Atlanta Daily World

No Colored Officer's In Peacetime Ranks Of Marine Corps

JAMES I. RICKS By WASHINGTON, D.C.-No colored officers will be accepted in the peacetime ranks of the Marine Corps, the United States Marine Corps headquarters said here last Monday.

Reiterating its previously announced intentions of limiting the colored strength of the regular Marines to 2,800, Captain P. N. Pierce, headquarters information officer, said that present plans of the Marines do not include any colored men among the 7,000 officers and 1,200 warrant officers which will form the officer staff of the peacetime "regulars."

Lieutenant J. B. Davis of Fuquay Springs, North Carolina, who recently graduated from the Navy's V-12 program at Purdue University, Indiana, to become the fourth colored man to be commissioned in the Marine Corps, has already been placed on inactive duty, Captain Pierce said. This leaves the corps still without a colored officer on active duty.

Revealing that all reserve officers and men will have been weeded out of the corps by October 1, Captain Pierce said that on July 17 there were 4,313 colored enlisted men in the corps. Of that number 620 were regulars, leaving a total of 2,180 regular enlistments open for colored men in the regulars.

Asked if the Marines were still accepting colored men for regular enlistments, Captain Pierce said a few were still being taken, but the corps is making an effort to get the 2,180 regulars from the experienced reserves which it already has in its ranks.

The regular corps, Captain Pierce said, will have a strength of 100,000 enlisted men. At present the strength of the corps is 132,814 enlisted men with 9,212 officers. Of these totals, ninety-two of the officers are women and 1,632 of the enlisted total are enlisted women.

On V.J Day when the corps was at its peak of 485,000 men it had a strength of 16,883 colored men the department said.