Equality, Inclusion Would Have Been a Viable Solution to Poverty, Civil Rights

By Norman Franklin

Norman Franklin

I enlisted in the Air Force in 1966, three months before I graduated. It was strategic. The Vietnam Conflict was escalating, and I had seen the war’s coverage in Life Magazine. It was gruesome. I wanted no part of it.

I didn’t join the Air Force to avoid Vietnam. In fact, it was inevitable that I spend some time in Nam; I served a six-month Temporary Duty Assignment (TDY), the last year of my enlistment. I chose the Air Force because I like to make my own choices. Military service was mandatory, and the Army had first dibs on draftees.

I didn’t enlist with any illusions that the pay would be a hedge against poverty. I grew up in rural Kentucky, low-skilled factory work and long, hard hours of seasonal farm labor, and with penurious wages was what the future held for me. Neither appealed to me, neither held any promise of better days. Military pay was consistent. If I had any illusions about it enabling me to rise above poverty, it was dispelled with my first pay draw. Poverty and Civil Rights were high profile in the 1960s, the Johnson administration was gravitating towards the armed forces as a possible solution for them both.

Daniel Moynihan, domestic program strategist, in 1966, wrote an article for the New Republic stating, “Civil Rights as an issue is fading. The poverty program is heading for dismemberment and decline. Expectations of what can be done in America is receding. Very possibly our best hope is seriously to use the armed forces as a socializing experience for the poor.”

Later that year, around August, the Johnson Administration announced the startup of ‘Project 100,000.’ The Vietnam Conflict was an unpopular war; draft dodgers, flag burning, deserters escaping across the Canadian border. This drained the military’s manpower. Project 100,000 was the Great Society’s answer to the manpower needs cloaked in an economic empowerment initiative.

Robert McNamara, Secy. of Defense, believed that a lower military entry requirement would open enlistment to high school dropouts, misdemeanor offenders, and draft age of residents of impoverished minority neighborhoods; it would help to combat poverty. Forty-one percent of this social experiment, ‘New Standard’ recruits were African American.

The rapid vanishing of young African Americans from the ‘hood’ during the five-year run of the project fueled the misperception that Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans carried the war. Eighty percent of those serving were Caucasian.

The majority of the 354,000 recruits of Project 100,000, dubbed ‘McNamara’s Morons,’ were sent to Vietnam, and assigned to combat units; 5,478 of them died while in service, most of them combat casualties. That was three times the rate of other Americans serving in Vietnam. Those that survived learned nominal marketable skills that they could employ on their return to civilian life.

There was a Pentagon project, ‘Project Transition,’ that brought private industry onto military bases to conduct job training for men with six months or less to serve. The National Urban League supplemented the project with services funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and private firms.

“These returning veterans,” Whitney Young, Exec. Dir., later wrote, “may face, as I faced when I returned from World War II, an America that may choose to ignore their sacrifices, new skills and abilities, a society that continues to subject them and their families to discrimination.”

Moynihan assessed that the greater presence of African Americans in the armed forces, and combat, resulting from Project 100,000, would increase the number of Blacks being shot at and killed, but concluded that it could be a civil right plus factor.

“History may record that the single most psychological event in race relations in the nineteen sixties was the appearance of Negro fighting men on the TV screens of the nation,” Moynihan wrote. America, because of broadcast technology and with journalist in battlefield areas, watched live coverage of the war on the six o’ clock news. Moynihan was suffering from short term memory or more precisely, selective memory, and the systemic devaluation of Black lives.

African Americans populated the ranks of the Armed Forces during World War I. It neither changed their economic status nor hastened their acceptance as equal citizens of America. Many veterans were lynched for wearing their uniforms, and for daring to think that they had the right to ride in the front of a public transportation bus or vote in an election. But their valor in the trenches wasn’t in the newspapers.

African Americans answered the call to arms in World War II; they served with valor in both the European and Pacific Theaters. Their sacrifices did little to abate the discrimination they endured at home and abroad, nor did it improve their impoverished conditions. Many were denied the benefits of the GI Bill that ushered in a decade of prosperity in America. The denial of benefits was systemic, not mandated policy in some cases. But their sacrifices, their valor in combat wasn’t shared in the news reels that informed America of the war’s progress and victories. Yet the African Americans remained patriotic.

Vietnam vets came home to a stagnant economy, with a scarcity of jobs, and the lack of applicable skills to employ in any trade; their communities were still gripped in poverty, and systemic racism that refuses to die.

The Kerner Commission Report, issued March 1968, gave viable solutions for alleviating injustice in America, inequality that erupts in violence, and the poverty that grips African American communities. Service in the Armed Forces, and valor in foreign wars was not one of the recommendations.

The modestly implemented recommendations: enhanced employment opportunities, developing urban and rural poverty areas, eliminating segregation in schools and curricula that recognizes the history, culture, and contributions of minorities, improved housing and police/community relations, were dismantled in the 1980s during the Reagan years.

Equality and inclusion were a more equitable solution than the policies and pretense of McNamara’s Project 100,000.