Current Projects

An Army Afire: The U.S. Army and “the Problem of Race” during the Vietnam Era

Forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press, 2023

In the current moment, institutions throughout the United States face renewed calls for racial justice. My project looks to an earlier period of racial crisis in the nation’s history, analyzing the ways one major American institution wrestled with demands for change. “The U.S. Army and ‘the Problem of Race’ during the Vietnam Era” examines the army’s efforts to address calls for racial justice and to manage the internal racial conflict that exploded during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the army’s actions must be understood in the context of its “institutional logic”—the collective force of the army’s culture, history, and tradition, its structure and organization, its avowed mission and purpose, its policies and practices. That institutional logic shaped the ways in which army leaders and members defined the problem at hand. It made certain proposed solutions more likely than others. It determined, to a great extent, how those attempted solutions played out: what would most easily succeed; what would more likely fail.

During the Vietnam era the U.S. military (with the army its largest and most diverse component) confronted demands for racial justice more directly than perhaps any other institution in American society. By late 1969, senior army leaders believed that racial conflict compromised the internal stability of the army and undermined its ability to defend the nation. Those charged with solving “the problem” of race were surprisingly creative, adept at dealing with the army’s institutional culture and at times willing to challenge its key premises and practices. Not surprisingly, they encountered roadblocks and resistance. The resulting struggles over racial policy and practice were rarely simple. But in its attempts to “the problem of race,” the army pioneered approaches to race relations that would be woven into its long-term institutional practice and widely adopted in the civilian world. Military experience, in turn, helped to shape the racial understandings of millions of young Americans.

In this work, I explain the origins of racial turbulence within the army during the Vietnam era in the context of broader social trends and of the institution’s longer racial history; trace the army’s move from avowedly color blind to avowedly color-conscious; and analyze their attempts to define “the problem.” Subsequent chapters examine specific army efforts to address the racial crisis: through command responsibility and leadership; through education and training; by accepting (to an extent) claims of Black identity in an era of cultural nationalism; by confronting off-post discrimination and relations with local communities, including within foreign host nations; by addressing discrimination in the system of military justice and the disproportionate incarceration of Black soldiers; and through a developing program of affirmative action.