Old feelings of race prejudice and intolerance, appearing mainly in the South, confronted the Negro at the beginning of the war.  The splendid attitude of the Negro shamed and overcame this feeling in other sections of the country, and was beginning to have its effect even in the South.  It is true that men of the race were not accepted for voluntary enlistment in numbers of consequence in any section, but had the voluntary system continued in vogue, the willingness and desire of the race to serve, coupled with the very necessities of the case, would have altered the condition.

No new Negro volunteer units were authorized, but the demand for men would soon have made it imperative.  It would have been combatted by a certain element in the South, but the friends of the few volunteer units which did exist in that section were firm in their championship and were winning adherents to their view that the number should be increased.  The selective draft with its firm dictum that all men within certain ages should be called and the fit ones chosen, put an end to all contention.  The act was not passed without bitter opposition which developed in its greatest intensity among the Southern senators and representatives; feelings that were inspired entirely by opposition to the Negro.

It would have been a bad thing for the country and would have prolonged the war, and possibly might have lost it, if the selective draft had been delayed.  But it would have been interesting to see how far the country, especially the South, would have progressed in the matter of raising a volunteer army without accepting Negroes.  Undoubtedly they soon would have been glad to recruit them, even in the South.

Unfortunately for the Negro, the draft was not able to prevent their being kept out of the Navy.  It is a very desirable branch of the service vitiated and clouded, however, with many disgusting and aristocratic traditions.  When the Navy was young and the service more arduous; when its vessels were merely armed merchantmen, many of them simply tubs and death traps and not the floating castles of today, the services of Negroes were not disdained; but times and national ideals had changed, and, the shame of it, not to the credit of a Commonwealth, for whose birth a Negro had shed the first blood, and a Washington had faced the rigors of a Valley Forge, a Lincoln the bullet of an assassin.

The annual report of the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, rendered to the Secretary of the Navy and covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 1918, showed that in the United States Navy, the United States Naval Reserve Force and the National Naval Volunteers, there was a total of 435,398 men.  Of that great number only 5,328 were Negroes, a trifle over one percent.  Between June and November 1918, the Navy was recruited to a total force somewhat in excess of 500,000 men.  Carrying out the same percentage, it is apparent that the aggregate number of Negroes serving, in the Navy at the close of the war, could not have been much in excess of 6,000.