When he splashed ashore, Miller later told his brother, “with those bullets spattering all around me, it was by the grace of God that I never got a scratch.” Even then, Miller helped scores of injured sailors to safety ashore. Of West Virginia's 1,541 crewmembers, 106 were killed and 52 wounded. In April 1941, the U.S. Navy convened its General Board to discuss expansion of the USMC. Major General Thomas Holcomb, Commandant of the Marines, who lived in Delaware and Washington, DC in his early years and attended private schools, said that African Americans had no right to serve as Marines. He said, "If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites."
In 1941, civil rights activists Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and A. J. Muste pushed Roosevelt to order fair employment for blacks in the federal government. Many rural southern African-Americans who had arrived in urban Northern and Western states in search of defense industry jobs during the second phase of the Great Migration were faced with constant discrimination in housing, on the job market, and in their recreational activities.
After the activists threatened to march on Washington D.C. in July 1941, Roosevelt - faced with a public relations disaster for his presidency and wanting to unite all Americans in striving towards defeating fascism - issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, which ordered the elimination of racial discrimination from federal departments, agencies, the military, and private defense contractors, after which the planned march was cancelled.
Directed by Roosevelt and U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox to accept black recruits, Holcomb proposed a separate battalion of African Americans, a seacoast defense battalion armed with anti-aircraft and anti-shipping artillery. To make this battalion self-supporting, Holcomb determined that it would contain a rifle company, special weapons platoons, and a light tank platoon—all manned by black Marines.