page_title: Ralph Austin Bard
section_title: Bard and integration of the Navy
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph Austin Bard / Service at the Navy Department / Bard and integration of the Navy
caption_attribution_description: English: "Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy, pauses in a tour of the U.S. Naval Hospital, San Diego, to talk with a Marine wounded in the recent conquest of Peleliu in the Palau Islands. The patient is Pfc. Lewis R. Juergens, USMC, of 950 South Floyd Street, Louisville, Ky., formerly of Chicago, who was hit by shrapnel on the third day of the invasion, and who reached the hospital only a week ago."
context_page_description: Ralph Austin Bard was a Chicago financier who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1941–1944, and as Under Secretary, 1944–1945. He is noted for a memorandum he wrote to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1945 urging that Japan be given a warning before the use of the atomic bomb on a strategic city. He was "the only person known to have formally dissented from the use of the atomic bomb without advance warning."
context_section_description: When Bard became Assistant Secretary, Navy policy was to prohibit African Americans from enlisting for "general duty" (combat) roles, restricting them to service as "messmen."  Although Bard's duties as Assistant Secretary did not extend to uniformed personnel, his office often dealt with racial discrimination and its consequences. As a member of a committee appointed to investigate the Navy's racial policies, Bard's special assistant Addison Walker argued for allowing enlistment of a small number of African Americans for general duty on an experimental basis; and Bard himself promised Mark Abridge, who chaired President Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices Committee, that enlistment of African Americans would be given consideration. Under pressure from President Roosevelt, the Navy announced in 1942 a new policy of accepting African American volunteers (but not draftees) for general duty positions in segregated units, a practice that continued until 1948 when President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 racially integrating the United States Armed Services. In 1944, the Navy began the training of African Americans as commissioned officers.
caption: Ralph Austin Bard visits a wounded U.S. Marine in San Diego in 1944.
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