Chronicles of BLACK COURAGE

Ebony, August, 2001 by Lerone Jr. Bennett

William H. Hastie set new standard by resigning top-level post to protest racism

"It is a unique art and special skill, this business of being a Negro in America."

--William H. Hastie

WHEN, in 1943, in the midst of the second war to make the world safe for democracy," William Henry Hastie took the unprecedented step of resigning as civilian aide to the secretary of war to protest racism, he created consternation in official Washington and set a new standard, the Spingarn Committee said, of character, conduct and courage.

Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.

Never before--or since--had an African-American resigned a post on this level to protest racism, and the "bewilderment" behind the scenes in Washington, NAACP Secretary Walter White wrote, was "widespread at a Negro giving up a fat. salary and the prestige which goes with a high War Department post solely as a matter of principle." Echoing the Spingarn citation, White added:

"Judge Hastie's resignation ... sets a new yardstick for courage and integrity whose repercussions will be felt for a long time."

What made this all the more bewildering to government leaders was that Hastie was not a wild-eyed radical. The grandson of slaves and the son of a government bureaucrat, he was, in fact, the epitome of the Black Establishment. A graduate of Washington's elite Dunbar High School and Amherst and Harvard, he had held a number of pioneering posts, including assistant solicitor of the Interior Department and federal district judge in the Virgin Islands, a Black first. Somewhat to the surprise of his major sponsor, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Hastie--who voluntarily gave up more major federal posts than any other Black--resigned from the federal bench in 1939 to return to Howard University as dean of the law school.

It was largely because of these impressive credentials that he was named civilian aide to the secretary of war. What the War Department wanted was a quiet, ceremonial Black to quiet the unprecedented militancy of Blacks, who were marching and fighting all over America to protest segregation and Jim Crow in the armed services and defense industries. What the War Department got was a quiet, brilliant, tenacious infighter who drove his superiors crazy with one of the most skillfully conducted memo wars in the history of federal bureaucracy.

That war began soon after the 35-year-old Hastie assumed his new position on November 1, 1940. A Black operating at the highest levels of the War Department was a new phenomenon to the generals and bureaucrats, who believed generally, according to numerous internal memos, that Blacks were emotionally and intellectually incapable of leading troops or operating complicated machinery. When the generals continued to turn out Jim Crow orders, blithely ignoring Hastie and his all-Black office, the civilian aide went to the secretary of war and won a major bureaucratic victory. On December 18, 1940, an order went out to the chiefs of arms and services and the General Staff that "matters of policy which pertain to Negroes, or important questions arising thereunder, will be referred to Judge William H. Hastie, civilian aide to the Secretary of War, for comment or concurrence before final action."

Pressing this advantage, Hastie and his aides, Chicago Attorney Truman K. Gibson Jr. and Louis R. Lautier, inundated the bureaucracy with memorandums and letters demanding desegregation and new opportunities for Black officers and specialists.

All this, as can be imagined, alarmed War Department officials. As early as March 1941, a G-1 officer told his superiors that it was necessary to check Hastie or "the whole program may get out of hand." In a later memorandum, a hostile White officer complained about the effectiveness of the Hastie effort.

"The War Department," he wrote, "is confronted ... with a condition that bids fair to be insidious, even cancerous. Judge Hastie makes no bones about it that the time for minorities to make their gains is the time of national emergency. With utmost frankness, then, it is the purpose of Judge Hastie and his backers to advance the colored people as a race at the expense of the Army. Not satisfied with any gain, and there have been many, he intends to go from one disputed point to another. When the War Department recedes from an announced position he is prepared to submit some equally debatable issue. While many of these issues are small in themselves, the cumulative effect is being felt throughout the War Department among those who deal with Negro problems. Incident after incident could be recounted wherein he has demonstrated willful persistence in breaking down the Department's long considered policies."

Going from one disputed point to another, adapting the language and bureaucratic techniques of his adversaries for his own purposes, Hastie made it impossible for the War Department to evade the implications of its "long-considered" Jim Crow policies. On September 22, 1941, after ten months of "observation, discussion, and action in the War Department and in the field," he issued the Hastie Survey, which was an "overall description of what is happening to the Negro in the Army." What was happening, he said, was blatant racism reminiscent of the Nazi creed America was fighting.