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Chapter 2

Black Power

The relationship between the genocide in Vietnam and the smiles of the white man toward black Americans is a direct relationship.

—Eldridge Cleaver

The embarrassing thing about the peace movement … is that it’s white.

—a peace activist

Following a six-week pause instigated by LBJ, the American bombing of North Vietnam resumed on January 31, 1966, and the following months saw an intensification of the military campaign. Between January and July more than 50,000 people were killed, 2,691 of them Americans.¹ At the end of December 1965, 180,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Vietnam; within two years the number would exceed 500,000. The $5 billion spent on the war during 1965 would become $10 billion the following year and, despite impressive Pentagon statistics, it soon became clear to the American people that the war would not be over quickly. Indeed, by the spring of 1966 the phrase “credibility gap” was widely used to describe LBJ’s tendency to mislead the public, and the president’s approval rating was falling.² The pollster Louis Harris reported that “a sense of ‘travail without end’” was “straining both the patience and normal optimism of the American people.”³ Dissent from within South Vietnam itself by Buddhists, students, and even factions within the South Vietnamese military compounded the situation, and increasing numbers of Americans wondered whether their presence in South Vietnam was even wanted. As the military effort in Vietnam bogged down, domestic disquiet over the war increased.

Toward the end of 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began to consider adopting an official position on the Vietnam War. The organization had already begun to develop links with the nascent peace movement. During the April 1965 antiwar demonstration in Washington, for example, it had shared its office with Students for a Democratic Society. SNCC chairman John Lewis had signed the Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam, in which signatories affirmed their noncooperation with the war effort and offered support to draft resisters. And during August, Bob Moses had helped organize the AUP. As Clayborne Carson has asserted, the overwhelming majority of SNCC activists “opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam as soon as they became aware of it.” There was a reservoir of pacifist sentiment within the organization, which helped shape its response to Vietnam; while for others opposition to the war was rooted in a general distrust of the federal government, or in a sense of solidarity with the worldwide struggle against white imperialism.⁴ Despite this antiwar feeling, the organization had not taken a formal position against the war. James Forman recalled that most SNCC members had considered Vietnam “not irrelevant, but simply remote. Its importance to black people had not come home to us.”⁵

Some within the group began to push for an official antiwar pronouncement during the summer of 1965. The August 30, 1965, issue of SNCC’s newspaper, the Student Voice, ran an article by the radical white historian and civil rights activist Howard Zinn, along with Miss Ella Baker, one of SNCC’s “adult advisors.” After asking, “should civil rights workers take a stand on Vietnam?” Zinn gave three reasons why civil rights groups and SNCC in particular should oppose the war. First, the black movement had a duty to offer support to its allies. Zinn pointed out that if peace groups were asked to support civil rights initiatives and “said they supported them, but could not come out publicly because it would harm their peace work, movement people would be rightly indignant.”⁶ Second, he explained that opposing the war would not mean giving up on civil rights to focus on peace—SNCC could simply offer a feasible level of support to the antiwar movement. Third, Zinn placed opposition to the war in the context of civil rights activists’ experiences. He explained that “movement people’ were in an ideal position to understand America’s actions in Vietnam—“they understand just how much hypocrisy is wrapped up in our claim to stand for ‘the free world.’ … Events in Vietnam become easier to understand in the light of recent experience in the South.”⁷

Bob Moses also argued in favor of adopting an official antiwar position and, like Zinn, he believed that the experiences of civil rights activists made them more likely to be skeptical of the noble claims that America was making about Vietnam. Moses declared that there was a “sickness in America” regarding the way that it viewed the world, and that it was “possible that those who have been part of the agonies of the South in recent years” were better able to understand this than others. The SNCC leader went beyond this, though, to place opposition to the war within a broader conceptual framework of participatory democracy. Moses attacked those who argued that civil rights groups had no business commenting on foreign policy issues. He explained that one of the fundamental rights that the civil rights movement had been fighting for was the “right to participate fully in the discussions of the great issues that face the country.” This included foreign policy which, as Moses noted, was generally left in the hands of the president. But the civil rights movement, or at least the portion that Moses represented and inspired, believed that “people should be involved in all the major decisions that affect them.”

Moses also thought that Vietnam cut to the nature of the movement itself. The SNCC veteran did not believe that it was possible for the civil rights movement to simply “join” the peace movement. Instead, the “question we must ask ourselves is what kind of a movement are we going to be … are we going to address ourselves to the broader problems of society? Can we build a wider base for a movement in this country; and actually can the freedom movement as it has existed survive and achieve its goals unless it does this?”⁸

Not all SNCC members agreed that it made sense to attack the Vietnam War. Mitchell Zimmerman, a white activist with SNCC’s Arkansas project, wrote to the Student Voice criticizing Zinn’s call for an antiwar stance. Zimmerman acknowledged that there was a “certain level of agreement within SNCC” about the war, but that this did not “settle the question as to whether SNCC as an organization should take a stand.” He argued that civil rights work was more acceptable to the wider American public than peace work, and that while peace groups would gain from associating with the black movement, civil rights groups would suffer. Indeed, Zimmerman asserted that SNCC ran the risk of being “seriously injured by being identified with dissent on Vietnam.” Opposing the war would, he argued, hand the movement’s enemies an effective means of red-baiting them, compromise the organization’s fundraising capability, and curtail any further cooperation with the federal government. Moreover, Zimmerman felt that the peace movement was doomed to fail, and that “left wing dissent on Vietnam will have no significant impact on either our foreign policy, or on public opinion.” The young activist concluded that “while we care a great deal about both Vietnam and civil rights, we can’t do anything to help the Vietnam situation, and we can hurt ourselves by trying.”⁹

SNCC finally debated Vietnam at a staff meeting held at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta at the end of November. The discussion, which took place on the evening of November 29, was generally supportive of taking an antiwar position. Marion Barry—a former graduate student at Fisk who had played a leading role in the Nashville student movement—and his allies, who feared that opposing the war would damage the organization, were in the minority.¹⁰ Gwendolyn Patton, for example, urged that SNCC “talk to the people about how rotten the country is that we live in. The MONSTER we live in.” James Forman recognized the importance of the draft to an organization in which 80 percent of the staff were eligible, but also cautioned against shifting their focus. Forman explained that the peace movement did not have grassroots work going on, that SNCC could “relate things to people where we work,” and urged that any action on Vietnam be made relevant to current work with black people.¹¹ Cleveland Sellers recalled Courtland Cox’s role in persuading SNCC to adopt an antiwar policy. According to Sellers, Cox took the floor and “waxed eloquently” on the parallels between Vietnam and black America—“Mississippi and Vietnam; they are very much alike. Think about Vietnam’s Ky and Senator James O. Eastland…. Think about the problems of Mississippi’s poor, disenfranchised blacks and the problems of Vietnam’s poor, disenfranchised peasants … consider the similarities between Vietnam’s National Liberation Front and SNCC. They ought to be very much alike!’”¹² The discussion, which apparently involved much “debate and hassle,” concluded with a decision to authorize the Executive Committee to draft an antiwar statement that would subsequently be released to the press.¹³

It is tempting to try to link the position on the war to the developing factionalism within SNCC. Clayborne Carson has argued that during 1965 the organization was torn by a dispute between “floaters” such as Bob Moses, who opposed centralizing and bureaucratizing trends within the group, and “hardliners” like Cleveland Sellers and James Forman, who favored greater discipline to make the organization more effective.¹⁴ There are indications that the “Freedom High” or “floater” faction within SNCC was keener than “hardliners” on antiwar activism. Bob Moses, for example, had been the black staff member most active in antiwar activities, while at the November staff meeting Marion Barry spoke out against opposing the war on the grounds that it would harm the organization’s health. James Forman also warned against SNCC shifting its attention away from black concerns. Ultimately, however, there is insufficient evidence for such a convenient dichotomy. Both “hardliners” and “floaters” opposed the war, most came to support SNCC’s adoption of an official antiwar stance, and, ultimately, very few black SNCC field secretaries involved themselves in efforts to build an interracial antiwar movement.

The racist murder of a black SNCC worker, Sammy Younge, Jr., in Alabama, provided the catalyst for the release of a militantly antiwar statement by the organization.¹⁵ Younge, a U.S. navy veteran enrolled at Tuskegee Institute, was shot to death by Marvin Segrest, a white gas station employee, on January 3, after he tried to use a restroom that was for “whites only.” Cleveland Sellers recalled that “the absolute absurdity of a man having to die for attempting to [use] a toilet filled us with rage,” and the contradiction between “the freedom that Americans were killing and dying for in Vietnam and the race hatred that motivated Sammy’s murder” was evident to all.¹⁶ For SNCC communications director Julian Bond, Younge’s death provided him with an epiphany on Vietnam. He recalled that it “crystallized everything. Everything became so stark.” The fact that Younge was a veteran made his murder even more powerful.¹⁷

On Thursday January 6, 1966, the day after Younge’s funeral, SNCC issued its antiwar statement.¹⁸ The organization asserted its “right and responsibility” to dissent with American foreign policy when it saw fit; accused the U.S. government of being “deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people”; and it drew a parallel between America’s democratic claims in Southeast Asia and its alleged inaction and indifference to murder and law-breaking in the South. SNCC also questioned America’s leadership in the Cold War struggle against communism. The group suggested that the “cry of ‘preserve freedom in the world’” was “a hypocritical mask behind which [America] squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United States cold war policies.” SNCC noted the disproportionate drafting of African Americans, expressed solidarity with draft-resisters in America, asked “where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?” and called on those who preferred to “use their energy to build democratic forms in this country” to work with civil rights and human rights organizations as a “valid alternative” to the draft.¹⁹ Indeed, concern over the inequities of the Selective Service System played an important role in SNCC’s opposition to the war. The disproportionate drafting of black Americans was an understandable cause of concern for the organization, and a good deal of the discussion at the November 1965 staff meeting had been centered around this.²⁰

SNCC’s antiwar pronouncement came during a period of great turmoil for the organization, which was increasingly turning away from its nonviolent, interracial roots and embracing black separatism and armed self-defense. Evidence of increasing radicalization was not hard to find. In the summer of 1965, for example, SNCC workers founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, designed to win political power for local blacks. The all-black party took a black panther as its symbol. The year 1966 saw SNCC’s Atlanta Project, located in the Vine City neighborhood, take an anti-white, racially separatist line. In May 1966 John Lewis would be replaced as SNCC chairman by the twenty-four-year-old Stokely Carmichael—and by the end of the year the remaining white members of the organization would be expelled. Julius Lester, who joined SNCC after Carmichael’s election, wrote that the “angry children of Malcolm X” were replacing the idealistic activists of the early 1960s.²¹

As well as earning SNCC the wrath of the establishment, the ire of liberals, and the condemnation of former allies in the civil rights struggle, the war also had serious repercussions for Julian Bond, who had recently won election to the Georgia state legislature.²² He was preparing to take his seat, representing the 136th district in Atlanta, when the antiwar statement was released—a statement that he endorsed. Amid accusations of “treason,” Bond was denied his seat on January 10; his struggle to regain it occupied much of the next twelve months and was finally resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in December.²³ Bond recalled that James Forman told him he was naïve, but “who would think that you would win the election, and then have the election declared null and void … I couldn’t believe that when it happened…. of course I woke up fast, quickly. But … I had no idea that would happen.”²⁴

Support for Bond’s right to be seated came from a wide variety of sources. John Lindsay, Republican mayor of New York, said that he wished that he still practiced law so that he could represent him.²⁵ Martin Luther King led a march in support of Bond and declared that “our nation is approaching a dangerous totalitarian periphery when dissent becomes synonymous with disloyalty.”²⁶ The would-be legislator also received overwhelming backing from his Atlanta constituents—“there was almost unanimity in support of my right to be seated, and my right to have this opinion.” But while local African Americans backed Bond’s bid to claim his seat, there was less support for SNCC’s attack on the Vietnam War. Bond recalled that “lots of people were against the antiwar statement but didn’t say.” Many constituents were “fairly conservative, and had a conservative world view, and this is a fight against communism, and the communists are bad, we have to fight them, they’re exploiting these people, and so on. So there wasn’t an embrace, by any means, of the statement. But there wasn’t real hostility to it or pulling back from it.”²⁷ This reflected the findings of a Harris poll commissioned by Newsweek, which showed that only 18 percent of African Americans favored a unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam; 37 percent apparently supported LBJ’s policies in Southeast Asia, with the same number unsure. While this survey indicated that a relatively large segment of black America was either opposed to, or hesitant about, Vietnam, it also revealed that the type of radical antiwar stance adopted by SNCC at the beginning of 1966 did not yet command widespread support among ordinary blacks.²⁸

An editorial in the Movement claimed that the denial of Bond’s seat validated SNCC’s criticisms of America. The organization’s antiwar statement had declared that “We know for the most part, elections in this country … are not free.” As the Movement noted, “this month, in a revealing display of attitudes in the “New South,” the Georgia legislature proved this point.”²⁹ The editorial placed Bond’s exclusion within a wider indictment of the Johnson administration. It argued that the government’s failure to protect black lives in the South, James Coleman’s nomination to the federal bench, and the “pitiful number” of federal registrars dispatched to the South “all fly in the face of the government’s pious pleas that the movement work through ‘acceptable’ channels.”

The episode propelled Bond into both the national limelight and the peace movement. According to John Lewis, Bond became seduced by the “flush of celebrity. He was a star, and he liked it.”³⁰ At times, however, Bond seemed a little resentful that Georgia reactionaries had pushed him into the leadership of the antiwar struggle. In February 1967 he told one journalist that he had “begun to receive honors based on my ability to represent at once youth, peace and civil rights, and wanted only to represent the 136th District of Georgia.”³¹ He later recalled, “it seemed to me that … being elected to the legislature was a real accomplishment of which I was quite proud. Being involved in the antiwar movement in this way, was something other people had done to me.” While he was proud of his role in the peace movement and “believed in it strongly,” his election was “the thing I was most proud of, and most wanted to do.”³²

The Bond incident was one example of how the Vietnam War could affect the civil rights movement at the local level. Another came from Arkansas, where from late 1965 through 1966 the war intruded into the SNCC-related civil rights project there. SNCC’s Arkansas Project was established in the autumn of 1962, after a formal request from the Arkansas Council on Human Relations. The project’s headquarters was in Little Rock, but other movement centers included Gould, Pine Bluff, and Helena. The Arkansas movement helped desegregate lunch counters, hotels and theaters by early 1963, and in the summer of 1965, a “Summer Project” was initiated in order to register voters.³³ Beginning in the autumn of 1965, the Vietnam War began to emerge as an issue within Arkansas SNCC.

In September 1965, Mitchell Zimmerman, a SNCC worker with the Arkansas Project, had penned a rebuff to Howard Zinn’s call for the organization to oppose the war in Vietnam, which was later published in the Student Voice. Zimmerman, a native of the Bronx who had first been inspired to activism by the Cuban Missile Crisis, had spent the summer of 1964 working in SNCC’s Atlanta office. He arrived in Arkansas in August 1965 and served as communications officer for the project. In addition, Zimmerman was also involved in organizing around school board elections in the delta.³⁴

Some thirty-five years later, Zimmerman disagreed with his warning against taking an antiwar position. It was, he said, “cowardly,” “timid,” and “wrong.”³⁵ Zimmerman’s caution in the autumn of 1965, however, was not borne of personal doubts about the immorality of the war. As early as December 1965, activists in the Arkansas project, including Zimmerman, were attacking America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. William Hansen, a white field secretary from Cincinnati who had been active in SNCC since 1961, and who had arrived in Arkansas in the fall of 1962, wrote to the Arkansas Gazette condemning American foreign policy. In a letter that was published on December 1, Hansen denounced America’s policies in Rhodesia, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. The civil rights leader charged that U.S. foreign policy was predicated on race and that America defined its “sphere of influence” on the basis of skin color.³⁶ A few days later Zimmerman attacked the Vietnam War and linked the conflict to the black freedom struggle. He complained that those who had the power to change things in the South were concentrating their efforts elsewhere—“like protecting the ‘freedom’ of the Vietnamese peasants to have their villages destroyed by napalm. No price is too high for us to inflict it upon the Vietnamese to prevent them from rejecting the American Way of Life—nor is any opportunity sufficiently costless for us to protect the rights of Negro Americans.”³⁷

Following the controversy generated by SNCC’s antiwar statement, Hansen offered an explanation to the Arkansas Democrat. He asserted that the antiwar pronouncement was “general” and “not intended to dictate a position for all [SNCC] members.” But he went on to say that African Americans were beginning to realize the effect of the war on them, which led to questions and protests. The newspaper article noted that three Arkansas SNCC members had registered as conscientious objectors.³⁸

One of the COs was Vincent O’Connor, a devout Catholic and committed pacifist from San Francisco. Although he initially registered with the Selective Service as a CO, O’Connor later withdrew from cooperation with the system.³⁹ After leaving SNCC in the summer of 1966, he became active in local efforts to mobilize Vietnam dissent and worked with Arkansans for Peace in Vietnam.⁴⁰ In January 1966, though, O’Connor was opposed to SNCC using its limited resources to aid the peace movement—especially a peace movement that could be too easily tarred with the twin evils of leftist sectarianism and counterculturalism.

On January 12, 1966, the Pine Bluff Commercial carried a story about a planned antiwar demonstration, to be held in Pine Bluff on February 12. The action had been called by the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCC) during a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The date, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, was chosen to “symbolize the freedom movement.” Jon Jacobs, director of the Southern Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SCC) explained that Pine Bluff had been chosen because of the SNCC presence there—“SNCC’s activities lead us to believe that the people of Pine Bluff are open to such a movement.”⁴¹ O’Connor fired off a response to Jacobs in which he stated that while he might participate in an antiwar demonstration he would not engage in organizing activity around the war—“I am not in Pine Bluff to organize peace demonstrations.”

O’Connor explained that as a pacifist he was opposed to all wars, and that he did not care for “leftist revolutionary factions” (at a press conference Jacobs had worn a Du Bois Club badge). He also pointed out that, in the South, association with countercultural forms of expression would serve only to hinder the forces of progress. O’Connor explained that “many people who’ve come South to work for freedom have shaved off beards & done other things to make it less easy for people to reject them—not what they say—as “Beat” or “Red” or whatever.” He expressed hope that “in future those who work for peace … would refrain, knowing the mind of the South, from wearing buttons that might tend to turn people off.” O’Connor suggested Little Rock as a more appropriate location for an antiwar demonstration and implied that there would be little support in Pine Bluff for peace activity. O’Connor again emphasized that SNCC’s purpose was not to organize peace demonstrations, which, he said, would be a full-time task.⁴²

Despite such objections, there were a small number of antiwar activities in Arkansas during February 1966 in which SNCC had a visible presence. A teach-in on the war was held at Little Rock University, at which Mitchell Zimmerman joined with Chris Hobson of SDS to present the antiwar case.⁴³ The SNCC activist recalled that a crowd of around 800, a quarter black, had been supportive.⁴⁴ Then, in Little Rock on February 12, a tiny crowd of 19 protesters demonstrated against the war. The action was supported by six people with links to SNCC, including William Hansen and Jim Jones (a black student at the University of Arkansas and former SNCC activist).⁴⁵

During late 1965 and early 1966 civil rights workers with SNCC’s Arkansas Project were struggling with how to deal with the war in Vietnam. It is clear that, at the very least, the activists felt discomfort over it. However, antiwar sentiment was tempered by concerns about harming the local civil rights movement—as evinced by the comments made both by Hansen during the furor caused by SNCC’s January statement and by O’Connor over the planned NCC action in Pine Bluff. This is a good example of how the “national” affected the “local.” In January 1966, not all SNCC activists were enthusiastically embracing radical positions or emphasizing internationalism. Those in Arkansas, for example, were trying to focus on local grassroots organizing. The story of the Virginia Students’ Civil Rights Committee (VSCRC) also reveals how local and national concerns often conflicted.

The VSCRC’s founding in December 1964 illustrates the inter-related nature of much of the progressive activism of the 1960s. Howard Romaine, a veteran of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, enrolled at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1964, where he met David Nolan, who was active in the University Young Democratic Club. At one YDC meeting, Archie Allen, campus traveler with the Southern Students Organizing Committee (a Nashville-based student group founded in 1964 that sought to bring progressive change to the South) spoke.⁴⁶ He persuaded some of the students to attend an organizing conference in Atlanta. When the delegates returned, they gave a talk to the Virginia Council on Human Relations (VCHR), during the time when the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was headline news. Howard Romaine, who had met Mario Savio during Mississippi Freedom Summer, urged that a sympathy demonstration be staged at the University of Virginia campus. The consensus within the VCHR was that a new group would be needed for non-civil rights movement activities, and the Students for Social Action (SSA) was formed, with Romaine as its chair. At a subsequent SSA meeting it was announced that a civil rights conference, sponsored by SNCC, was being held at Hampton Institute in December 1964.

Several people who would play important roles in the VSCRC (including Nan Grogan, Bill Towe, Betty Cummings, and Nolan) attended the conference, where they heard a number of SNCC activists recall their experiences as civil rights workers and pass on some of their expertise. Indeed, although many scholars have emphasized SNCC’s retreat from the laborious and exhausting work of nurturing local projects in the aftermath of Freedom Summer and Atlantic City, it is clear that the group did not simply give up on organizing. According to David Nolan, “there was a missionary zeal in the air, and the rather clear desire to bring the Mississippi experience to bear on the Virginia Black Belt.” James Forman told the conference that “you don’t have to go to Mississippi to find these conditions.”⁴⁷ At an evening party during the conference hosted by Virginius Thornton, a history teacher at Hampton, “people kept talking about the need to have a summer project in Virginia.” On the final morning of the conference, a continuations committee was set up to carry out research on race relations in the Virginia black belt and to plan future conferences. The committee chose the name Virginia Students’ Civil Rights Committee.

The organization’s purpose was to attack “the roots … of poverty, deprivation, and segregation” in the Old Dominion. The group’s former chairman, Ben Montgomery, recalled that they “decided we didn’t need to go to Mississippi to find work that needed doing. We had problems right here.” Drawing on the example of SNCC’s 1964 Summer Project, the young black and white activists, drawn from a dozen Virginia colleges, made plans for a summer of civil rights work during 1965. Their activity would be focused on Virginia’s Southside, a bloc of agricultural counties stretching from Norfolk to Lynchburg, which made up the fourth and fifth congressional districts. The area’s African American residents lived in poverty under a strictly segregated system, and were denied political power by local whites.⁴⁸

William Faulkner wrote that the whole land of the South is “indubitably, of and by itself, cursed,” and that “all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse.”⁴⁹ Certainly the “bleak country of red clay and scrub pine” that was the Virginia Southside was plagued by the “race problem … as no other section” of the state. Indeed, for more than two centuries the “cursed” land of the black belt, soaked in the blood of slaves and Confederates alike, was inextricably bound up with what James Baldwin termed America’s racial nightmare. Slaves had outnumbered whites in the antebellum period, which made Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection in Southampton County during 1831 particularly terrifying. In 1865, the war to free the slaves had left the region desolate and the plantations plundered—facts which “the lowland [white] South has never forgotten.”⁵⁰ During Reconstruction the area provided the heart of black political power in the state, electing John M. Langston to the House of Representatives in 1888. He was the only African American to represent the Old Dominion in the hallowed halls of Congress until the election of Bobby Scott in 1994. By the mid-twentieth century a rigid caste system, relying on custom and law rather than Klansmen and rope, kept the black population of the Southside firmly “in their place.” African Americans earned about three-fifths the income of whites, and averaged just five years of schooling.⁵¹

In the years following the Second World War, the region witnessed the rise of the modern black freedom struggle. A long and painful campaign to desegregate Prince Edward County’s public schools eventually made it all the way to Washington, DC, where, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case as part of Brown v. Board of Education.⁵² In 1960, in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins, protests were held in Richmond, Norfolk, Newport News, Hampton and Suffolk.⁵³ Three years later, the tobacco and textile city of Danville saw mass protests against Jim Crow segregation, which were met by a response violent enough to inspire a SNCC freedom song.⁵⁴

The Southside counties targeted by the VSCRC proved that no activist needed to travel to Mississippi to find serious problems that needed addressing. Lucious “Duke” Edwards explained that many people believed that “Virginia Negroes are free just because nobody is shooting at them every few nights.” But Edwards, a black activist and student at Virginia State College, pointed out that the Old Dominion was actually a “controlled society” in which African Americans were denied basic civil, economic and political rights.⁵⁵ The fourth congressional district was impoverished, and its black residents lacked political power. The median annual income of the district in the mid-1960s was $3,532, which gave it a ranking of 405 out of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. In most Southside counties, between a quarter and a third of African American families earned less than $1,000 a year, and 86 percent of the adult black population of the Southside had not completed high school.⁵⁶ Most of those who managed to find employment worked as unskilled laborers, and many lived on tenant farms.⁵⁷

Like countless communities across the South, economic deprivation went hand-in-hand with political impotence. While African Americans made up 47.9 percent of the fourth congressional district’s population, only 18.6 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote.⁵⁸ As W. Lester Banks, executive secretary of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP noted, though Virginia did not use violence to the same extent as Mississippi or Alabama to prevent blacks from voting, “registrars in the Black Belt Counties of Virginia do effectively discourage registration by Negro citizens.” They did so by being uncooperative about opening hours and by requiring blacks to answer questions not required under the state constitution.⁵⁹

The VSCRC, though an independent organization, was heavily influenced and aided by SNCC. Stanley Wise, a native of North Carolina who had been active in Howard University’s Nonviolent Action Group and the Cambridge civil rights movement, was pivotal in the group’s founding and attempted to pass on the lessons learned by SNCC activists.⁶⁰ On the eve of the summer project, SNCC field secretaries Stokely Carmichael, Charles Cobb, and Chuck Neblett spent three days in Virginia “giving pointers” to the VSCRC activists.⁶¹ The young Virginians’ declaration that their “primary function” was to “meet the needs of the people as they see them,” owed much to SNCC’s belief in participatory democracy and group-centered leadership. Indeed, one activist recalled that “VSCRC workers were thoroughly imbued with what is known … as the ‘SNCC philosophy.’”⁶²

“It’s very much like the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project in miniature—except that the accents of most of the workers are Southern,” began the Southern Patriot’s September 1965 article on the VSCRC.⁶³ Anne Braden, a white southerner and civil rights stalwart, declared that “no civil rights project in the South has been more carefully prepared for than this one.”⁶⁴ Twenty students, mostly Southerners, from seven Virginia colleges moved in to work in six Southside counties (Amelia, Brunswick, Dinwiddie, Lunenburg, Nottoway, and Powhatan).⁶⁵ VSCRC headquarters were established in an old pool hall in Blackstone, Nottoway County, which had a population of 3,659.⁶⁶

Believing, as Howard Romaine put it, that their job was “to find out what people want and need and help them organize themselves,” the VSCRC activists spent “a lot of time just listening.”⁶⁷ Programs “varied sharply from county to county,” and depended largely on what local blacks requested or supported.⁶⁸ Activities included voter registration, organizing black farmers, establishing selective buying campaigns, carrying out research, and publishing a newsletter. The VSCRC also worked at building up the local infrastructure by establishing community centers and forming sports teams.

At the end of the summer project, six students remained to continue working with the local black population. The activists’ decision to engage in full-time organizing reflected the fact that short-term commitment was of limited use. As Nolan explained, “with students in summer projects [there] is barely time to start a baseball team.”⁶⁹ Instead the young activists would have to immerse themselves in the communities where they worked, and become what Bob Moses called “deep-sea divers.”⁷⁰

Over the next six months or so, VSCRC continued much of the work that it had begun during the summer. In cooperation with the SCLC’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, more than 1,200 people were registered to vote. The largest increase took place in Lunenburg County, where the number of registered African American voters doubled. The VSCRC also helped to organize marches and rallies, which resulted in the electoral boards in Lunenburg and Dinwiddie Counties granting additional registration days. Crop allotments were a major local issue, with African Americans often suffering from discrimination. The group attempted to educate black farmers about relevant federal farm programs, and organized mass meetings. VSCRC reported that “in each of the magisterial districts of three counties farmers nominated and had placed on the ballot candidates for the county Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation committees.” This was the “first time, in counties where Negroes comprise a majority or near-majority of farmers, that Negroes have been represented on the farm ballot.”⁷¹ VSCRC activists also organized local blacks to take advantage of the war on poverty programs, and worked to improve local schools.⁷²

During late 1965 and early 1966 the war in Vietnam began to have an impact on the VSCRC. At a January 1966 staff meeting, the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond because of his stand against the war was discussed. The following month, the VSCRC staff agreed that “discussion of peace” should form part of the program for a planned statewide student conference. At a staff meeting in March, David Nolan expressed his opposition to the war and the draft.⁷³ Indeed, Nolan was particularly enthusiastic about opposing the war. In July, for example, he argued that Vietnam and the black freedom struggle were inextricably linked. Nolan believed that the war presented a “moral test of the civil rights movement. It forces us to examine all the ideals we have claimed to be fighting for. Are we indeed working for everybody’s freedom, or are we merely out for our own selfish ends.” Nolan considered it “inconceivable that one who supports the ideals of the civil rights movement could also support what is being done by the United States to the people of Vietnam.”⁷⁴

The activists’ opposition to the war could sometimes have a personal dimension. Rives Foster was classified 1-A for almost a year, and confessed that he did not know what he would have done if he had been drafted.⁷⁵ At a staff meeting on July 18, the VSCRC decided to sponsor a peace demonstration on August 6. Reflecting his mounting interest in the war, Nolan was “delegated to make further plans … and to report back.”⁷⁶

Opposition to the war, though, was not always an issue that commanded broad support among the local black population. As David Nolan explained, the white workers tended to have views “on such subjects as … Vietnam that don’t jibe with those of local people.” Nolan recognized that most blacks “had a single interest in civil rights and proclaimed themselves ‘100% with LBJ.’”⁷⁷ The potential of Vietnam to divide movement activists from those whom they were trying to organize had parallels within SDS. By 1965 its attempt to mobilize the poor through ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project) was already struggling but, as James Miller has argued, Vietnam was the “last straw.” The escalation of the war, and the desire of many SDSers to oppose it, introduced a volatile and destabilizing element into the relationship between community organizer and community. Many poor people, believing that America fought only just wars, were hostile to the growing antiwar movement.⁷⁸ VSCRC activist Rives Foster acknowledged that Vietnam helped to push the Virginia civil rights movement off course—“at first anti-war efforts … seemed to be hurting the movement,” and “the result of the war was the drifting along of projects and problems.”⁷⁹

Venturing outside the field of civil rights also threatened to damage relations with the group’s white supporters, some of whom were offended by its tentative opposition to Vietnam. After the VSCRC decided to sponsor an antiwar demonstration, a Charlottesville doctor who had contributed money to the group wrote to ask “how much time we were going to spend on Vietnam, so he could reduce his contributions accordingly.” Another financial supporter wrote that “we were not really civil rights workers, but rather draft-card burners, anarchists and subversives, and he wanted his money back.”⁸⁰

Antiwar activity in Virginia’s Southside seems to have generated very little enthusiasm. Fewer than fifty people, described as a “disgustingly low turn-out,” attended a daylong peace seminar on April 23.⁸¹ Moreover, the peace demonstration planned for 6 August had to be canceled because of a lack of support.⁸² As David Nolan explained, “at the last staff meeting we voted not to have the demonstration, after people began finking out right and left, getting county fever, deciding that one day of voter registration work was worth more than trying to do something about the war.”⁸³ It is interesting to note Nolan’s implication that Vietnam was more important than civil rights.

The VSCRC’s increasing interest in Vietnam, which coincided with the rise of separatist tendencies within the freedom movement as a whole, pushed the white volunteers away from their organizing work among Virginia’s black population and onto the college campuses. Black Power had always been a factor within the VSCRC. John “Coolie” Washington “came on the project a black nationalist,” and believed that “if there was a war between all the whites and Negroes … the Negroes would win,” while the group’s black chairman, Ben Montgomery, was “influenced by SNCC workers who came through singing the praises of Malcolm X.”⁸⁴

The VSCRC’s white activists increasingly accepted that organizing African Americans was a job best done by blacks themselves. Within the grass-roots civil rights movement, whites were increasingly seen by their black counterparts as perpetuating a culture of dependency among poor African Americans and reinforcing racial stereotypes. In 1965, for example, CORE’s Bill Bradley outlined some of the problems caused by white activists—“the general experience expressed by project leaders … was that white workers generally found it difficult to accept Black leadership.” There were also cultural differences, such as when white workers decided not to bathe “until practically forced to.” Perhaps more important, though, was the realization that the relationship between white activist and black community could be a potentially damaging one. Bradley explained that “too often the white worker becomes a crutch for members of the black community…. Case after case of Black dependency (upon) whites could be cited. The reasons are clear, we are used to depending upon white folks (good or bad) for practically everything. We are taught from birth that the white man is the greatest and a ‘nigger ain’t shit.’” The CORE leader concluded, “the very independence we are trying to encourage is discouraged by the presence and activity of whites.”⁸⁵

David Nolan explained that white VSCRC activists “were given preferential treatment to the Negro workers. This is … understandable … since the white workers were something new … but it grated on the Negro staff members.” He continued, “Negroes in the community had a hard time breaking their own stereotypes about whites. When Mr. Claiborne came over … to get me for church he was hesitant about coming in, hesitant about sitting down, always calling me Mr. or sir.”⁸⁶

Nolan had raised the problem of whites organizing blacks as early as September 1965. Somewhat patronizingly, he explained that “I think you get non-ordinary whites (social revolutionaries) working with ordinary Negroes (peoples).”⁸⁷ Rives Foster, who was white, believed that “black-white hangups in community organizing was always a problem. Many times I talked to groups of Negroes instead of with them … Black nationalism was and is the answer.”⁸⁸ In November 1966, as the VSCRC considered abandoning its work among black Virginians, the staff agreed that any future civil rights organizing “should not be geared toward participation by white students.” Instead, local black students should be recruited.⁸⁹

In late 1966, the VSCRC staff decided to withdraw from the Southside, and focus on organizing “Virginia students” rather than local African Americans. One explained that the VSCRC “had a dual constituency—Virginia Negroes and Virginia college students, the former by the nature of our commitment and the latter because of our origin. We had a responsibility to both of them, a responsibility to change.” Many of the organization’s activists felt, as David Nolan noted, that they “were not living up to that responsibility by continuing to work only in Southside” because it was not “the most effective place to work to change the condition of the Negro in Virginia and it was not the most effective place to work to change American policy in Vietnam.”⁹⁰ With the war in Vietnam escalating, student protest against the war continued to build. Nolan wrote that “we were … derelict in our obligations to Virginia students. Increasingly, their main concerns were the Vietnam War and the draft.” In a July 1966 memorandum, Nolan argued that “the problems of organizing” African Americans was “best done by” African Americans, and he urged the white VSCRC activists to switch their focus to Virginia students and the war in Vietnam. He believed that they “should focus Virginia students on their own problems … rather than drain off their efforts by working in southside.” Nolan felt that there was a “need for more peace work in Virginia which would more logically be located in the college communities than in southside…. I think there is work to be done on the question of the draft.” Nolan thought that “people in VSCRC are probably the best qualified in the state to do something about these things, and I think that this is where they should train their efforts.”⁹¹

It would appear that, within the VSCRC, Black Nationalism to some extent provided white activists with the excuse they were looking for to leave the civil rights movement in order to concentrate their efforts on protesting against the war in Vietnam. By 1966 many were coming to agree with Michael Ferber, founder of the anti-draft Resistance movement, that Vietnam was a more “urgent national issue” than civil rights.⁹²

The white activists’ increasing focus on, and interest in, protesting against the war in Vietnam blended with Black Power ideology to derail the VSCRC and its civil rights organizing work. Evidence from Virginia shows how the war in Vietnam increasingly replaced civil rights as “the issue” in the consciousness of politically aware progressive white activists as Black Power ideology simultaneously nudged them out of the struggle for black liberation.

While many black SNCC activists—Bob Moses, Cleveland Sellers, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Gwendolyn Patton, and John Wilson, to name just a few—passionately opposed the war in Vietnam and were active in the movement to end it, the majority of those featured in the previous discussion—Zinn, Zimmerman, Nolan, Hansen, and O’Connor—were white. Although white activists retained their commitment to the cause of black freedom, the Vietnam War increasingly occupied their attention and, as noted, the developing ideology of Black Power encouraged this. Indeed, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael appeared to countenance such a development. Writing in the New York Review of Books, he explained that one of the “most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley.” Carmichael continued, “they admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community…. Let them work to stop America’s racist foreign policy.”⁹³

The emergence of Black Power was, as many scholars have recognized, a tremendously important development in the history of the African American freedom struggle. Robert Cook and David Burner, for example, both cite Black Power as one of the principal reasons for the collapse of the civil rights movement.⁹⁴ Black Power first came to public attention in the summer of 1966. In Greenwood on June 17, SNCC activists Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks popularized the controversial slogan. John Dittmer has described how an angry Carmichael, out on bail, told an agitated crowd of 600 mostly local people that “this is the 27th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more, I ain’t going to jail no more.” Then, as the crowd became increasingly enthusiastic, he repeatedly yelled “We want black power!” The SNCC leader continued, “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt … from now on when they ask what you want, you know what to tell ’em. What do you want?” The crowd thundered back, “Black Power.”⁹⁵ The powerful cry was no spontaneous eruption, though. Willie Ricks had tested it on crowds during the previous week and urged Carmichael to use it. Moreover, SNCC as an organization had been moving toward Black Nationalism since the cataclysmic summer of 1964.

Black Power’s meanings have always been fiercely contested and, despite the efforts of scholars, it remains a notoriously hard concept to define. The Black Power label can encompass such diverse philosophies as cultural nationalism, black capitalism and black separatism, but some generalizations can be made. Black Power ideology drew on the example and rhetoric of Malcolm X, emphasized racial pride and solidarity with nonwhite peoples, identified Afro-America with the worldwide struggle against white “imperialism,” advocated the support and development of black-controlled institutions, and endorsed self-defense. Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, a political scientist, provided one of the best intellectual definitions of Black Power in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. They attacked integration as a middle-class obsession, called on African Americans to abandon the tactic of coalition with white liberals, and encouraged the formation of locally based community organizations and political parties. Ultimately, though, Carmichael and Hamilton did not promote black separatism; instead, they placed African American development within the pluralist tradition of American politics. They wrote, in an oft-quoted passage, that “the concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise … before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.”⁹⁶

Most of white America, however, cared little for the subtleties and distinctions of the ideology, and focused instead on its alleged racism and violence. This misunderstanding was aided not only by “media misperception and manipulation,” but also by mainstream civil rights leaders and their white liberal allies.⁹⁷ The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, never a friend of the radicals, defined Black Power as “the father of hatred and the mother of violence. It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.” The Association simultaneously viewed the development of Black Nationalism within SNCC and CORE as an opportunity to recruit “mature and balanced young people” from the “defections in their ranks.”⁹⁸ Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that “racism is racism—and there is no room in America for racism of any color.”⁹⁹ Of course some black power militants were also to blame, especially when they went out of their way to shock whites by using provocative language. CORE leader Floyd McKissick’s comment to reporters, for instance, that “the greatest hypocrisy we have is the Statue of Liberty. We ought to break the young lady’s legs and point her to Mississippi” was never likely to help secure a favorable reception for Black Power.¹⁰⁰

Although historians have followed contemporaries in highlighting the discontinuities between the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and the nonviolent direct action protests of the first half of the decade, a new historiography is emerging that challenges such assumptions. In his study of the Monroe, North Carolina civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, for example, Timothy B. Tyson has skillfully demonstrated that the conventional dichotomy is simplistic, and that it often obscures rather than enlightens the scholarly discussion. According to Tyson the civil rights and Black Power movements “grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom.” He has shown that “virtually all of the elements that we associate with Black Power were already present in the small towns and rural communities of the South where the civil rights movement was born.”¹⁰¹ Both Black Power and nonviolent direct action, then, were deeply embedded in the history of the black freedom struggle.

Indeed, the historical roots of Black Power, and the traditions from which it drew strength and inspiration are striking. Armed self-defense was nothing new—it had an established tradition in the rural South. During the 1950s, legendary NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall relied on armed guards and even machine guns for protection when he argued controversial cases in the Deep South, while black activists like Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham and Medgar Evers in Mississippi used guns to defend themselves.¹⁰² It was not just Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael who promoted international solidarity among people of color. In A Rising Wind (1945), the NAACP’s Walter White had written that the Second World War had given American blacks a sense of kinship with other non-white peoples—“he senses that the struggle of the Negro in the United States is part and parcel of the struggle against imperialism in India, China, Burma, Africa.”¹⁰³ Roy Wilkins had marched in support of Ethiopian freedom during the 1930s.

In the build-up to Freedom Summer, SNCC members had engaged in an emotional debate about whether white volunteers should be restricted from leadership roles in the movement, and whether their presence was welcome at all. They may have been aware that, in the 1940s, A. Philip Randolph had insisted that his March on Washington Movement be all black.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the white activist Anne Braden, who had recruited SNCC’s first white field secretary in 1961, had long believed that “the job of white people who believe in freedom is to confront white America.”¹⁰⁵ The professed ideals of the Beloved Community had always existed alongside an instinctive caution, if not hostility, among many black activists about white participation in the freedom movement. When SNCC expelled its few remaining white members in December 1966, and when Black Power militants called on whites to organize whites and blacks to organize blacks, many liberals were indignant. But it is illuminating to recall Bayard Rustin’s speech to a 1964 SNCC conference. The veteran nonviolent activist declared that “the time has come for the white students who want to aid the civil rights movement to stop putting on blue jeans and going to Mississippi to organize Negroes.” “Instead,” he advised, “do something that is harder and much less glamorous: stay home, go into white communities, work as hard as any black SNCC worker to convince the white people to support this movement.”¹⁰⁶ The exhortation of Rustin, a leading exponent of liberal coalitionism, bears an uncanny resemblance to the sentiments expressed by Carmichael, a Black Nationalist. It clearly indicates that the relationship between the Black Power and nonviolent wings of the civil rights movement need further examination.

In addition to SNCC’s embrace of Black Power in 1966, the Congress of Racial Equality was also adopting a more radical orientation. As Robert Cook has shown, the organization’s increasing focus on organizing in black urban neighborhoods resulted in it recruiting more African American activists, thereby changing its racial composition. By 1964, 80 percent of CORE’s National Action Committee were black and the group’s overall white majority was quickly disappearing. Moreover, contact with ghetto blacks also increased CORE’s receptivity to the black separatist outlook of groups like the Nation of Islam, which exerted a powerful influence in the northern cities. By the mid-1960s, CORE’s attachment to the principles of Gandhian nonviolence was fading, and in July 1967 the term “multi-racial” was expunged from the organization’s constitution.¹⁰⁷

New Black Power groups also emerged. The most (in)famous was the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966. Inspired by the SNCC-organized Black Panther party in Lowndes County, Alabama, the Panthers opposed police brutality, called for black economic and political power, and advocated the formation of black self-help organizations to take control of ghetto neighborhoods. Imbued with the ideas of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, the sociologist whose writings on the “cleansing” power of revolutionary violence exerted great influence on black militants, they also embraced armed self-defense. On 2 May 1967, thirty guncarrying Panthers marched into the California state capitol in Sacramento to protest a bill barring the carrying of firearms in public. The Panthers, with their anti-capitalist rhetoric and fierce opposition to the war in Vietnam, quickly became folk heroes to a generation of white radicals. But while the BPP did engage in serious community organizing, it also had a sinister, criminal side.¹⁰⁸