Raytheon Company CEO William H. Swanson brought greetings on behalf of BEYA alumni at the Stars and Stripes event.


Gen. William E. Ward (far right) is the most senior African American four star general serving in the U.S. military.


Q: When can a banquet such as Stars and Stripes, held as part of the annual celebration of the Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA), become an event with critical importance? A: When it serves as a major networking event, spotlight, and sounding board for America’s corps of top African American military officers. Tyrone Taborn, CEO of Career Communications Group,


publishers of USBE&IT, put it this way in a recent discussion: “I found myself serving as the ‘phone book’ for black generals and admirals.” Many of the nation’s highest-ranking black officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines—and over the last several years, uniformed officers of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and Public Health Service—came every year for BEYA, but then they’d go back to their separate posts, and lose touch. And often, the problem worsened when it came to the retired flag officers, who may be out of uniform, but continue to serve in a multitude of ways.


“People were always calling me to get each other’s phone numbers and email,” Taborn said, “so I realized we needed a better way for the military people to network with each other. So we put together a breakfast that we hosted on the Sunday morn- ing after the BEYA Gala.”


That went well, and the post-BEYA military breakfast get- together became an expected part of the conference schedule. Then Taborn decided to move the event. Prodded by the activism of retired top guns such as the Air Force’s Gen. Lester Lyles and Lt. Gen. Al Edmonds, the Army’s Gen. Johnnie Wilson and Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard, the Navy’s VADM Walter Davis, Jr., and BEYA Alumni Co-Chair Tony Watson, Taborn realized that what was needed was a recognition event, as well as an opportunity for networking across the lines of distinction between the differ- ent services. “We asked Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the


48 USBE&IT I WINTER 2010


Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be our keynote speaker, and he agreed,” Taborn said, “and after that everybody wanted to be there.” A look at the statistics on rates of black access to the top ranks of the nation’s uniformed services shows why this kind of event is so important: In July 2008, 60 years after President Harry Truman ordered U.S. military services to stop segregating soldiers, sailors, ma- rines and airmen by race, an Associated Press report found that while African Americans, some 13 percent of the population, provide 17 percent of the uniformed servicemen and women, blacks are only 9 percent of all the officers. At the general officer level, less than 6 percent of the flag-rank assignments are held by African Americans.


Drilling deeper into the numbers the Pentagon provided to the news service, it emerges that: • On the 60th anniversary of the military’s desegregation, 5.6 percent of the 923 general officers or admirals were black;


• Eight blacks were three-star lieutenant generals or vice admirals; • 17 were two-star major generals or rear admirals upper half; • 26 held one star as brigadier generals or as rear admiral lower half, and


• Only three of the black one-star generals were women. Such disparities are hard to explain in this era of vastly improved black access to higher education and vastly greater participation in the military. Gone are the days when Henry Ossian Flipper spent four years “silenced” by West Point class- mates who shunned him before he graduated in 1877, to be later forced out of the Army by a court-martial that found him guilty of trumped-up charges of “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Also long gone are the days when an officer with a record as distinguished as Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer could refuse to serve with black troops, as Custer did with the Tenth Cavalry’s “Buffalo Soldiers” on the Western Frontier. Some analysts point to the greater likelihood of African


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