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In June 1961, the first director of the Peace Corps flew home to promote his new agency before a special gathering of an older one. "I have in my hand a volunteer questionnaire for Peace Corps service," R. Sargent Shriver told the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago, which he had founded and supervised for several fractious years. "Nowhere does it ask for the candidate's race." This conscious omission illustrated the Peace Corps's most conspicuous goal: "to see people as people--to come to terms with human beings as persons apart from qualifying adjectives," as Shriver formulated it. Here he credited the burgeoning civil rights movement of the era, which echoed and inspired the Peace Corps's own color- blind philosophy. "Injustice is done when men place high priority on race or class rather than personality," Shriver intoned. "When will the ugly incidents of Montgomery and Birmingham cease to be? Only when every man becomes a person to every other man." Since the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, Shriver admitted, Americans' behavior had often contradicted that document's credo of human equality. The Peace Corps would reinvigorate it, stressing "quality of skill" over "color of skin"--and prodding the nation to complete its historic task.(1)
Ten years later, a young recruiter's letter to African American collegians breathed a decidedly different spirit. "I am a Black Returned Peace Corps Volunteer," began Carolyn Gullatt, "who wants to rap with you about the relevance of such an experience for Black people." For most of her own college career, Gullatt recalled, she had dismissed the Peace Corps as "for whites only." But then she met a Black recruiter, who "didn't run down the usual jive propaganda about how nice it is to help people." Instead, "he talked about how I, as a Black person, could get 'home' and join with the Brothers and Sisters" abroad, where "people have grown into Black pride naturally, where Black power is the status quo, and Black action is a working reality." Gullatt applied and eventually enlisted, discovering for herself the "irrevocable bond between peoples of color" who suffered together under a worldwide "economic and social whip." Now, she wrote, the onus was upon other African Americans to do the same. "Each year the Peace Corps sends hundreds...