This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
High school graduation kicked off my summer in 1970. I lived in a semirural small Midwestern town in Michigan. I couldn't afford college; classmates were turning to factory work, which held no interest for me. The specter of the draft was always present. My uncle was in the Air Force, and he had some great stories. So, what the hell. Although I didn't know anything about the real Air Force, I joined just before year's end.
Come April 1971, I arrived at Altus Air Force Base, Oklahoma. I liked the Air Force I had joined. I was beginning an interesting and fulfilling job that I would pursue for 25 years. My dorm room was comfortable and carpeted; it even had a refrigerator! Support facilities like the dining hall, gym, bowling alley, and auto shop promoted by my recruiter were as advertised. One thing my recruiter didn't tell me about was how much I didn't know. About the Air Force. About its culture. About its people.
That gap in my education was apparent when I met my first roommate. He was the first Black man I had ever met or, for that matter, even talked with. Paul was from Washington, D.C., and held a bachelor's degree in sociology. He was an informal leader among the young Black airmen. He included me in his circle of friends, who often stopped by the room. They were definitely influenced by the events of the day: the 1967 Detroit race riots. The Black Power protest at the Mexico City Olympics, the Democratic National Convention, and Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination all occurred in 1968.
I knew about those events and felt bad for people attacked by vicious dogs and high-pressure water hoses, but they were just a collection of facts that unfolded on my living room TV. To Paul's friends, they were personal; the events hit them in a visceral way. Yes, I felt bad, but these men were truly angry.
That first year of my career, those young men filled the gaps in my education. I would never have expected what they taught me: There was an entirely different Air Force if you were Black and male.
My first clue to those differences came with a knock on my door one evening about a week after I arrived. I opened the door to one of the career noncommissioned officers who lived in the dorm.
"I can get you a proper roommate if you want," he said without any preamble. Naive as I was, I didn't understand what he meant. The next day, Paul explained that he was the local Ku Klux Klan recruiter and was not happy I was in a room with a Black man.
My education about this other Air Force began by eavesdropping on conversations among Paul's friends. As we grew more comfortable with one another, I learned that when it rained out on the flight line, Black maintainers were picked up in open-bed trucks, and white maintainers were picked up in covered step vans. In really hot weather, trucks with water coolers often bypassed the Black workers. In some work centers, Friday cleanup was the sole domain of Black airmen.
The dining hall selections I thought were pretty good rarely featured items you'd find in a Black home. An airman's club existed then, but Paul and his friends knew they were asking for trouble if they visited.
It was hard to digest; nothing in my background prepared me for this "in your face" experience. I used to think my life experience was universal. Everyone was free to go where they wanted when they wanted. Restaurant menus had the items you wanted. I could walk into a store and not ever hear a mean word. Oh, I knew the words people sometimes used for minorities, but I rarely heard them used and had no idea of the pain those words caused.
I realized I had been sheltered from much of the world's ugliness and was more than a little naive. I thought the problems I heard about from Paul's friends were peculiar to my base.
What I thought were local problems proved to be far more widespread.
While I was at Altus, problems erupted at another air base, underscoring that the inequities Paul and his friends discussed existed throughout the Air Force.
In May 1971, racial disturbances flared into a full-scale race riot at Travis Air Force Base, California. Groups of airmen formed along mostly racial lines and fought. Airmen attacked each other and smashed vehicles with baseball bats. Other groups entered base housing and caused more damage. The maintenance group's commander was dragged from his car and beaten.
By the time things died down, 135 military personnel were arrested--25 of whom were white and 110 whom were Black--and a firefighter died.
In the Travis after-action report, Black airmen complained that they received unequal assignments, promotions, and military justice compared to their white counterparts.
Travis would become the catalyst for change across the Air Force. The aftermath changed how the Air Force dealt with discrimination and race relations. The military created the Equal Opportunity offices and changes followed quickly.
News traveled slowly in southern Oklahoma in 1971. News of the riots didn't trickle down to the enlisted ranks until late Monday, three days after the melee started. By Monday evening, Paul had been moved to the commander's staff--and moved to a different dorm room--to serve as a liaison of sorts between those on their initial enlistment and command staff.
Soon, the exchange added Black hair products, makeup, magazines, and books. The dining hall refurbished a second serving line, widened its menu to include fare like tacos and soul food, and extended serving hours.
Within a month or so, the staff organized multiday classes to discuss the issues raised by Travis AFB. I remember a "Black ASVAB" with alternate questions such as "identify a deuce and a quarter" (answer: a Buick Electra 225 sedan). The teaching tool demonstrated how the official Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, which determined career fields, was oriented toward rural, white experiences.
Those minimum steps effectively reduced local tensions; they were also occurring at other bases around the world with similar success. At the same time, the Air Force was making top-down changes to address the underlying systemic problems. It didn't happen overnight, but the Air Force changed. When I retired in 1995, the Air Force was a much better, healthier organization than it was in 1970.
Paul and his friends shook me from the blissful ignorance of my youth. Had I not met him and his friends, I would have thought everything was hunky-dory, that Travis was an aberration, and that my Air Force wouldn't do that.
It helped me understand that I was a part of the problem, whether I realized it or not, by blindly accepting my experience as everyone's experience. My eyes opened up as I heard these guys' pains; they wanted to be included, they wanted to be successful, and they were being held back.
The lessons I learned then still inform me today. I am a Roman Catholic deacon now, and a part of my ministry has been in jails and prisons, where people are often lumped together by their race regardless of what they bring to the table.
My younger self saw my Air Force's advances as a lesson for the larger society as it worked towards recognizing and overcoming the systemic problems that hindered some of its members.
But I suspect conversations with today's youth, who live in the same country as I do but experience a different world based on their race and communities, would echo those discussions of uneven treatment in 1971. I am no longer a naive boy from a small town, and I ruefully see that society as a whole hasn't come very far. It makes me wonder, "Will we ever learn?"
Mark Miller served in the Air Force for 25 years as a public affairs practitioner in both print and broadcast career fields before retiring in 1995 as a senior master sergeant. He served at five CONUS and five overseas bases. He served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In June of 1987, he was ordained as a Roman Catholic deacon and served military communities in Germany; Saudi Arabia; Kelly Air Force Base, Texas; and Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in secondary education.
