Black Explosions in West Germany

THE racial divisions that underlie much of the violence in the U.S. are beginning to follow the flag. Black and white strife of the sort that has swept such Stateside bases as Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg is turning up at U.S. military facilities overseas. The situation is so volatile among the 185,000 G.I.s stationed in West Germany that the Pentagon has decided to dispatch a team of military and civilian experts to investigate. When the team arrives this week in Europe, it will have plenty to study.

Upraised Fists. The Washington experts will review race relations in all the services, but will concentrate their efforts on the 165,000-man Seventh Army, which is the U.S.'s main ground contribution to NATO's shield in Europe. Until recently, the Seventh Army has had a reputation as a highly disciplined elite unit. But during the past six months the Seventh's image has been rudely shattered by the emergence of racial invective in the barracks plus bitter, sometimes bloody strife between black and white G.I.s. In Friedberg. a mob of 25 club-swinging black G.I.s roamed through the downtown bars, injured three white G.I.s, who had to be hospitalized, and terrorized most of the German citizenry. Another crowd of black troops descended on a civilian police station in Schweinfurt and forced frightened local officials to release a black G.I. who they claimed had been unjustly arrested. White prisoners beg for transfers from the big Army stockade at Mannheim, where friction between white guards and angry black prisoners has sparked at least three riots.

At most of the Seventh Army's 60 bases from Bonn to the Bavarian Alps, young black soldiers toss the upraised-fist salute to their brothers and willingly accept courts-martial as the price of their nonregulation Afro haircuts.

For a while they bombarded their white superiors with petitions complaining about inequities, real and fancied; now, believing that their grievances are ignored, they have largely stopped. Black noncoms, especially career soldiers who tend to side with the Army, cool the agitators as much as they can.

The Seventh's racial troubles are by no means caused only by black soldiers, who account for about 12% of the U.S. troops in West Germany. The blacks complain of harassment by white MPs and taunting by NCOs who threaten to "get me a nigger." Last week a Ku Klux Klan-style cross was found burning outside a Mannheim barracks: there have been at least two similar incidents at other Seventh Army bases. The Communist East German daily Neues Deutschland has seized on the cross burnings to portray the U.S. Army in Europe as a sort of K.K.K. expeditionary force.

Time Bomb. Black awareness and militancy began to catch up with the Seventh Army last winter. "Study groups" for black G.I.s appeared on some 25 Army posts; the members used such textbooks as Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land. One organizer was Specialist Fifth Class Lincoln Ashford, 21. Ashford, who admired the Black Panthers but was not a member, talked vaguely of "black men in green fighting white men in green." He often said: "We are a time bomb, man, and it's going to go off." Ashford finally drew the study groups together into a "defense committee" in which the black G.I.s could meet monthly to discuss gripes and coordinate activities. Ashford has since been discharged from the Army and has returned to Chicago, but the defense committee continues vigorously without his leadership. About 150 blacks came to last month's session.

Rhetoric turned to violence last March, sparked by two unrelated incidents at the huge Army base at Heilbronn. A white G.I. died after a fistfight with a black soldier, and the corpse of a long-missing black corporal was discovered under a sheet of ice in a sump trench at the motor pool. Stirred up by the corporal's death, a band of black G.I.s wrecked the local enlisted men's club two nights in a row. From Heilbronn, the racial strife spread to other bases. Says David Ingram, a civilian American lawyer, who represents black G.I.s in courts-martial: "A bunch of the brothers just declared war."

Midnight Flights. The militants' complaints range from grievances about unequal housing and lack of advancement to gripes about too little soul music in enlisted men's clubs and the scarcity of black chaplains. There is also a widely held belief that blacks are more apt to be ordered to Viet Nam than whites. The Army is fully committed to equal riahts; U.S. Commander in Europe General James H. Polk declares that "discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated." But equality at the command level often gives way to prejudice at the company level. In addition, bureaucratic channels like the inspector-general system sometimes handle black complaints too slowly or ineffectively.

Seventh Army officers seem puzzled about how to handle the militants. At Augsburg, one general tried a program of "midnight flights"--hustling supposed troublemakers back to the U.S. as soon as they could be identified. Stars and Stripes reporters have been ordered to play down racial incidents. Seventh Army headquarters at Heidelberg has set up an Equal Opportunities Discussion Group to study the dissension and suggest antidotes. But the few attempts at curbing racial troubles have been so unsuccessful that the Seventh Army's ranking officers will probably be grateful for any advice that the Washington experts will be able to give.

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