Kenneth Claiborne Royall, Sr. (July 24, 1894May 25, 1971) was a U.S. Army general, and the last man to hold the office of Secretary of War, which secretariat was abolished in 1947. Royall served as the first Secretary of the Army from 1947 to 1949, until he was compelled into retirement for refusing to obey and realize President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9981 for the racial desegregation of the military forces of the United States. Early life and career Kenneth Caliborne Royall was born on July 24, 1894, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the son of Clara Howard Jones and George Pender Royall. He graduated from Episcopal High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and Harvard Law School before serving in World War I. He then practiced law and was elected to the North Carolina Senate as a Democrat. At the beginning of World War II, he became a colonel in the US Army. On August 18, 1917, Royall married the former Margaret Pierce Best, with whom he had two sons and one daughter, Kenneth Claiborne, Jr., Margaret, and George Pender Royall. According to a 2006 newspaper column by Jack Betts, eight German agents bent on mayhem came ashore on Long Island in 1942 but were soon caught and ordered to stand trial in a secret military tribunal. US President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Royall to defend them, but, wanting a swift conclusion to the process, with the Germans executed as soon as possible, ordered Royall to avoid civilian courts. Royall wrote to Roosevelt that he thought that the president had no authority to convene a secret court to try his clients, and asked him to change his order. The president refused, and Royall appealed to the US District Court, arguing the secret tribunal was unconstitutional. The court rejected that argument and so Royall and other lawyers in his office appealed to the Supreme Court, which rejected Royall's argument in a brief announcement in July 1942 and upheld the right of the president to appoint a secret tribunal. However, Royall had succeeded in getting civilian court review of the tribunals' constitutionality despite the president's predilection for secrecy. The Supreme Court published a more detailed opinion in October, saying, "Constitutional safeguards for the protection of all who are charged with offense are not to be disregarded." By