PATRICK AIR FORCE BASE, FLA. -- Air Force Lt. Col. Dennis Michael Collins sat in the dark, hunched forward in his chair, eavesdropping with headphones and peering through a one-way mirror into an adjacent classroom where 15 Army sergeants and Navy petty officers sat talking about the day's topic: the "White Male Club." Suddenly Collins got excited. "Listen!" he shouted. "We've got a good one here." He took off the headphones and turned up the volume.
"Back home in Texas, it was one-sided." The speaker on the other side of the glass was a white Navy petty officer second class. His face was red. His hands were shaking. "Whites on top. That's where you wanted it."
"I feel like I'm being controlled by white males," said a black Army sergeant from Alabama. "I feel manipulated. It's always something hanging over you. The white male culture is inculcated into each of us. I've learned that whole system my entire life."
"I couldn't go out and kill somebody because he's white," said a black petty officer first class from California who had the floor. His eyes were penetrating. "There are blacks out there who could. Yes. Absolutely. I felt that way when I was younger. I was angry. It's been carried out through centuries. I'm black. I'm stupid. Treat me as such. That's why I'm here at this school. To try to make some people realize it's wrong. How in the hell are we going to make this country change if we don't try to change everybody?"
That is the essential question at the Army's Defense Equal Opportunities Management Institute (DEOMI), tucked away in a corner of Patrick Air Force Base near Cocoa Beach. Since its inception two decades ago, the institute has seen more than 10,000 U.S. military men and women, black and white, some as volunteers, most of them drafted into the endeavor, go through what may be the world's most intensive race relations course.
Those who complete the course -- three months of five-day weeks spent reading, listening to lectures and participating in daily small-group discussions of their deepest feelings about race -- become equal opportunity officers on military bases. Trained to conduct programs and seminars on military issues of race and gender, the officers are responsible for investigating and seeking to resolve discrimination complaints.
No one here claims the military is a model of perfect racial equality and harmony, and every positive statistic has its counterpoint. Blacks account for 20.5 percent of today's military personnel. The black presence is highest in the Army (28.6 percent) and Marines (19.2 percent), but the Air Force and Navy passed 15 percent recently and are showing the most rapid growth. But although the number of black officers is increasing, the military officer corps still is only 6.9 percent black. In the Navy, 3.8 percent of all officers are black; the Air Force has 5.5 percent, and the Army 10.7 percent.
"I can look around at all the peers who started in the system with me, and most of the blacks are not here," said Army Lt. Col. Timothy Pancake, one of the institute's directors. "What happened? My {white} peers are just more comfortable with me than with a black male. Our work is not done."
A Pentagon-sponsored advisory group last year reported an increase in racially motivated problems at U.S. military facilities in Europe, and there are new reports of a resurgence of white-supremacy groups on bases in this country. "There is a dangerous tendency to think we've licked the problem," said Army Col. Patrick Connor, the institute's commandant. "Now we see some of the behavior problems starting again. If we don't keep the emphasis going, it's like reverting to pre-Pasteur biology: The epidemics will come back."
Yet for all its difficulties, the military of 1990 is the most racially balanced major institution in the United States -- not yet there, by any means, but farthest along the road to true integration.
"It is definitely ahead of what I see in society as a whole," said Collins, a former student body president at Howard University, and a graduate of the institute's second class who is now a trainer there. "That's probably why I'm still here. It isn't a perfectly integrated institution. I don't think such a place exists. But I'd put its record up against anybody's and not feel ashamed."
The institute has played a crucial role in the integration of the military, a process that began near the end of World War II when black platoons first fought alongside whites at the Battle of the Bulge in France's Ardennes Forest. Army Research Bureau social scientists who interviewed thousands of white soldiers after that battle found that whites facing combat near blacks underwent positive changes in racial attitudes. From that finding, scientists developed the "equal contact theory" of reducing racial stereotypes by bringing groups together under conditions of equality. Over the last four decades in the military, the theory has been "well worn, but hard wearing," in the words of black military sociologist John Sibley Butler.
Truman Orders Integration
Support from above has been uneven since July 26, 1948, when President Harry S. Truman took the official first step integrating the U.S. armed forces by signing Executive Order 9981: "It is hereby declared . . . that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons without regard to race." Forty-two years later, the clearest symbol of change at the top is Army Gen. Colin L. Powell,
the black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
When Collins arrived here two decades ago, however, the "equal contact" theory was facing its toughest test, a challenge from black soldiers separating themselves because they saw little that was "equal" in the contact. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, bases around the world were plagued by internal racial strife triggered by black frustration over discrimination in assignments, military justice and promotions. The conflict proved a critical test for the U.S. military as an institution, and for the equal contact theory as an idea.
"In Vietnam, racial tensions reached a point where there was an inability to fight," recalled Lt. Gen. Frank Petersen Jr., the highest-ranking black in the Marine Corps until his retirement in 1988. "We were pulling aircraft carriers off line because there was so much internal fighting. There were murders, blacks banding in power groups. The leader of the Mau-Maus was in my squadron. Platoons that were 80 percent minority were being led by lieutenants from Yale who had never dealt with ghetto blacks. Soldiers were angry. Martin Luther King was killed. It all came together. It was a mess."
Petersen, now an executive at du Pont, was the Marines' first black pilot, first black squadron commander in Vietnam, first black general. He saw it all, starting in October 1952 when he began pilot training in Pensacola, Fla., and was told he had to move to the back of the bus every time the vehicle left the base's front gate. Some of the most haunting memories of his career date to when he was sent to Germany in 1970 with a Pentagon team investigating racial tensions.
One day during the trip, black dissidents asked for an out-of-uniform meeting with him at a castle in Vienna. As the leaders of thousands of separatist black troops in Europe and Vietnam, the cadre said they felt so much racism in Germany that they needed to take violent action. What impact would there be in Washington, they asked Petersen, if they were to assassinate a high-ranking military official?
"If you do it," Petersen told them, using reverse psychology he learned from an Aesop fable, "make sure it is one of you eight who pulls the trigger." He turned his back and walked out. The assassination never happened.
Another day he arrived at an Army base hours after a body floated up in a waste pool. "It was a fragging of a white officer," Petersen said. "People don't realize how tough things were. It was absolutely unbelievable."
More than other institutions, the military had to work to resolve the explosive issues of race, including not just black rage but the causes of it, to restore common goals, or just to function. Once the process of numerical integration began, the military became more dependent on minority troops, a reliance that would increase with the initiation of the all-volunteer force in 1973. In other parts of society, whites could avoid integration and racial confrontation: move to the suburbs, send their children to private schools, back away from points of racial change and challenge. The military had no such choices.
"We must develop in the military that kind of condition of equality of opportunity and treatment which can constitute a model for the rest of the American society," said L. Howard Bennett, assistant secretary of defense in 1970. "This is what we can do, and I think this is what we must do. We cannot afford to funnel back into the American community a million men a year, black and white, who are hostile in their attitudes toward each other."
Bennett and his boss, then-Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, created the school in Florida, at first called the Defense Race Relations Institute, to serve as the agent for that process of change.
During the first few years, the institute had a highly charged ideological atmosphere, reflecting the times. Collins remembers his class taking a field trip to the Miami ghetto and holing up for three days in the Sir John Motel. "There were all kinds of behaviors," he said. "It was intense. There were fights. The course was seven weeks then, and we called it 'Seven Weeks of Dealing.' I think it changed people, for better or worse. Some whites came out of there as pro-active agents. Others were turned off after being told that whites were the source of all evil. Unfortunately, some of those folks are colonels now, still replaying tapes of what happened in Race Relations 101."
Pancake, the director of instruction, was in the 1973 class. "People literally changed in a few weeks," recalled Pancake, who was sent to the institute from Fort Ord in California. "My wife's family lived nearby, so I had the fortune to try on my new attitudes and behaviors on those I loved. I usually got thrown out of the house."
Eventually the institute struck a balance between instruction and confrontation and expanded the curriculum to include more than the history of black oppression, getting into the pyschology of prejudice in general and the nature of power and discrimination. The focus shifted to teaching students from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard how to become effective equal opportunity officers.
"That was my goal from the start," said Collins. "There were some people who wanted to use it to get back at the system, and I understood that, but they got burned out and left the military. My goal was to actually change behavior, and I saw the military as a place to do it. One thing the military does is throw people together from different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities. It forces you to learn how to deal with people different from you."
"I can't be part of the institution and not be a part of it," Collins said. "Black officers have learned that. You don't have to give up your identity as a black person, but you have to be flexible and go to social functions that you might not be comfortable at. I've put on a cowboy hat and done the Cotton-eyed Joe, even when that experience is foreign to me. That's not giving up your blackness, that's expanding your horizons."
But people and institutions are not transformed overnight. After Collins graduated from the institute, he had to face the real world of an air base in the Florida panhandle. His commander called him a "big black buck." Senior noncommissioned officers would walk by without saluting.
A Matter of Respect
One day Collins blew up. "A senior master sergeant walked by, looked right at my bars, and looked down without saluting. He was one of those NCOs who was always complaining that young blacks didn't show respect. I turned around and called him: 'Excuse me, sir, is something wrong with your right arm?' He said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, sir.' I said: 'Look, I've really had it. I want you to spread the word, the next time I walk by and don't get saluted, I'm going to have that person's ass."
The fact that Collins had a system he could follow to enforce fair play and demand respect meant a lot to him then, as it has in all of his dealings over the last two decades. It is a basic principle of the institute here: to teach people how to use the system fairly. It is often cited by black officers as the reason they believe the military offers them better opportunities than other institutions.
Major William M. Pennick, another 20-year black veteran at DEOMI, said he felt more comfortable in the Marine Corps, which he called "the ultimate Southern gentleman's organization," than in the civilian world because he knew what the rules were. "You had a certain understanding of how to negotiate the obstacles that come about, because rules and regulations exist," Pennick said. "If someone were to behave in a racist manner, it was bending a regulation, and most likely it would catch up with them. In the military I felt I had more control of what my life would be. When I looked at the academic and corporate worlds, there were more unspoken rules that you had to follow."
Northwestern University professor Charles Moskos, an expert on the racial sociology of soldiers and a frequent lecturer at DEOMI, said the key to integration in the military came when the structure became a tool to promote racial equality rather than stifle it. "A lesson that can be useful to the rest of society is that if an organization is committed to true integration, and penalizes people who are discriminatory, that helps a lot," Moskos said. "You do not hear many racist jokes in officer clubs anymore. There is now a checkbox for such behavior on the promotion list. People have been relieved of commands over it."
Most graduates of the race relations institute become equal opportunity specialists for a year or two, jobs in which they serve as watchdogs of the process. A special emphasis is placed on training white men. Many of them are drafted from their units and sent to the school "kicking and screaming with claw marks visible all the way down I-95" as one teacher put it. But many are emerging three months later as "pro-active agents," ready to use their inherent clout as members of the "White Male Club."
Capt. Robert Yingling is one such officer. "So often in life, if something doesn't impact us, we don't have a concern for it," he said. "I sat in the small groups here every day for 16 weeks and listened to how blacks felt. On a subject most people don't talk about -- race. It made me much more aware of how I come across to people. My grandmother was in Selma during the marches. On the wrong side. She talked about 'darkies.' I grew up near here on Merritt Island. I was 14 when this place opened, and I remember wondering why we needed a race institute." Now Yingling, who is white, is Collins's assistant.
Master Sgt. Robert D. Shaver, who joined the Army out of Dixie County High School near Suwanee, Fla., said the Army drafted him into DEOMI from a tank squadron in West Germany, where his team consisted of two black and two white soldiers. "If you really want to get to know somebody, spend three months inside a tank with them," Shaver said. When he arrived at the institute, his first reaction was that it was a waste of time.
"When it started, it does feel like, what are they trying to do, lay a guilt trip?" Shaver said. "But when you get through the entire program you realize you know a lot you didn't know before. Most people never look at the issues of race. They try to ignore the problem."
'Trying to Make a Difference'
Black soldiers also said the school changed them. "I grew up in the South. Whites were not my favorite folks," said Sgt. Major Clifton Lovejoy. "Then in the military, and at this school, I realized there are screwed up folks in every group. I understand the difference between personal racism and institutional. I don't think civilian society appreciates the part we play in racial understanding. They think we're just in uniform and when war breaks out we kill somebody. They don't know we're living and working together, trying to make a difference."
Lovejoy has kept in touch with dozens of DEOMI graduates who have become equal opportunity officers at bases around the country. Those contacts, he said, have left him with mixed feelings. "I call around to Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Ord, every week and say, 'Hey, what's going on out there? How are you all equipped to do your job?' Too many of them tell me their commanders don't care about equal opportunity anymore. They think they're beyond that. It concerns me. I see some wolves in sheep's clothing out there."
Collins and Yingling were back in the observation room, watching another round of small-group discussions. Things were getting testy. That morning, when a black female instructor gave the lecture on personal racism, several white soldiers were on edge. They wanted the instructor to say that blacks discriminated as much as whites. She responded that discrimination required power, and blacks had little power. The argument continued in the small group discussion led by Lovejoy.
"We don't discriminate, but you perceive it," said a black petty officer. "How can we discriminate when we don't have power? We are angry, and you perceive that as discrimination."
"Anyone can be discriminated against by anyone else," said a white sergeant.
Collins had heard the arguments before. Day by day, he had watched the process. It did not always work, but he thought it was worth the effort. He turned down the volume again and gazed through the one-way mirror. In the silence, he saw his students gesturing, smiling, scowling, talking, trying to understand one another in black and white.
