Essay On African American Soldiers During The Vietnam War

Section 1. Identification and Evaluation of Sources
The purpose of the investigation is to explore the question, “To what extent were the African American soldiers given equal opportunity during the Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975?” The investigation is significant because it was the first account of a fully-integrated American military, and will specifically focus on the troops in Vietnam rather than the civil rights movements in the United States. First-hand accounts of the war, along with statistics regarding racial population and income will be analyzed in order to investigate the topic. One source that explains the success and failures of the integrated armies was the book The African American Experience in Vietnam: Brothers in Arms, by historian James Westheider and published in 2008. The purpose of the book is to explore the complex relationships between black soldiers and the army. Its content covers African American involvement in the American Armed Forces before Vietnam from the beginning of drafting to the end of the war. A value of the source is that the author is an experienced historian, who has a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and teaches there. Another value of the source is that it spans a long timeframe of black

The treatment of African Americans in the war is broken into the categories of de jure and de facto. De jure refers to the laws and regulations, while de facto refers to the civil side of a topic, and how the laws are actually conducted. Although the de jure of the army planned to create a system of equality, the conduct and de facto of the army limited the equal opportunity given to African Americans during the Vietnam War through social limitations and