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A social media storm has broken out since Facebook and Twitter posted a photo of 16 young black women about to graduate from the US Military Academy posed on the steps of a West Point barracks, arms raised with clenched fists.  

More than 50 years have passed since I was an army officer. I got in and got out of the army before a woman of any race had been admitted to West Point. Most officers, like me, got their commissions through ROTC, but I knew a few West Point graduates. (Perhaps needless to say, they were white as well as male.) The post’s officer corps included a few old colonels from West Point who lent me and some fellow lieutenants their ceremonial swords so we could form an “arch of sabers” when one of our number was married in the post chapel. I remember the scowl on the priest’s face when we got up before the benediction, unable to keep our swords from clanking, as we moved outside the chapel door.  

A much more vivid and still painful army memory is from the time I commanded a convoy of artillery weapons across Arizona, five big army trucks towing five big howitzers. Half way across we pulled into a dusty truck stop and gassed up. We were hungry and thirsty and went into the cafe, but the owners wouldn’t serve us because two of my sergeants and one of my privates were African-American. We were, of course, in uniform; I had just paid more than $100 to fill up our gas guzzling army trucks. But this was 1961, and Arizona was still under Jim Crow.  

Well, things are better now. Aren’t they? Those 16 about to graduate cadets will go into a very different army and a different world. But the same social media that disseminated the picture of their salutes has also disseminated stories from Florida, Staten Island, Ferguson, and Cleveland that are much worse than getting rebuffed at a truck stop. A clenched black fist, even from an army officer, seems like a pretty mild gesture.