....The reasons are obvious. African-Americans are 12 percent of the general population but make up 21 percent of military personnel and 30 percent of Army enlistees. They made up 23 percent of the troops sent to the 1991 Gulf War. The Department of Defense recently attempted to downplay those disproportionate percentages, reporting that African-Americans were more likely to be in administrative and support jobs and therefore were less likely than white soldiers to be killed on the front lines. White soldiers made up 71 percent of the troops in the 1991 Gulf War but suffered 76 percent of the deaths.

That ignores why African-Americans go into the service in the first place. Many of them are refugees from a job and collegiate environment that is disproportionately hostile to them. President Bush recently stoked the hostility by filing a brief to the Supreme Court opposing the University of Michigan's affirmative action program.

That alone is enough to make African-Americans wonder whether they are about to relive bad history. Time after time, war after war, African-Americans fought and died for the nation's agenda only to see the nation ignore or reject their issues. Black folks fought in the Revolution and slavery lasted nearly another century. Black soldiers were promised land after the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 and never got it.

In the Civil War, African-Americans, then 14 percent of the population, were 20 percent of the Union casualties. Yet segregation and second-class opportunities were the rule for almost another century. Black folks fought in World War I in the hopes of winning full citizenship. They were rewarded with white race riots. Participation in World War II and Korea further emboldened African-Americans to protest for desegregation in the military, public accommodations, school desegregation, and voting rights.

But Americans took so long to become disgusted with the lynchings and disenfranchisement of the '40s, '50s, and early '60s that the hypocrisy could not be contained. There was Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 lament ''for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.'' There was Muhammad Ali's ''I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong'' because, as he said, ''no Viet Cong ever called me nigger.'' There were the riots.