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3. A View from Within: The Negro

THERE IS no one Negro view on Vietnam, any more than there is one white view on Vietnam. But there are such clear signs of hostility to United States policy in Vietnam among important sections of the Negro population that it may be useful for the rest of us to take notice and to inquire: Why?

The signs are unmistakable. They appear quickly, in the press or in personal encounter, then are scattered, gone—and perhaps all I am doing here is pulling some of them together to remind us of what I believe is a significant pattern of opinion.

A Negro field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee told me last year in Mississippi: “You know, I just saw one of those Vietcong guerrillas on TV. He was dark-skinned, ragged, poor, and angry. I swear, he looked just like one of us.”

This was an individual reaction, but the Negro organizations have spoken. Of the five major civil rights groups, three (CORE, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference) have all declared themselves strongly against U.S. policy in Vietnam, and indeed urged that the United States withdraw.

Never before in the history of this country have Negroes expressed such fierce opposition to the government’s foreign policy. And this in spite of the general Negro warmth toward the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society. A columnist for the Amsterdam News, the most important newspaper in Harlem and one of the most influential newspapers in the Negro world, wrote on August 21, 1965:

President Johnson’s Great Society is bursting into full bloom. Never has so much been done for so many in so short a time. … But I, for one, have not said a word, and I know at least twenty others … men and women, white and colored … who have had the same impulse, but have found themselves unable to express words of praise. Because they catch in every throat.

All the accomplishments fade into insignificance. All the progress is shadowed just as all of it can be swiftly undone, by the horror, the spectre, the glaring immorality of Vietnam.

The statements of the more militant civil rights groups (SCLC, CORE, and SNCC) have been even stronger. In January 1966, SNCC said, in its first comment on the war, unanimously approved by its staff of over a hundred field workers:

We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claim of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people both in the United States and in other countries. … Our work in the South and in the North has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed United States citizens and is not prepared to end the rule of terror and suppression within its own borders.

Referring to the murder of Samuel Younge, a Negro student in Tuskegee, SNCC said:

Samuel Younge was murdered because United States law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. …

We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of the United States cold war policies. …

We are therefore, in sympathy with and support the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to the military draft and thereby contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam.

Stokely Carmichael of SNCC is unsparing in his criticism of Negroes who fight in Vietnam, calling them “black mercenaries.”

Several months after this, in April 1966, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. King, adopted another strong resolution at a time when the Buddhist revolt was being crushed by the Ky government with the complicity of the United States:

American policy has become imprisoned in the destiny of the military oligarchy. Our men and equipment are revealed to be serving a regime so despised by its own people that, in the midst of conflict, they are seeking its overthrow. Not only the Vietcong but basic institutions of the South Vietnam society, Buddhists, Catholics and students, are expressing contempt for the bankrupt government we have blindly supported and even exalted.

The immorality and tragic absurdity of our position is revealed by the necessity to protect our nationals from the population and army we were told were our cherished allies. …

SCLC, as an organization committed to nonviolence, must condemn this war on the grounds that war is not the way to solve social problems. Mass murder can never lead to constructive and creative government or to the creation of a democratic society in Vietnam.

The staff of CORE, which in the summer of 1965 had pressed for and indeed passed a resolution opposing the government’s policy in Vietnam, but was pressured by James Farmer to withdraw this, became uninhibited in its criticism of the war when Floyd McKissick became its national chairman. McKissick was one of five Americans who visited Cambodia in the summer of 1966 and found in a frontier village the body of a young pregnant woman, shot to death by a strafing American helicopter the day before. This only confirmed his already bitter feelings about United States behavior in the war.

What of the mass of Negroes outside these organizations? Negro opinion on foreign policy is varied and fluid and shifts rapidly—even within the same person—based on that person’s latest mood toward the national government. The Negro has had a strong need (like any minority group) to identify himself with the majority, so that often he appears more patriotic than others. But this patriotism is a very thin membrane which, when punctured by some immediate event revealing American racism, releases a fundamental anger at the nation and a distrust of its policies. The turbulence of the struggle at home, coinciding with such a blatantly cruel war as that in Vietnam (whose victims are largely nonwhite), has lacerated again and again the Negro’s vulnerable loyalty to America.

As one bit of evidence, I would point to the case of Julian Bond, the SNCC worker elected to the Georgia State Legislature. I would guess that the Negro voters in Julian Bond’s Atlanta constituency (a neighborhood in which I and my family lived for seven years), if polled on the Vietnam issue in isolation from other issues, would have reacted along a wide spectrum, from hostility to support, in relation to Lyndon Johnson’s policy. But when Bond was expelled by the Georgia Legislature for refusing to repudiate SNCC’s criticism of the Vietnam war, local backing for him was so overwhelming that no opponent could be found to run against him in the next election. The race mood determines, from moment to moment, the Negro attitude toward Vietnam. In World War II there was such a strong element of anti-racism in the fight against the century’s arch-racist, Adolf Hitler, that Negroes could to a large extent be persuaded to support the war. But in the Vietnam war, the situation is different: The foe is not an Anglo-Saxon racist but a mass of poor, dark-skinned peasants who resemble in many aspects of their lives the Negroes of the American rural South.

From time to time incidents in the war, like one reported on American television March 13, 1966, release the pent-up anger of Negroes against a white society that, with an incredibly innocent obliviousness, makes their everyday life miserable. Vietcong rebels had overrun a Special Forces base, occupied by troops of the government of South Vietnam and some American military. United States helicopters flew in to evacuate the Americans, leaving the Vietnamese behind. South Vietnamese rushed the helicopters in their desperation, and the United States soldiers drove them away with gunfire, shooting thirty or forty of them, with undisclosed casualties. It was a complicated scene, but it was hard to avoid the conclusion that by some deeply imbedded principle guiding American conduct, the lives of white Americans were worth more than the lives of Asiatics—even those “on our side.”

The charge most often flung at the Johnson administration by Negroes in connection with the Vietnam war can be summed up in one word: hypocrisy. If the government is dedicated to the expansion of freedom in far-off parts of the world, then why is it not equally dedicated to freedom for the Negro at home?

The liberal replies: But it is—look at the Civil Rights Acts, the White House Conferences, the speeches by LBJ.

The Negro responds: My real problem is not what it says in the law books, but how much money I have in my pocket. The Negro compares the magnitude of national effort to bring what is claimed to be “freedom” to 13 million people in South Vietnam, with the magnitude of the effort for 15 million Negroes who are poor at home. He compares the $2 billion spent each month on the war with the pitiful sums of money spent on behalf of the Negro. He compares the willingness to commit mass murder in Vietnam, presumably justified by “freedom,” with the unwillingness of the federal government to arrest on the spot a sheriff in Mississippi whom FBI men watch beating a Negro. He compares the 350,000 soldiers sent to Vietnam with the frequent refusal of the federal government to send even a handful of marshals to protect Negroes from violence. He compares all the spurious legalistic argument to explain why the federal government cannot protect civil rights workers in the South with the crass violations in Vietnam of international agreements, to say nothing of one of the most important provisions in the United States Constitution, giving Congress alone the power to declare war.

Mississippi Negroes pleaded with the federal government in early June 1964 for protection in what was obviously going to be a dangerous summer. A busload of black Mississippians traveled 1000 miles to present evidence in Washington on the need for such protection, and constitutional lawyers proved that the federal government had all the legal authority it needed to grant this. But the Mississippi Negroes were met with silence, and thirteen days later Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, who had to travel unprotected into Neshoba County, were murdered. Even after the murders, when once again asked to supply protection, the federal government gave various arguments: it would violate “the federal system”; not enough marshals were available. But when various tottering regimes in South Vietnam pleaded for help, the government sent thousands of troops across the Pacific.

A brief item from The New York Times of June 22, 1966 helps explain the bitterness of Negro militants when the federal government asks support for its massive military effort in Vietnam. It describes a series of acts of violence against Negroes marching into Philadelphia, Mississippi, and goes on to say: “Philadelphia’s ten policemen, including two Negroes, and a group of Neshoba County deputy sheriffs watched most of the violence without moving to stop it. At least two Justice Department lawyers and an undetermined number of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were present as observers.” (My emphasis.)

Bob Moses, the pioneer of the Mississippi civil rights struggle, summed it up: “Our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America.”

The hypocrisy is seen also in United States policy toward those African states where blacks are still controlled by a white minority. If the United States cares enough about “freedom” to make a major military effort in Asia, why has it been so consistently reluctant even to support economic sanctions against the most brutally racist country in the world—South Africa? On June 17, 1965, the Special Committee on Apartheid of the United Nations, calling for “total economic sanctions” against South Africa, according to The New York Times of June 18, 1965, “expressed concern that Britain and the United States continued to oppose Security Council action.”

Similarly, United States softness toward Portugal’s colonialism is contrasted with the hardness in Southeast Asia. On May 2, 1966, professors at the predominantly Negro Lincoln University, in a letter to Senator Fulbright, opposed the nomination of William Tapley Bennett as ambassador to Portugal, pointing out that “in spite of votes by overwhelming majorities within the United Nations General Assembly demanding that Portugal admit the principle of self-determination for its colonies, and despite the persistent refusal of Portugal to act, the United States has consistently voted against United Nations sanctions to induce Portuguese compliance.”

Some Negro civil rights workers compare the American fear of revolutionary change in the world to the white South’s fear of social change. In this analogy, Lyndon Johnson appears as a kind of global Governor Wallace, sending out the troops to quell demonstrations of the aggrieved and refusing to understand that a group which has suffered over the centuries, once aroused, will not simply retire into the shadows by the threat or use of force. The United States no more understands the psychology of the hungry peasants of the world than the white South has understood the thinking of the Negro. It does not understand the mind of the revolutionist, and this has important implications for the “domino theory.” Even a total military victory in Vietnam would not prevent another insurrection from developing the next week in another part of Asia or Latin America, in the presence of deep grievances—just as the beating and killing of Negroes did not stop the marches, the demonstrations, the spread of rebelliousness in the South.

It may offend admirers of the Great Society to hear Lyndon Johnson compared to George Wallace, but consider: to white Alabamans, Wallace has appeared as a kindly, genial statesman, well-meaning and bringing economic progress; they have been mystified by the stubbornness of the Negro revolt and thus have reacted with a violent anger—much as Johnson has reacted in Vietnam.

The analogy can be carried further. The white South, refusing to believe that local Negroes had genuine grievances about which they were disturbed, attributed the demonstrations to “outside agitators.” Similarly, the Johnson administration cannot seem to believe that there were genuine grievances in South Vietnam which led to guerrilla warfare, and so it blames the war on “outside infiltration” from North Vietnam, or outside “instigation” from Communist China. There has been infiltration from North Vietnam, and help from Communist China. But so was there “outside” aid to the Southern Negro from Northern Negroes and Northern whites. In neither case, however, does this fact of outside support obliterate a more fundamental truth, that the insurgent energy was indigenous, supplied by severe local problems, and indeed could not have become a major movement unless these problems existed.

The United States government has drawn a kind of curtain around itself to keep out a barrage of criticism from abroad of our Vietnam policies. This is strikingly like the way Alabamans and Mississippians for many years tuned out of the indignation expressed in other parts of the country, listening only to one another, reaffirming their belief that they were right and everyone else in the world wrong.

Both in the American South and in South Vietnam, there is an oversimplification of issues. This is done by the use of symbolic words to arouse emotions and prevent a rational consideration of the complex problems of human relations. In the South, the standard epithet has always been the word “nigger”—which destroys the individuality of the Negro so that the white man can develop an undifferentiated reaction of hatred and contempt for anyone so designated, whatever his unique qualities of character. In American foreign policy, the epithet is “Communist”—which may begin to describe a situation in the way the term “nigger” begins to describe the person so designated, but which hardly gets to the distinctions that are so crucial in a world where “Communism” has many forms.

Perhaps the crowning hypocrisy is that the national administration, which welcomed with such enthusiasm the adoption of nonviolence by Negroes under direct attack and responded with such alarm when Negroes began only to speak about defending themselves, has used such frightful force in a situation where this nation has not been attacked. Even with all the recent emphasis by Negro militants on the right of self-defense, no leader has suggested that Negroes invade the white community with guns and bombs as a preventive action to forestall possible attacks on them in the future. Yet this is essentially what the United States is doing in Vietnam.

Toward the end of the tense summer of 1964, many of us who were in Mississippi drove into Neshoba County to attend a memorial service for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, whose bullet-shattered bodies had just been found. At that service Bob Moses spoke from a pile of black rubble—all that was left of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, whose burning the three had gone to investigate. In this quiet, sunny glen, where all thought was directed to Mrs. Chaney, clad in black, mourning her teenage son, Moses surprised everyone by referring to a headline in that morning’s paper which read: “President Johnson Says ‘Shoot to Kill’ in Gulf of Tonkin.” Then he said: “This is what we’re trying to do away with—the idea that whoever disagrees with us must be killed.”

A year later, Moses was one of those arrested demonstrating in front of the Capitol in Washington against our Vietnam policy.