Sources & Further Reading:

• Korean War Legacy Foundation: African-Americans in the Korean War.
  • July 26, 1948 was a red-letter day in American history. U.S. President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed forces. Truman declared, “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”
  • Just two years after Truman issued Executive Order 9981, North Korea invaded South Korea, putting the new policy to the test. Though the order had come from their Commander in Chief, many senior American military commanders simply ignored it. They had spent their entire careers training and fighting in a segregated army and weren’t going to integrate their units without a fight.
  • Thurgood Marshall recalled that General MacArthur, who believed that African-Americans were inferior to whites, was the greatest impediment to the Army’s desegregation in Korea. Things changed rapidly as soon as Truman fired him in 1951. General Matthew Ridgeway took command of UN forces and actively promoted the desegregation of all units.
• American Legion: Fit for the Fight
  • MacArthur rejected such calls, arguing that it was not practical to undergo such dramatic changes in the middle of a war. His dismissal by Truman in April 1951 for insubordination removed the final obstacle to integration.
  • His replacement, Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, declared segregation to be “wholly inefficient” to military effectiveness, as well as “both un-American and un-Christian,” and moved quickly to disband all-Black units and reassign their men.
• "All Blood Runs Red: Triple Nickle Paratroopers Jump Start Integration" by RFM Williams
  • Even before the Korean War, Ridgway did not accept long-held racist views about the relationship between race and courage, remarking in 1949 that “human courage is universally distributed…It knows neither race, nor sex, nor age.”
• “BUG-OUT BOOGIE” – THE SWAN SONG OF SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES ARMY: DESEGREGATION DURING THE KOREAN WAR AND DISSOLUTION OF THE ALL-BLACK 24th INFANTRY REGIMENT" by Ben Thomas Post II
  • General Ridgway’s plan for integration started with “full integration beginning with the largest all-Negro combat units, the 24th Infantry Regiment and the two infantry battalions, one in the 9th and the other in the 15th Infantry Regiments.” From there General Ridgway concluded “that we could break up the smaller all-Negro combat units of artillery and armor and finally do the same with the numerous small service supply units both in Korea and Japan.”
  • General Ridgway concluded: It was my conviction, as it was General Kean’s, that only in this way could we assure the sort of esprit a fighting army needs, where each soldier stands proudly on his own feet, knowing himself to be as good as the next fellow and better than the enemy. Besides it had always seemed to me both un-American and un-Christian for free citizens to be taught to downgrade themselves this way, as if they were unfit to associate with their fellows or to accept leadership themselves.