The Black Officer Corps: A History of Black Military Advancement from Integration through Vietnam by Isaac Hampton II (review)

African American US Army officers have a long history of struggling against racism, prejudice, and institutionalized beliefs in the lack of their martial and leadership abilities. Historian Isaac Hampton tackles a sliver of this history—the early 1950s through the end of the Vietnam War—which represented an era of significant change in the army as the military integrated and black officers strove to gain true equality with white officers. The Black Officer Corps is the ten-chapter narrative, beginning with a history of being a black military officer, of those struggles, and the impact of the civil rights movement on officers’ perception of their military duty. In his book, Hampton principally focuses on the 1960s and early 1970s, the period surrounding the Vietnam War, to analyze the “social and cultural experiences of African American Army officers” as they struggled for equality (xi).

Hampton argues that as black officers fought the war in Southeast Asia, they also fought personal battles for genuine equality, not only within the army but also within the civilian sector, as all struggled for civil rights. In a counternarrative to the more radical initiatives of the civil rights movement, and later the Black Power movement, African American officers actively sought this equality and advancement via traditional means within the army system, namely through diligence and excellence in their performance regardless of their racial classification. These officers saw what they were doing as part of an overall solidarity in the larger struggle for civil rights and as being a tactic different from that of the more radical enlisted men.

Although much of this historical context can be found elsewhere, Hampton does make several important contributions to the growing body of work on African American military experiences. Notably, he emphasizes the often-overlooked Butler Report—authored by Colonel Douthard Butler—which detailed Butler’s struggles and the pervasive inequalities in the officer promotional system towards black officers. This sheds light on the deep-rooted prejudice and stereotyping within the institution and underscores especially the prejudice against historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCUs generated 75 percent of the black officers in the army, and while Hampton’s focus on the importance of HBCUs to the development of officers is enlightening, it is, nonetheless, a bit brief. Hampton also discusses how black officers supported army initiatives to gain genuine equality, even when they resulted in controversial programs such as the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI), which focused on race relations to ease racial tensions within the service.

The key contribution of The Black Officer Corps, though, is the extensive use of oral history to inform the narrative. In his research, Hampton conducted over seventy-five interviews with African American officers, enlisted men, and officers’ wives. This alone represents an impressive collection of black veterans’ stories, and undoubtedly will prove valuable for future researchers, since the majority of the interviews are housed in the Houston History Archives at the University of Houston. While the monograph is not constructed around these interviews, Hampton does greatly enhance his analysis of the corps by underscoring key points and arguments on the struggle for equality with liberal block quotes throughout the text. At other times, he aggregates the interviews to develop insights into general, overall feelings or perceptions common among the interviewees, upon which he then elaborates.

Through these interviews, Hampton is able to gain insights into the officers’ perceptions of advancement opportunities, the nonradical struggle for equality within the army, army efforts at improving equality, and the influence of the civil rights and Black Power movements on their conceptualization of an officer’s duty. Augmenting the officers’ interviews with those from enlisted men, Hampton provides perspective into soldiers’ mentalities in Vietnam and the enlisted soldiers’ trend toward radicalization, inspired by the Black Power movement. Because this radicalization did not extend to the officer corps, tension often developed between the...