New Military Data: 80 Percent of Chicago-Area Recruits are Minorities

By: Rachel L. JonesAs the United Nation's Jan. 15 deadline for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait looms, an analysis of military data by The Chicago Reporter offers new ammunition for the debate on the disproportionate representation of minorities in the military.

The Reporter obtained a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) zip code study of Chicago-area residents who enlisted in all four branches of the armed services during fiscal years 1989 and 1990. The data show that in the zip code areas that encompass Chicago and a group of six nearby suburbs--Cicero, Niles, Riverdale, Elmwood Park, Harwood Heights, and Evergreen Park--80 percent of 2,623 recruits in 1990 were-minority--65% black, 12.4% Hispanic, 19.9% white and 4.3% other.

Minorities comprised half of the 5,957 recruits from a larger region that includes all of Cook, DuPage and Lake counties, small portions of eastern McHenry and Kane counties and a section of northern Will County.

For the fiscal year of October 1, 1989, to September 30, 1990, 2,378 recruits from that area were black, 491 were Hispanic, 124 were Asian and six Native American. Of the 5,876 recruits who enlisted from October 1, 1988, to September 30, 1989, 2,482 were black, 362 were Hispanic, 91 were Asian and 14 were Native American.

Though current data of population by race for each of Chicago's suburbs are not available, 1990 estimates from the Chicago Department of Planning show that minorities comprise about 70 percent of the approximately 363,000 people aged 18 to 25 living in the city of Chicago. And 1988 population estimates by the Illinois Department of Public Health show that, Chicago is 44 percent minority, Cook County, 29.5 percent minority, DuPage, 5.4 percent and Lake County, 8.8 percent.

While 80 percent of military recruits from Chicago and its immediate suburbs are minority, their percentage is significantly lower nationwide. In the US Army, the largest branch of the military, 31.9 percent of soldiers are black, compared to an estimated US black population aged 18 to 24 of 13 percent.


Poverty Draft
Military critics argue that if war erupts in the Middle East, a disproportionate number of minority youths who joined the military as an alternative to unemployment and poverty may have to pay for their choice with their lives.

"We can't even get a civil rights bill passed over here, and economic conditions here are terrible for black youth," said US Rep. Charles Hayes (D-IL) who has two nephews stationed in Saudi Arabia. "To send those same youth over there to be on the front lines fighting an unjust war is a travesty."

There are no precise data on how many Chicagoans are in the Persian-Arabian Gulf. Recent news reports estimate that one third to one half of the 326,000 troops in the gulf are minorities, and DOD statistics show that among Army troops stationed in the desert in mid-November, 36 percent of the troops were black, 61 percent were white and 3 percent fell into the "other" category.

Richard Morales, a Mexican-American from Romeoville, joined the Marine Corps reserves last April. The 1988 high school graduate had been working on sporadic construction jobs and looking for a career.

His parents urged him to join to give him some direction, he said. About a month ago Morales learned he would be sent to Saudi Arabia in early January. He remembers thinking: "I sure picked a great time to join."

At boot camp, he had noticed that about 40 percent of the members of his artillery unit were Hispanic. "It makes you stop and wonder," he said. "It should be equal. There shouldn't be more of us, but when you sign that contract, that's that."

Military critics question whether disadvantaged youths really have a choice when they decide to sign up. They argue that because minorities have fewer educational and job opportunities, the military is often the only chance for disadvantaged youths to excel.

Minority overrepresentation in the military "is a commentary on the opportunity structures that exist in this society," said Edwin Dorn, a military analyst for the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. "In fact, the high representation of blacks in the military is the best evidence that you could have that there is something wrong with the civilian opportunity structure."

The current economic recession has aggravated an already gloomy picture for minority youths, a local economist said.

"If you think of black workers as having poorer opportunities in the labor market, then it's like they're living in a recession at all times," says Edward Lazear, a professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business and a senior research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.

The Chicago area used to be primarily a manufacturing and industrial area, but the people who have been successful at getting those (manufacturing and industrial) jobs out of proportion to their numbers are whites, Lazear explained.

Besides, "They're not in the kinds of industries that are growing in Chicago," Lazear said. "They are low-paying, and they don't lead to higher-paying jobs very easily. Given the Chicago context, the service area is not going to be an area that is growing, and there's no hope that taking one of those jobs will lead to anything other than staying in that area or doing nothing."

When the question of the skin color of potential war casualties came up in November, a peeved Gen. Colin L. Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Washington Post: "What would you wish me to do? Move the blacks from the positions they're in so that they will have a lower percentage of casualties? I don't think it's disproportionate or wrong. I think it's a choice the American people made when they said have a volunteer Army and allow those who want to serve to serve."

The lack of participation by the more affluent is evidenced by a November report in Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress. The paper reported that just two of Congress' 535 members have children in Saudi Arabia.

The economic and educational status of minorities has created a "poverty draft," said Jamillah Muhammad, director of the Youth and Militarism Program, a branch of Clergy and Laity Concerned. CALC was formed in 1965 by the Rev. Martin Luther King and others as a response to the Vietnam War. The group counsels youths about the consequences of military service, with a special focus on minorities.

"Our kids are not only academically unprepared for college, they're financially unprepared. The military capitalizes on that," Muhammad said.

The mother of a reservist who may be on his way to war agreed. "This thing is about money, and for people who don't have any, you can't win," said Doris Cheatham, a Chicago mother of three. Cheatham's son James Gray, an Army reservist, received his "stand-by" notice in late November. On Dec. 17, he was on a transport plane headed to Germany, where his unit replaced a unit that had been sent to Saudi Arabia. "With my luck, a bullet will ricochet from the desert and hit him in Germany," Cheatham laughed nervously.

DOD officials estimate that as many as 1,000 reservists are being sent to Saudi Arabia each day, so Gray, 27, may not be in Germany long. He entered the Army reserves eight years ago, after his baseball scholarship to Tennessee State University was canceled due to an injury. Joining the reserves was the only way he could finish his sociology degree; his monthly reserves stipend and educational benefits helped pay his bills, his mother said.

Pentagon spokesman Doug Hart said that 144,236 Army National Guard and reserves recruits had been put on "standby" by early January; half had actually gone to Saudi Arabia by that time. The major difference between an "active duty" military recruit and a member of the Reserves is the amount of time served. All recruits go through an eight-week basic training period, followed by skills training that can range from 10 to 4 weeks.

Afterwards, an active duty recruit then goes to an army base and serves as a full-time soldier for the duration of their enlistment period. A Reserves recruit serves only one weekend per month, and two weeks during the summer. Reservists are considered "part-time" soldiers. That is, until a war breaks out, when reservists are deployed for combat duty just like regular recruits.

During fiscal year 1990, 2,010 people joined the military Reserves in the area that includes Chicago and the 6 suburbs. All told, 60.8 percent were black, 7 percent were Hispanic, 1.4 percent were Asian, and .l percent Native American, compared to 26.1 percent whites. From the overall area, 52.4 percent of Reservists were white, 37.4 percent were black, 5.2 percent Hispanic, 0.2 percent Native American and 1.9 percent were Asian, out of 5,118 recruits.

Some military experts argue that low-income whites are also vulnerable to the lure of the military. But Brookings Institute analyst Dorn believes that race and class are both important factors in decisions to sign up.

"It's very difficult to disaggregate the effects" of class and race, Dorn said. He posed the question: "is (a minority recruit) confronting a lousy opportunity structure because he's poor or because he's black or Hispanic? Well, in large measure, he's poor because he's black or Hispanic."

But a local expert on minorities in the military disagrees. "By focusing on blacks, you sort of make them into unwitting recruits, which is another form of victimization," said Charles Moskos, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. "The poor white kids who enter do so under the same constraints, and we should talk perhaps about all working class young men and women."

The entry level job market will probably be just as good this spring as last year, according to Northwestern University's 1991 Endicott-Lindquist Report, an annual survey of private and public companies. But those jobs are for college graduates.

"The new jobs in the Chicago area are better suited to educated workers, and given the distribution of education in the city, black workers are going to be disadvantaged in their ability to get those jobs," economist Lazear said.

And Chicago public school dropout rates show that more minority youths are failing to get that education. According to data for the high school graduating class of 1988, 41.2 percent of black students dropped out, 43.5 percent of Hispanics left before graduation, 15.3 percent of Asians and 68 percent of Native Americans, compared to 36.7 percent of whites.


Military Lures
Military recruiters don't always tell potential enlistees the full story, said Muhammad of CALC. For example, recruiters tend to focus on people who say they want to work with computers and paint a rosy picture of the myriad technical opportunities in the military.

"A recruiter can't guarantee where they will be placed after they're in. The only involvement they may have with computers is unloading them off a truck," she said.

"It's a problem, and we recognize we have it," said Lt. Col. Richard Strube, head of the Army's Recruiting battalion at Fort Sheridan. "We go into schools with a lot of pretty slick stuff, and it's pretty impressive. What you can't show somebody is that there are a lot of days when you just get dirty and tired and sweaty or freezing cold, and it's not as glamorous as it looks on that video."

On her visits to Chicago-area high schools, Muhammad is often pitted head-to-head with military recruiters who, she said, are skillful at making a 17-year-old's eyes sparkle with tales of a military career unclouded by the spectre of armed combat and death.

Army recruiters visit each of about 200 high schools in Cook, DuPage and Lake Counties at least once a year to make presentations to students, Strube said. The potential enlistee is acquainted with an array of tempting benefits, including:

• 25,200 from the Army College Fund. If a recruit signs on for three years of service, he or she will receive $525 a month for four years as long as they are enrolled in college.

• In addition to the fund, veterans who are Illinois natives get free tuition, something that few states offer. The State of Illinois pays the tuition at any state college or university for any veteran who has served at least one year and got a honorable discharge.

• Free medical and dental care during service.

• All recruits receive either free housing or a housing allowance of up to $800 a month as long as they are enlisted.

"They make it sound like the promised land. How is a kid supposed to resist that?" Muhammad asked.

She mentioned another recruiting pitch that many inner-city minority youths find hard to resist: uniforms. "Show up in uniform, and you are somebody. That's the way the gangs recruit kids. They have their colors, and their jackets, and they are a part of something," Muhammad said, adding that recruiters are not much older then the youths they are trying to entice.

Muhammad said that while the DOD's $2.1 billion 1990 recruiting budget is only a sliver of the $292 billion total military budget, it's significant when compared, for example, to the $709 million spent on the federal summer youth employment program and $700 million on youth training programs in the Job Training and Partnership Act for 1989-90.

On Dec. 7, Annual Career Day at Roberto Clemente High School, Muhammad said she counted five young black male recruiters for the Army alone. Despite the Gulf crisis, the students "flocked to the recruiters," she said.

There is no Chicago Board of Education policy governing the frequency of recruiting in public schools; it's up to individual school administrators, said high school district superintendent Grady Jordan. "It's too bad that is the only alternative for many young people, but let's face it, there are no jobs out there," he said.

At Winnetka's New Trier East High School, 94 percent of its students go on to college. Recruiters are allowed to visit twice a year, said Nina Winter, the career center resource director. Only four or five students each year actively pursue an interest in the military. "It's just not a part of what they're planning to do with their future," Winter said.

Chicago schools' Jordan said he wouldn't be surprised if recruiters were targeting minorities. "Hell, the recruiters aren't stupid. They're going to go where they feel they have the best chance. They're going to go where they feel the young people have less options."

Strube denied that his recruiters target minority youths and added that because his battalion's recruiting budget for 1990 was slashed by $35,000 to $15,000, less money is available for newspaper advertising and other publicity.

But the cut apparently hasn't affected enlistment; the number of local recruits held steady between 1989 and 1990.

Strube thinks most of the criticism of disproportionate representation is "uninformed" at best. "Obviously, it's an issue that needs to be addressed, in the correct forum, which is probably the political forum," he said. "It needs to be addressed with factual information and not speculation or emotionalism."


Veteran Victims
The Milwaukee-based National Association for Black Veterans has compiled some facts about America's 2.2 million black veterans:

• For every one white unemployed military veteran, there are three minority veterans without a job.

• Veterans comprise about 35 percent of the national prison population. Over 50 percent of them are black, although African Americans make up only 7 percent of the total veteran population of 27 million.

• Homeless veterans comprise nearly one third of the total homeless population in some large cities, according to the 1990 Homeless Veteran's Reintegration Project. Nearly 50 percent of those homeless veterans are black.

• 507,000 black soldiers who served in Vietnam received other than honorable discharges, which are issued without a military hearing. One out of every three black soldiers, or 300,000, received those discharges.

A 1987 study of 2,350 veterans by North Carolina's Research Triangle Institute found that 27.9 percent of Hispanics and 20.6 percent of blacks surveyed suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, compared to 13.7 percent of whites. Most of the veterans surveyed had fought in Vietnam.

Earnest Webb, a Vietnam veteran who was drafted in 1967 and wounded during the famous Tet Offensive in 1968, said, "All the guys up on the hill with me were black. I can't speak for anybody else, but that's what I saw." Webb is a counselor at the Veteran's Resource Center, 5505 S. Harper.

The streets of Chicago teem with the casualties of war, he said. "Go out on any street corner where you see the brothers hanging out and drinking wine. Ask how many of them are Vietnam vets, and I bet you that most of them will put down their wine bottles and raise their hands," Webb said.

According to data from the Illinois Veterans Task Force, a black veteran's group, there are approximately 99,000 black veterans in the city of Chicago, and 296,000 black veterans in the Chicago metropolitan area. Illinois has about 1.3 million veterans, according to the group.

Chicagoan Ted Saunders, a former Green Beret who was drafted in 1958, did three tours of duty in Vietnam and rose through the ranks as a paratrooper and a member of the Airborne Rangers. He's chairman of the Illinois Veteran's Task Force and an unabashed military supporter who thinks the debate over minority representation is ironic. Just before the Persian Gulf crisis began August 2, black politicians complained that the military was excluding minorities in large numbers because its testing standards were too high, he said. "In fact, some of the same people who were complaining about being left out are now crying about too many of us being in," Saunders said.


Attacking Attucks
He thinks complaints about minority overrepresentation are an insult to the legacy of black soldiers like Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave who was the first to die in the Revolutionary War on March 5, 1770, the day the war began. "In every war that's been fought in the U.S., blacks have fought in them," says Saunders, who considers himself an amateur expert on blacks in the military.

"Blacks have always distinguished themselves as very courageous and great fighters. We as blacks, even before the Civil War, have been fighting for basically the same thing, and that's the right to defend our country. It's a right that we hold as citizens."

Still, the minority veteran also shoulders a compounded burden, said veteran's counselor Webb. "A lot of blacks had experienced some trauma before they went (to war), in terms of racism here in the US, then they experienced the trauma there, and then had to come back and deal with the trauma of being black and aVietnam veteran."

In 1965, 27 percent of black draftees in the Vietnam War were assigned to combat duty, compared to 18 percent of whites, according to a study by Jack D. Foner, author of "Blacks and the Military in American History; A New Perspective." Foner also found that in 1967, 20 percent of all army fatalities were black, though they made up just 10.9 percent of all Army personnel.

Webb believes that the Army does not offer a strong mentor system, or teach proper procedures. Recruits "don't know what they want to do or what they're gonna do," he said.

Or as Jamillah Muhammad puts it, "Basically, we send kids to the military, and they come out qualified to be janitors with a gun."

Today parents like Barbara Carter are just hoping their kids come out. Through tears, Carter, a South Side beauty shop owner, described the stunned look on her daughter Mia's face when she learned she might be heading to Saudi Arabia after six years in the Army Reserves. Her daughter joined to help pay for her education.

"Well, Ma, I'm going, but I don't know when," the 24-year old said one Saturday afternoon in September, after an emergency meeting of Army Reserves Unit 996, a medical combat unit.


Nightmare Begins
For Barbara Carter, it was the beginning of an endless nightmare. "I knew she would go, I knew." she said. "I haven't been the same since the minute I heard." She said she can't sleep, can't eat and spends most of her time watching the clock and hoping that a war doesn't come. Several days before Thanksgiving, it was confirmed; Mia would leave in early December. Carter attended a family briefing session for MIA's unit, where she was given a list of the things MIA would need: sunscreen, two rolls of toilet tissue, deodorant, lip balm. "My daughter can't stand too much heat. How is she going to take it?" Carter asked.

On Dec. 8, the day MIA left, she comforted her mother and promised to bring back exotic gifts. "I pray to the Lord a lot," Carter says. "I ask that he and everybody else accept that I am just a nervous wreck. I will be until she's back home."

Now, as in the '60s, the more affluent and educated youths choose college over the military. And then, as now, their involvement has taken the form of war protests. The Chicago Campuses Against War organized a Dec. 8 protest rally that drew 5,000 people to Daley Plaza. They argue that young Americans should not sacrifice their lives to protect oil interests for corporate America, especially when there are so many other pressing problems, like racial inequities, at home.

But though Barbara Carter also opposes war, she thinks the group's efforts are hypocritical. She chafed at media reports about the march, concerned that it would further lower the spirits of the thousands of young people slated to go to the Gulf.

"Their morale has to be in the toilet," she said. "They don't need to hear about all these college kids complaining about the war. Tomorrow, they're going to get out of their lily-white beds and go to their classes, and my daughter will be out there dodging bullets."

She has the last and perhaps most eloquent word on the subject.

"I'm so proud of her," she says of MIA "l know she's scared. And to face something when you're scared, that's what we're about as black Americans."