Back in 1995, while a senior officer on the Army Staff in the Pentagon, I asked a legendary officer to come for lunch and speak to my staff. The officer was retired General Walter T. Kerwin, one of the legendary members of the West Point class of 1939, unarguably one of the Academy’s most storied. Over lunch I received an education I had not expected.
At the time of the lunch we were reducing the Army by about a third following the end of the Cold War. Kerwin had been the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff in the early 1970s and overseen the drawdown following Vietnam. Things had not ended well following that effort, and I wanted to avoid similar mistakes.
But before we got to that discussion, the old General asked how things were in Hanau, Germany. Kerwin and I had a connection we had discovered earlier because he had commanded the Army’s Hanau Military Community in the early 1960s, and I had commanded a part of it thirty years later. “It’s much nicer than in your time,” I reported. “But it still has problems.”
“Such as what?” Kerwin asked. I updated him on Hanau, which sat astride major road and rail transportation hubs about thirty miles northeast of Frankfurt. It had become, I reported, the largest military community among the sixteen or so the Army maintained in Europe, housing some twenty-two battalions of various types. But somehow, I noted, Hanau was always the last to get the latest upgrade whether it be a new commissary, a post exchange, or armed forces TV.
“You know why that is, don’t you?” Kerwin asked.
I said I had no idea. “It’s institutional racism,” Kerwin quickly replied, “going back to World War II and the segregated Army.”
The general, who had been in World War II and was briefly an aide to Patton, offered an interesting perspective. When the war ended, he explained, Hanau became a major Army logistical center, a home for numerous support units such as Quartermaster and Transportation outfits. In the segregated Army of the time, such units were normally all-Black, while the combat units were all-White. Hanau, Kerwin continued, became known to the Germans as one of the Americans’ Schwarzstadt — a “Black City.”
As such, when it came to the provision of facilities and services as the Army settled in for its fifty-year Cold War presence, from the beginning Hanau was prioritized very low if not actually last. “I’m sure no one in Heidelberg (the headquarters for the US Army in Europe) today knows why Hanau is still last,” Kerwin concluded, “it just became an institutional habit, and institutional habits can continue for a long time.”
President Harry Truman, as is well known, integrated the Army in 1948 — two years before I was even born. And I have always been proud of the military’s record regarding race. It has not been perfect by any means, early in my Army career there were clear racial tensions and I confronted several racial conflicts among the troops, but over time the military has certainly earned its share of plaudits. The late sociology Professor Charles Moskos once came to West Point while I was on the faculty. Moskos studied military society intently and in his day was the nation’s most noted authority regarding it. “The military,” I recall him saying, “is the only place in American society where a Black man orders a bunch of White men to do something and nobody thinks anything about it.”
When I deployed my artillery battalion from Hanau to Desert Storm, three of my five battery commanders (my immediate subordinate officers) were minority officers. Three of the five senior sergeants were also minority soldiers. And as Moskos had correctly observed to me a decade before, no one thought anything about it.
When General Colin Powell became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, it received more than the average media coverage as Powell was Black — the first minority Chairman. But as I told a reporter during that time, within the military itself this was nothing notable. General Powell, after all, had a sterling record: he was a Vietnam combat veteran, had been a White House Fellow, aide to the Secretary of Defense, and President Reagan’s National Security Advisor. Those were the relevant credentials we cared about.
But General Kerwin’s observation has stuck with me over the years, especially since the two soldiers I lost in Desert Storm were both minorities — one African-American, one Asian-American, both All-American. Do we have societal “Hanaus” out there that we don’t recognize for what they are? Are they more numerous than we want to admit? Why, for example, are police forces in largely minority communities pre-dominantly White, such as the one discovered in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014.
Finding a solution to any problem starts with the recognition that there is in fact a problem. But problems are often deeper than imagined, making solutions more difficult to craft. To return to my Army days, I became aware at one point that the majority of the soldiers being referred to me on disciplinary issues were minorities. Accordingly, I summoned my senior sergeants to a meeting to discuss the matter. As we all sat around my office I asked the sergeants if they felt this particular disparity suggested a problem. One of the Black sergeants (who was my favorite of this group) quickly answered.
“Sir,” he firmly stated, “those we send to you are the ones who’ve caused trouble. You have to trust us on this. We don’t see them as Black or White; we see them as Green. And we have high expectations of Green people.”
I adjourned the meeting. I wish American society as a whole saw itself as “Green” — but maybe I’d be happy with simply Red, White and Blue. But it’s obvious that we do have our “Hanaus” out there, many unrecognized by those who most need to be aware of their existence. We need the vision to see them and the wisdom to address them. In many instances, that is difficult. Things often are merely accepted “as they are” without question and without awareness of why that might be.
