote an eight point petition to the Versailles Peace Conference, demanding that the colonial subjects in Indochina be granted equal rights. From there he went to Moscow, where he trained as an agent of the Communist International. In the wake of World War II, as France reasserted its jurisdiction over French Indochina, Nguyen Sinh Cung, who by this time went by Ho Chi Minh, declared an independent North Vietnam and the League for the Independence of Vietnam, known as Viet Minh began a guerrilla war against the French. In 1947, United States President Harry Truman declared that the policy of the United States was to assist countries threatened by Communism. By 1950, the United States was identifying the Viet Minh as a communist threat, and assisting France. When French troops were defeated by Viet Minh forces in 1954, ending French rule in Indochina, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that if a communist government took over in Vietnam, it could create a domino effect, with all of Southeast Asia falling to communists. It was this domino theory that the US used to justify their military presence in the region for decades to come. In August, 1964, after two US destroyers that were stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, were fired on by North Vietnamese forces, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked the US Congress for permission to increase US military presence in Vietnam. The resulting Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a joint resolution of Congress dated August 7, 1964, authorized the use of, "all necessary steps, including the use of armed force to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, requesting assistance in defense of its freedom." After World War II, the United States had continued a peacetime draft or military conscription of men. In 1965, as the fighting and Vietnam intensified, President Johnson doubled the number of men drafted each month to 35,000. Local draft boards could grant deferments to the draft for various reasons, including medical issues, in a process that privileged white men, especially those with money, or political connections. An October, 1966 report of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service showed that while African Americans made up 11% of the United States population, they made up 16.3% of draftees, and in 1967, African Americans made up 23% of combat troops in Vietnam. In 1969, a national lottery system was established. As the nation watched, a televised drawing of birth dates established the order in which draft eligible men would be drafted. My own father's birthday was 229th. out of 366 possible birthdays. He avoided the draft. The Vietnam War was deeply unpopular. By 1971, public opinion polls showed only 30% approval of the war, after years of public protests. President Richard Nixon had won the 1968 presidential election, in part because of his promise to withdraw from Vietnam, which he did, albeit slowly. As troops withdrew from Vietnam, morale among the remaining troops plummeted, as they wondered why they were there at all. And the army faced increasing problems in its ranks, from both drug abuse and racial incidents. In 1948, Executive Order 9981 had officially desegregated the United States Armed Forces, although the process of desegregation took a while. The Vietnam War was the first major conflict in which the forces were fully integrated. Despite that integration, African American soldiers complained that they were often denied promotion, assigned menial duties and more dangerous combat roles, and disproportionately punished for infractions. Racial tensions had been building in the military during the war, and they exploded after the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. On August 29, 1968, a group of African American inmates at Long Binh Jail, a US military stockade in South Vietnam, attacked prison guards and set fire to several buildings, including the mess hall and the administration building, in a riot that eventually ended weeks later, when a company of armed military police entered the occupied area with tear gas. The Long Binh Jail riot was only one of 1000s of racial incidents in the United States Army, which occurred not only in Vietnam, but also in bases throughout the world, and back home in the United States. In 1967, African American journalist, Wallace Terry had reported in Time Magazine, on, "democracy in the foxhole, same mud, same blood." But by September, 1969, he said that there was, "another war being fought in Vietnam, between Black and white Americans." The army could no longer insist, as it had been, that it didn't see Black and white, just olive drab, the dark olive green color of military uniforms. Increasingly, senior officials in the army recognized the problem, with Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, General Walter T. Kerwin saying in 1970, "In the past year, racial discord has surfaced as one of the most serious problems facing army leadership."

Protests at Fort McClellan, Alabama, drew the attention of the Congressional Black Caucus, which began to investigate racism in the military. An inter service task force within the military also investigated, resulting in Department of Defense Directive 1322 Point 11, which established the Race Relations Education Board, and in 1971, created the Defense Race Relations Institute, DRRI, to develop mandated race relations training. In March, 1973, the last United States combat troops withdrew from Vietnam, although around 7000 civilian employees of the DoD remained stationed there. The last Americans left on April 30, 1975, as Saigon fell to communist forces. In total, 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War. After the deep unpopularity of both the war and the draft, the United States moved to an all volunteer military in 1973. As of 2020, over 21%, of the United States Army is Black, compared to around 14%, of the United States population as a whole. Joining me now to discuss race relations in the United States Army during the Vietnam War era, is Dr. Beth Bailey, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of Kansas, and the author of, "An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era."

Hi, Beth, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Beth Bailey  11:52  
It's a pleasure to be here.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:54  
This was a fascinating book, and I'm excited to get to talk to you about it, I wanted to start by asking, your writing career has spanned lots of different kinds of topics, and I wanted to know a little bit about how you decided to write this book now.

Dr. Beth Bailey  12:09  
This book has been a long time coming, I think. And there's there are always multiple layers of reasons why people choose to write books. And there's the sort of professional one, the historiographical one, and then there's the personal one that says, you know, "This got under my skin on some level, and I just had to write it." You know, professionally, historiographically, I've always been interested in how social change happens. And I like looking at how people solve problems. And so usually I pose a problem and then trace the ways that people try to make sense of it and solve it. But in a more fundamental sense, as historians, we've done a much better job understanding the ways in which people have advocated for social change than we have done in thinking about how that set of demands has been incorporated into society. And obviously, what really truly matters is the the demands of those people who are seeking change, the grassroots movement, but it doesn't make that much difference if that's all it is. And so what I was trying to do in this book, and it was, I think, shaped even more because I was writing it during the pandemic, and after the murder of George Floyd, and the protests that followed, is to think about how institutions cope with demands for social change, to think about how those demands are incorporated into major institutions in American society, and how what we need to understand in order to make sense of that process. And so I'm a military historian. I study the US Army. By military historian, I mean a historian of the military as an institution. The army's an institution, which is one of the places that social change has to be incorporated. So, you know, on some levels, this is a book for people who study military history, but it's also a book for people who are interested in questions of race and social change in America.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:02  
Yeah. In your acknowledgments, you talk a little bit about putting this book together as like piecing a quilt together. As a fabric artist myself, I found that really compelling. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, that process of writing and getting a book out of what all this information that you have found and what that looked like in this case?

Dr. Beth Bailey  14:22  
I'm so glad that you read the acknowledgments. In the last book I wrote, I described it as being in a nation where I can't read the fonts, even, much less understand the language and trying to find my way around because it was the first book I had written about in military history. And this one, I felt like I was trying to create a narrative out of scraps and pieces where there was no narrative to draw on. And I think I, it's really embarrassing to confess this, but I do tend to print out my research notes and primary documents. I think I had 13 linear feet of documents that I put this book together from. So it was finding a piece of paper in one file in one archive under one description and another piece of paper in an archive on the other side of the country under a completely different description, and realizing that when you put them in conjunction with one another, you see a pattern that's worthwhile. And in, and I was quilting a lot during the pandemic. It was it was a way of getting through it. And the two efforts seemed somehow very similar to me at the time.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:22  
Yeah. I loved that, that imagery.

Dr. Beth Bailey  14:28  
I keep meeting people, scholars who are actually fabric artists, and quilters and who sew. And I think we should create a network somehow. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:53  
Yes. So let's talk a little bit, you said that you like this idea of looking at social change and how it actually happens in an institution, and in the military. Of course, the US military is a very particular kind of institution. And so you tease out in the book, some about the things that the military does have in its control, and it controls a lot. But then there are also things it has to deal with that are completely outside of or somewhat outside of its control. So can you talk a little bit about that? And how, how the military then approached this, these different kinds of areas that it's looking at? 

Dr. Beth Bailey  16:32  
Yeah, so what I began with was the notion of institutional logic and institutional culture, trying to think about the ways in which the culture and traditions and history of an institution, its policies and practices, structure and organization, shape how that institution defines the problem that it's confronting, and then what ways it tries to solve it. And so in terms of the army, it has an enormous amount of control over those people, you know, who who are within the army, people, because of a system of authority and rank hierarchy, people can issue orders, and they can enforce those orders. People who are members of the US military are members of the US military 24 hours a day. It's not like they go home and become simply, you know, private citizens until they go back to work. So, you know, it's not that I'm saying that the army is a model for how all institutions work. I'm saying, let's look at the particular logic of the army. So, you know, in terms of one of the one of the things that many Black soldiers complained about during this period, was discrimination off post, that when they left the, the gates of the army post, they went into a situation in which civilians discriminated against them in ways that were both egregious and subtle. And it wasn't happening only in the United States or in the US South, but it was happening in places like West Germany. And one of the complications, of course, is that we believe in civilian authority in the society. We don't believe that the military authority should extend to civilians. But at the same time, the question becomes what happens when somebody has been drafted into, conscripted into, or enlisted in the US military, and they are being treated in ways that are unacceptable when they are not on post? What responsibility do the army leaders have to those people that they lead? So you know, that was a conundrum. Where does military authority end? What responsibility does one have? And so many of the attempts that I look at here are ways that the military leaders, army leaders had to confront contradictions. There was rarely a simple answer. There was rarely something that they could do, that wasn't a trade off. No matter how committed they were to trying to make a difference, often, they had to struggle with situations that they didn't have under their control, or with actions that might improve the situation on one hand, and make the situation more complicated on another hand.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:11  
So I was particularly interested in what was happening in Germany, and, you know, like the struggle to find housing off base for for the Black soldiers and their families. You know, I think I had in my mind had always imagined like, "Well, during the Vietnam War, like Germany was the cushy post that you could get," and you know, I'm sure in some ways, that was the case. But that it was shocking how much they were dealing with there. Could you talk a little bit about the the situation in Germany, what's happening there? What what the problem of race looks like there?

Dr. Beth Bailey  19:44  
Yeah. So army leaders, and and the civilian press often talked about this is the war within the war. And what was happening was an enormous amount of racial conflict and racial violence. And that was, in fact, less in combat units in Vietnam than it was in in the rear in Vietnam and in other US installations around the world. And West Germany was probably the worst of it. It certainly was better than Vietnam in that nobody was shooting at you. But the racial conflict in places where despite the strength of the Cold War at  that moment, many people felt like they didn't really have a good reason for being there, where the army was drawing on pulling strength out of West Germany pulling leadership out of West Germany, pulling established officers out of West Germany to send them to Vietnam, and then leaving things pretty much in crisis through much of West Germany, which was critical given the the escalating Cold War tensions of the time, were left a very volatile situation among the troops in West Germany. On on the installations, it got to the point where NCOs, Black and white, junior officers were refusing to go into barracks of enlisted men without a sidearm. They were saying that things were so difficult that it's they're so racially charged that they couldn't feel comfortable with their own safety or their own authority and command. But what was also difficult is that this, the tensions with the army spilled out into the streets of surrounding towns and villages. And, you know, perhaps, perhaps it's surprising because the narrative of West Germany and African American culture has been a bit once you leave the southern United States, and you find yourself accepted much better in other places. And that was a post World War II narrative. But in fact, there was an enormous amount of discrimination against Black soldiers in West Germany, you know, whether it was suddenly a club becomes a place where you had to have a private membership or a dress code, or, "Ebony" tells a great story of when when club owners want to discourage certain patrons, they do things like having the accordionist come out and start playing polkas. And that was a surefire way to convince Black soldiers that they'd rather seek another establishment for their patronage. But because things were so divided, places became clearly Black or white. And they played different music. Different women went to the bars and clubs based on who they were planning to meet, civilian women. And often, often, because there were fewer Black soldiers, and because Black soldiers reportedly spent less money, the "better bars," the places, you know, that that had more resources, tended to be white focused, which, you know, angered a lot of young Black men who were in a place they didn't want to be, and didn't feel welcome and and found themselves turned away or discriminated against or finding again, once again, substandard accommodations and entertainment.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:56  
So let's talk a little bit about people being in a place they don't want to be, because that's what separates the Vietnam era from pretty much the rest of military history in the US is not just are people being drafted, but people being drafted into a deeply unpopular war. The people being drafted are the exact age group that is, you know, so against this, this conflict. So can you talk a little bit about that, and what that does, throwing all these people together, who are coming from all over the place with very different backgrounds, very different understandings of race, perhaps, putting them together and putting them together in a place, they don't want to be, how that feeds on itself to create some of these conflicts?

Dr. Beth Bailey  23:39  
So during the Vietnam era, the military relied heavily on conscription to fill its ranks. And increasingly, there was resistance to the draft and resistance to the war. And so what happened in the case of Vietnam is that was the first war that was fought purposely from the beginning with a racially integrated force. But at the same time, it was pulling a lot of young men who very much did not want to be in the military, and putting them together in close proximity in very tense relationships with people from very different backgrounds. But it wasn't just the Vietnam War, and it wasn't just the military. This was a period of enormous racial conflict in American society. It was a period of enormous cultural conflict in American society. So one of the things I write about in the beginning of the book is an uprising/riot at Long Binh Jail in Vietnam, which was begun by a group of Black men who were imprisoned there, mostly people who were in the most intense imprisonment situations. It didn't get a lot of play in the United States because it was the same time as the Chicago National Convention riots in the streets. And so people were more interested in tanks in the streets of Chicago than they were with an episode of violence in Vietnam, where there was continuing violence. So what was happening is that a civilian society, which was wracked by conflict and division and violence, was sending young men into the military, where they were in a place they didn't want to be, by and large. And so the violence was not simply particular to the military as part of American society. But there was less division between the two at the time. The other thing that was happening is that a civil rights movement that had been focused primarily on integration and more liberal solutions to the racial conflict, and discrimination in American society, was being overtaken by notions of Black Power and Black Pride. And the young men, Black men who are coming into the army, were often coming out of worlds in which this was their context, in which they were frustrated and angry at the failure of American society, to live up to the promises of equality and change. And who were very insistent upon embracing a Black identity and Blacks embracing Black Pride in an institution that denied the right to embrace any form of identity other than that of soldier. So there were all sorts of structural tensions involved, some of them which were, were consciously discriminatory, but many of them which were just the structure of the institution, which had by and large defaulted white for an awful lot of decades and, and Black Pride coming into, into conflict with the notion of, we see only one color and that's OD. It was not an easy, it was not an easy reconciliation.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:50  
Yeah. So one of the fascinating ways this comes out is in hair. So you have a whole section where you talk about hair and the army trying to grapple with, "Okay, well, we want everyone to have short hair. But you know, what, what can we what could we allow? What could this look like?" Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it's and you point out in the book, it's not just a race thing. There are plenty of white soldiers at the time, too, who also didn't want buzz cuts, you know, but what, how does this play out?

Dr. Beth Bailey  27:19  
Look, yeah, it's hard to imagine how important hair was in the early 1970s, how much people cared about their haircuts. It was a symbol of belonging, it was an ideological commitment to either wear an afro for Black soldier, or just to have longer hair for young white soldiers who wanted to be part of youth culture and to be seen as hip and, and to be able to, you know, move into civilian society, and as the army leaders kept saying, meet girls, right. So because many young Black soldiers cared a lot about displaying Black Pride and and saw the kind of haircut that the army offered them as something that was reminiscent of being enslaved and stripped of their manhood, there was a huge push toward being able to wear an afro. And, you know, the army is saying, "We have this huge problem. We have a problem of racial conflict that is so severe, that it threatens our very ability to fulfill our mission of national defense. And so we've got to solve this." And the initial ways they tried to solve it are the predictable ways that that the army would. They look at leadership, they look at education and training, but at some point, they say, "Okay, let's listen to what young men are saying is the problem." And overall, they just kept saying, "hair."  A survey at Fort Carson found that more than a third of soldiers at Fort Carson, and this is in the midst of the height of the Vietnam War, thought that the biggest problem they confronted in the army were hair regulations. It mattered. So there's, they're saying, Okay, we're gonna do something that really violates our general principles of how the army works, our principles of uniformity. We're going to allow people to claim an identity other than that of soldier. And they they found a Black barber named Willie Lee Morrow, had been grown up in Alabama. He was a great entrepreneur, he invented the afro pick. And they they took him he was in California, at that point around the world to teach local barbers and people in the PXs how to cut Black hair, and how to do what the army called an afro, which a lot of Black soldiers didn't quite agree that it was an afro, but, but to do that. But then they ran into you know, I said there was a problem because there was always a conflict between an action and its implications given army logic. Letting Black soldiers claim to some extent, Black identity, wear an afro, wear what they called a slave band or slave bracelet. That seems to really go a long way toward making some of the young Black soldiers believe that the army was listening to them. But once the army says that you can use a symbol of identity, it can't say only some people can use a symbol of identity. You can probably hear what's coming right? White southern soldiers had a symbol of identity they wanted to deploy, and it was the Confederate battle flag. And that absolutely did not improve race relations within the Army, right? So then they made rules about which flags you can fly. You can only fly the unit flag and the US flag, etc. But they're struggling. And that's what I find interesting, they're struggling really hard to try and figure out how to address the problem they see. They're doing it because they believe that it's the survival of the army that's at stake, but it makes them creative. And it makes them confront the limits of the logic that they have lived with, and they implement daily.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:48  
So one of the things that seemed surprising to me was that one of the solutions they'd come up with is sensitivity training. So you know, like, okay, regulations about hair, you know, like, you can see how this sort of fits into the army mold, but I think about the military as such a conservative institution, and the idea that, that they may be not the first institution to do it, but you know, like, right there, yeah, of doing this, you know. Can you talk a little bit about that, and, you know, any training you do, of course, is taking away from time, you could be training soldiers in something else. So, you know, what, what does this look like? How do I get to this point where they say, "Okay, this is what we need to do?"

Dr. Beth Bailey  31:30  
Well, I mean, first of all, the army is this massive educational institution. It always has been, and training and education is fundamental. But it comes about as a whole series of sort of contingent actions and ad hoc responses. I, when I was doing research, I found luckily, because he had a somewhat unusual name, a man who was a psychiatrist in the army at Fort Benning in the late 1960s. And he had been part just of addressing the problems of race, because increasingly NCOs and junior officers were starting to send young Black men to him when they were, "causing trouble," and suggesting that their responses were psychological. And he, on the one hand, thought, "Yeah, it's true, because stress does create psychological consequences." But on the other hand, he wanted to make it clear that there were actually reasons that these men were feeling this way. But as a psychiatrist, as violence started breaking out at Fort Benning, he decided that the best thing he could do was to essentially hold a group encounter session, and he had one at Fort Benning that had about 800 people involved. In some senses, and people didn't want to leave, people just wanted to keep talking, they finally got Black and white soldiers talking to one another. And this sort of starts to provide a model that gets taken up. But encounter groups, sensitivity training, all of these approaches were becoming what corporations were flirting with, at this time, trying to figure out how to manage the the tensions of American society. And this is one of the places that the army was creative. They started training people to lead these sessions. It was not necessarily a great idea, because it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to properly facilitate something where you are pushing people to say the things that they don't want to say. And once people have said that in a unit that was properly functioning, sometimes you can't really go back when somebody has said what they maybe feel in their heart, but have not said out loud. But it was a part of the army saying,  "We're going to try whatever might work. This is a technique that is out there. We're going to give it a try." But it's it's reminiscent of what's happening today, in terms of army trainings and congressional resistance. There was an enormous pushback from southern senators about the forced sensitivity training and, you know, people who were in positions of power suddenly found themselves replaced because of congressional pushback on the Armed Services Committee. So, you know, again, a sign of creativity of perhaps an approach that is better left in the early 1970s. But again, they were really going to try whatever they could to address the crisis they saw.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:26  
Yeah. It made me wonder as these people were leaving the military because you know, the they they weren't they most of these were not lifers. So they were going back out into, you know, whatever communities that came from, like if they kept any of that training with them, you know, what, what, what effect that had going sort of back out into the country?

Dr. Beth Bailey  34:46  
Well, I think it was about 1.9 million people who served in the military during this period, and the army was the largest branch, and I should say, I keep talking about men and it's because there were really a very tiny number of women who were serving during this period and army leaders weren't worried about women undermining the, you know, combat capability of the military. All of these programs were really focused on men. But yes, I think that was part of the point. They had these experiences in the military, army education programs and training programs, not only tried encounter group techniques, but they taught all soldiers about the history of slavery in the United States. They taught about Black history and culture, they attempted to make people understand more about the backgrounds that different groups came from and to to increase the since the 70s communication. And so no, perhaps, whatever kind of education or training that used encounter group processes may not have had as big an impact on some people. But all soldiers who went through basic training, learned about African American history. And this was an enormous change. And it may not have touched everybody in a way that they carried back with them. But I think a lot of Black soldiers felt that their history had been recognized. And I think a lot of white soldiers understood a little bit better about the history of race relations and racial tensions in the US simply because of that. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:17  
Yeah. Like you mentioned that we're talking about men, we're also of course, talking mostly Black and white, because that's what the military was looking at primarily.

Dr. Beth Bailey  36:27  
Yeah. The fact that we're talking about Black and white is evidence that the reason that military leaders, that army leaders were so intent on solving this problem was because they saw it as threatening the stability of the army, because that's where the conflict was. It was a Black/white conflict. It was black/ white violence. It was Black/white anger, when when army leaders set up programs, they often would refer to other groups. They would refer to people of Mexican descent, and to to Asian Americans and to people from Puerto Rico. And sometimes they even talk about people from Appalachia. But all that went away quickly, because it was the reason they were doing this was to try and confront the anger and the violence. And as one man who wrote into the "Stars and Stripes" said probably more directly than people really wanted to say, "The army is acting out of fear. And of all these groups, it's only Black soldiers who are making them feel afraid. There is only because of the demands that young Black men were making, that the army is taking these actions." And the fact that it was so Black/white focused is and just so male focused is evidence that that is true. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:48  
Yeah. So you talk a little bit in your conclusion about, you know, what was this successful? So I wonder if you could just sort of reflect a little bit on there's lots of ways to answer that question, of course, but like what, what is the success that the military finds in putting on, they tried lots of things, but you know, in at least some of the things that they tried?

Dr. Beth Bailey  38:07  
Yeah, so the army was undeniably successful in its efforts, because what the army was trying to do was to stabilize the army, and it's still here. If the question is did the army efforts to address race relations and racial conflict improve the situation of people of color in the US Army? Yes, certainly not enough. There are certainly questions and issues that continue and people are still fighting for improvements in race relations in American society in general. But what these efforts did, no matter the impetus, no matter whether people were acting out of a sense of moral and ethical commitment, or they were acting simply because they've been ordered to it, it made race visible. The Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, in 1969, said, essentially, we can't be colorblind anymore. We have to recognize race, we have to pay attention to race, we have to make race a topic of concern. And so race and race relations got bureaucratized. It got woven into army regulations and practices and the gathering of information. Army leaders changed training and education. They rethought leadership, they began a program of affirmative action to try and raise up a new generation of leaders and officers. They reformed military justice, they addressed questions about off-post discrimination. They flirted with the idea of allowing people to embrace different cultures. And while that didn't last in terms of behavior, it certainly changed what was in the PX and what was on PX shelves. So yeah, it made a difference. It meant more people of color in the military. It meant they were more visible, it meant that regulations were more conscious of the differential ways that different kinds of regulations had impact on different people from different racial backgrounds. Yeah, it definitely made a difference. It, it didn't solve the problem of race, it did solve the problem of whether or not the army was going to survive.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:07  
So it's a terrific book. And I want to encourage people to read it. How can people get a copy?

Dr. Beth Bailey  40:05  
Well, I always say, support your local bookstores. So if there is a way to either find it there or request it to be ordered, that'd be great. It's from the University of North Carolina Press. It is, of course available online, and it is already available.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:36  
So, is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Beth Bailey  40:42  
When I, my first draft of this book ended with a list of lessons learned, which is something that military leaders do, you know, coming out of a situation and event. What did we learn from this? And I had an itemized list of lessons that my wonderful editor Debbie Gershenowitz said, and maybe not, it's probably not the way you want in the book, but the key lesson that I took away was that individuals matter despite the existence of institutional racism, which army leaders directly acknowledged, despite the inter woven crises of American society and the US military. Time after time, I found individuals whether they were Black or white, whether they were enlisted or army officers, who took a stance, who who pushed a point, and who truly made a difference. So that's my optimistic conclusion here. It yes,  institutional racism, systemic racism exist. Individuals can make a difference.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:46  
Beth,Thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed the book. I enjoyed this look into the military, and I enjoyed talking to you.

Dr. Beth Bailey  41:55  
Thanks. Great questions. It was a lot of fun to talk with you about it.

Teddy  42:17  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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