1. Project One Hundred Thousand
adapted by Dr. Elisse Wright Barnes
from her 2002 dissertation,
Birds of a Different Feather:
African American Support for the Vietnam War
in the Johnson Years, 1965–1969
Launched as the Pentagon’s “contribution to the War on Poverty,” Project 100,000 was the
military’s instrument of recruitment between October 1966 and June 1969. Under this
initiative, 246,000 “New Standards Men,” who were previously unable to qualify for military
service, were recruited to unskilled job categories in the U.S. Army. Of the first quarter million
recruits, 41 percent were nonwhites; most were poor and poorly educated. According to
historian Jack Foner, “because they lacked the skills to enter specialist units, 40 percent of the
New Standards men found themselves in combat units and in the Army and Marines 50 percent
of the New Standards Men went to Vietnam.”1
Diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer
concluded that “only the most charitable observers viewed the Project as more than a means of
acquiring warm bodies for the frontlines.”2
Influential members of the African American media were not in a charitable mood. The
Pittsburgh Courier announced that despite the disproportionate number of blacks already
serving and dying in Vietnam, Project 100,000 ensured that “there’s going to be even a greater
percentage of Negroes drafted or enlisted in the future.” Jet magazine’s Simeon Booker wrote
that
Stokely Carmichael’s contention that Negro GI’s are mercenaries in Vietnam
took real meaning when the Pentagon announced enrollment of 40,000
rejectees. Many will be Negro. The U.S. would rather enlist Negroes in the
military and scrap the Job Corps program, with whites being deferred to stay
in school. Negro youth, many high school dropouts and others with no cash
to attend college, face military enlistment and service in Vietnam.3
Ironically, the hated program may have originated with President Johnson’s black advisors.
In the fall of 1965 both Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Louis Martin and
presidential aide Hobart Taylor urged the White House to develop a program that would relax
Selective Service admission standards to “accommodate Negroes who fail the military test.”
Both men envisioned a mutually beneficial relationship. Taylor believed that “although these
young men would cost us more than those we take at present, they might cost less than they
would it they remain on the streets, and the machinery is already set up to carry out this plan.”
Martin concurred, writing to Johnson’s senior domestic policy aide, Joseph Califano, that
1

2. A large number of these rejectees are undoubtedly in the army of
unemployed Negro males.... [T]hrough the efforts of an intelligent remedial
and rehabilitating program [it] would appear that we could help the military
in their manpower problem and ease the Negroes unemployment situation.
It is even possible that this would affect the crime situation.4
Califano forwarded Martin’s memo to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara the following
day.
In the fall of 1966 former Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Whitney
Young, Executive Director of the National Urban League, joined Martin and Taylor in asserting
that military service might provide a solution to the unemployment crisis for “unemployable,”
poorly educated, black men. Moynihan wrote in The New Republic that with the recent
disclosure that
67.5% of Negroes were failing the Selective Service mental test, the
American armed forces, having become an immensely potent instrument for
education and occupational mobility, have been systemically excluding the
least educated, least mobile young men… as employment pure and simple,
the armed forces have much to offer men with the limited current options
of, say, Southern Negroes…. History may record that the single most
important psychological event in race relations in the 1960’s was the
appearance of Negro fighting men on the TV screens of the nation. Acquiring
a reputation for military valor is one of the oldest known routes to social
equality….Civil rights as an issue is fading. The poverty program is heading
for dismemberment and decline. Expectations of what can be done in
America are receding. Very possibly our best hope is seriously to use the
armed forces as a socializing experience for the poor—particularly the
Southern poor—until somehow their environment begins turning out equal
citizens.5
Moynihan’s ideas were not novel or new; President Johnson himself had linked military
service to civil rights progress during World War II when he contended that after serving in the
military, blacks would no longer accept the abusive treatment meted out by whites. From that
point forward, Johnson contended, progress on civil rights was the only way to avoid “blood in
the streets.” And in the summer of 1963 he had urged presidential speechwriter Ted Sorenson
to tell President Kennedy to
be on all the TV networks… [have] the honor guard there with a few Negroes
in it. Then let him reach over and point and say, ‘I have to order these boys
into battle, in the foxholes carrying the flag. I don’t ask them what their
2

3. name is, whether it’s Gomez or Smith, or what color they got, what religion.
If I can order them into battle, I’ve got to make it possible for them to eat
and sleep in this country.’6
And while Whitney Young considered it “sad” that the military needed to be used to address
substandard education in the black community, he defended Project 100,000 as a way to give a
hand up to young men who are “below the national average due to the various handicaps
poverty inflicts on its sufferers.” Young wrote “We can’t simply say that these men should be
denied a new start in life.”
Like many African Americans of the day, especially those who had served in World War II,
Young had a positive view of military service. Despite serving in a segregated unit, Young, like
other future civil rights role models and leaders including Jackie Robinson and Medgar Evers,
had developed leadership skills during the war—and found his career path in race relations.
After the war, the GI bill had financed the master’s degree in social work he needed to pursue
his interests. A 1969 analysis of black Americans and U.S. foreign policy concluded that
“Contrary to the utterances of some of the leaders on the left of the civil rights movement in
the mid-1960s, the military and military service have had at least as favorable an image among
Negroes as among whites.”7
So while he acknowledged the controversy over the war and the overrepresentation of
African Americans on the frontlines, Young still concluded that Project 100,000 “shouldn’t be
dismissed so lightly [since] in a real sense it could serve as the basis for real changes for the
better in the economic and social status of Negro citizens.” Young considered the initiative a
“temporary measure pending a thorough overhaul of selective service.”8
And he assumed that
the promised educational components of the program would, in fact, be realized. When they
were not and his faith proved misplaced, Young still noted bitterly that “funds needed for
programs like these probably have a better chance of being voted by Congress when the Army
asks for them [since] recent history has shown that Congress’ attitude is often one of extreme
generosity to Pentagon requests while other agencies have to grovel for every dollar.”
Ultimately, the ever-pragmatic Young concluded, “We cannot wait for Utopia to arrive. To do so
is to condemn another generation of Negro youth to poverty and squalor.”9
3

4. ENDNOTES
1
Jack D. Foner, Blacks and the Military, 203; Jeffreys-Jones, Peace Now, 109-110; Lisa Hsaio, “Project
100,000: The Great Society’s Answer to Military Manpower Needs in Vietnam,” Vietnam Generation,
1, 2 (Spring 1989), 14–37.
2
Plummer “Evolution,” 78.
3
“Pct. Of Negroes in Viet Nam Could Rise,” The Pittsburgh Courier, September 3, 1966, 1; Simeon
Booker, Ticker Tape U.S.A., Jet, September 8, 1966, 12.
4
Memo from Louis Martin to Joseph Califano, September 24, 1965, WHCF, Box 13, Folder: HU2
Equality of the Races, 9/25/65–11/2/65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (LBJL); Memo from Hobart
Taylor to LBJ, August 30, 1965, WHCF, Box 6, Folder: BE4 2/26/65–7/6/66, LBJL.
5
Daniel P. Moynihan, “Who Gets in the Army,” The New Republic, November 5, 1966, 20, 22.
Paul Seabury wrote that “regardless of the complex moral issue of inequity which [the
disproportionate number of black soldiers] poses… as in the past it will probably hasten, rather than
retard, the process of ethnic integration by serving as a surrogate college education for the
economically deprived.” Paul Seabury, “Racial Problems and American Foreign Policy,” in Racial
Influences on American Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Shepherd, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, Inc.,
1970), 75; Also see Kenneth Crawford, “The Non-Debate,” Newsweek, April 17, 1967, 46. But Sol
Stern countered that if “whites were capable of seeing blacks as just another ethnic group there
would be no race crisis.” Sol Stern, “When the Black G.I. Comes Back From Vietnam,” New York Times
Magazine, March 24, 1968, 38.
6
Dallek, Flawed Giant, 24; Stern, Calculating Visions, 85–6.
7
Hero, “American Negroes,” 229; “The Great Society--in Uniform,” Newsweek, August 22, 1966, 46–8;
Howard Schuman and Shirley Hatchett, Black Racial Attitudes: Trends and Complexities, (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 1974), 9, 16.
8
Whitney Young, “A New Look at the Draft,” Whitney M. Young Papers, Box 195, Folder: Speeches, To
Be Equal #40, 10/5/66 “A New Look at the Draft,” Columbia.
9
Whitney Young, “A New Look at the Draft,” Whitney M. Young Papers, Box 195, Folder: Speeches, To
Be Equal #40, 10/5/66 “A New Look at the Draft,” Columbia. Draft article for American Child
magazine, “Drafting the Army into the War on Poverty,” NUL Papers, Part III, Box 424, Folder:
Executive Office, Presidential Files, Young, Whitney M. articles, “D-I” 6/66–3/71 (2 of 8), LOC. Sol
Stern warned that “it is extremely dangerous to try to use the military to solve social problems in a
society that is torn by racial conflict…. The military experience is a very special one; when it is over
there is an entirely different ball game to go home to.” Sol Stern, “When the Black G.I. Comes Back
From Vietnam,” New York Times Magazine, March 24, 1968, 41.
4