In Texas, nominations to the service academics from senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn included 23% and 20% people of color, respectively -- among the lowest levels in the Senate compared to the demographics of their state, where more than 60% of young adults are Black, Asian American, Hispanic or Latino.

Cruz’s press secretary, Dave Vasquez, said the senator rejects that race should be factored in when selecting academy nominees and that names, race and other personal information are all removed before an external review board considers applications to Cruz’s office, selecting candidates “on objective merits such as SAT/ACT scores, GPA, and community-service involvement.” Cornyn’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Curtis Harris said he was awarded one of just three nominations to West Point out of more than 300 applications to his congressman. He graduated in 1978 and became the first in his family to rise to the officer ranks, initially becoming a platoon leader overseeing 35 people and equipment worth millions of dollars at the age of just 21. His uncles had enlisted in the Army and his stepfather was a Navy cook, but they had few options for advancement as Black servicemen, he said.

West Point remains a point of pride for Harris: He hasn’t missed an Army-Navy football game in 40 years, and he helps review applications for nominations for U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York. He also visits high schools and junior high schools to encourage candidates of diverse backgrounds to apply.

In a society where opportunity is not given out equally, Harris said, the academy provides the “ammunition” to be successful. Yet diversifying West Point is “not going to happen by itself,” he said. “I just think that particularly people of color should know that this opportunity exists.”

The Naval, Air Force, Merchant Marine and Coast Guard academies have generally become more diverse over the past two decades, according to data supplied by the four schools after the AP asked for 20 years of student body demographic data. West Point did not provide historical records, but Col. Deborah McDonald, the academy’s admissions director, said it is welcoming more and more diverse students, with 37% of the class of 2024 identifying as nonwhite. A decade ago, that proportion was more like 25%, she said.

Non-white racial groups did not see appreciable changes at some academies. For instance, while the number of Hispanic cadets increased in the past two decades at the Coast Guard and Naval academies, Black cadets showed no noticeable increase during that time. In the class of 2000, there were 73 Black midshipmen in the Naval Academy -- and just 77 in 2020. At the Coast Guard Academy, there were 15 Black cadets in the 2001 class. And in 2021? Merely 16.

According to the data provided to the AP, graduation rates between racial groups at the Naval and Coast Guard academies continued to show gaps. At the Naval Academy, for example, Black midshipmen still had the lowest graduation rate of any racial group at 74%, compared to the 2020 school-wide rate of 87%. And the Black graduation rate of 65% at the Coast Guard Academy between 2011 and 2020 lagged about 20 percentage points behind other racial groups.

Only data from the Navy and Coast Guard was complete and detailed enough to look at graduate rate trends by race.

Two of the five academies -- West Point and the Air Force Academy -- now have their first Black leaders. But Easterling, the West Point graduate, noted that the faculty there remains mostly white, meaning that students who “don’t see themselves, and don’t want to stay” can find it hard to ask for help.

Greg Elliott said he often found himself in trouble as a midshipman at the Merchant Marine Academy and was asked to leave without graduating. He doesn’t blame the academy for his mistakes and he said he never faced overt racism, but he wonders if a more diverse faculty and student body could have changed his course by making him feel he belonged.

He remembers a fellow Black alum telling him to just plow through with his head down and realize the academy was “a terrible place to be at, but it’s a great place to be from.”

Both Easterling and Shelley said they also saw signs of extremism during their time in the Army -- for Easterling, it was a member of his unit wearing a symbol for the Three Percenters, an anti-government paramilitary group. Both said the academies -- and the military -- need stronger guidelines for recognizing and confronting language and symbols that suggest an extremist path.

Kyle Bibby, a Naval Academy graduate who served for six years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer, said those who characterize white supremacism only as extreme behavior miss the insidious damage that casual racism and discriminatory attitudes can inflict.

“We view white supremacy as like, you know, somebody’s got the cross in the truck and they’re rolling to your crib to go burn it,” said Bibby, who co-founded the Black Veterans Project, which advocates for racial justice in the armed services. But the cuts are much more subtle, he said.

At the Naval Academy, he said he once was told that he was “the whitest Black guy” one of his white classmates had ever met because of his skill at trivia games. Another white classmate, unaware Bibby was in earshot, remarked that he didn’t care that his sister was dating a Filipino guy but would “kill” her if she dated a Black guy.

Timothy Berry, a former Army field artillery officer who graduated from West Point in 2013 and served as class president, said he never felt comfortable reporting racist incidents while at the academy, fearing it would draw unwanted scrutiny to him not being a “perfect cadet,” however minor his shortcomings might be.

An inspector general’s report last year found the Coast Guard Academy had mishandled nearly a dozen race-based harassment allegations between 2013 and 2018 and also noted that harassment was underreported in part because of “concerns about negative consequences.”

Lt. Cmdr. Kimberly Young-McLear, a Black woman who taught at the academy from 2014 to 2019, said she herself faced years of harassment and retaliation on campus, which she has detailed in congressional testimony. She said she continues to hear from cadets, faculty and staff at the academy who are afraid to speak out about their negative treatment.

“They truly are reaching out because they don’t have anywhere else to turn,” she said. “This isn’t about cadets just whining and complaining. They’re going against a very powerful institution.”

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Although the academies play a big role in the diversity of military leadership, some have argued that the pipeline begins even earlier, at the high school level.

The Department of Defense sponsors Junior ROTC programs at high schools around the country where students can learn the values of the armed services, run drills and wear the uniforms. According to a 2017 study sponsored by the Secretary of Defense, the programs are often located at high schools with larger-than-average populations of students of color.

Though it may not be an official recruitment program, Junior ROTC promotes the military branches as a pathway to excellence.

Cadet handbooks for the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marine Corps all stipulate non-discrimination policies with regard to race and gender, and emphasize treating everyone with dignity and respect.

But former Junior ROTC instructor Cardelle Anthony Hopkins said little was done after one of his students at Lake Brantley High School in Florida alerted him to social media posts by her fellow cadets making racist comments about Hopkins, a retired Black master sergeant. The language was crude and threatening: One comment said he needed to be “tar and feathered.” “No n------ in my corps,” read another.

The students also created a fake Instagram account impersonating Hopkins that included posts making fun of cadets. And ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, someone posted a sign on his classroom door reading “Blood and Soil,” a white supremacist slogan.

“I was so intimidated even walking to my car. I’m thinking, I’m a grown man … I’ve never been this terrified,” Hopkins said. “In my entire 23 years in the military, I had never been called a n----- ever. And here I am being called that by my students.”

Near the end of 2019, Hopkins said he noticed a change in the types of students enrolling in the JROTC program. In one of his freshman classrooms, for instance, every white student wrote a message in support of President Donald Trump while working on an art project to decorate ceiling tiles, he said.

“I could see that these students were a different breed,” he said, noting that their behavior prompted the parents of one of his Black students to remove their daughter from the program.

Hopkins said he complained about the harassment but that it wasn’t until other students went directly to Lake Brantley Principal Brian Blasewitz saying they knew who was responsible that administration officials acted to track down the two main students involved.

Hopkins said the students eventually received four-day suspensions. Blasewitz told the AP that the incidents were taken seriously, but would not disclose any disciplinary measures.

Hopkins contacted the officer then heading the Air Force Junior ROTC, who he said expressed sympathy but took no other action, other than saying Hopkins could request a transfer to a new school.

“We have roughly 120,000 cadets in Air Force JROTC alone,” Hopkins said. “This one colonel sitting in his office has the ability to put out a message to every last Air Force Junior ROTC school if he wants to that says ‘We will not tolerate anything like this’ and really get on top of this.’”

In an email to the AP, the current Air Force Junior ROTC director, Col. Johnny R. McGonigal, said the responsibility for addressing the incidents fell on the high school, writing that “the instructors are employees of the school and the school district is responsible for investigating and resolving disciplinary matters such as this one.”

Feeling defeated and isolated, Hopkins said his father -- a veteran and also a former JROTC instructor -- advised him to leave, telling him “there’s no reason to put yourself through this.”

After briefly holding the same job at another school, he stepped away from JROTC altogether and abandoned a lawsuit he had filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He’s joining a Tampa, Florida, high school as a teacher’s assistant -- a job that doesn’t capitalize on his more than 20 years of military experience.

Hopkins said his ordeal leaves him unsettled about the future of the JROTC and, ultimately, the U.S. military.

“It just feels like a breeding ground for hatred,” he said of JROTC. “And it’s not being checked.”

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AP writers James LaPorta in Miami and Kat Stafford in Detroit and data intern Jasen Lo in Chicago contributed to this story.

Wieffering is a Roy W. Howard Investigative Fellow.