Читать книгу Peace and Freedom - Simon Hall - Страница 9

Chapter 1

The Organizing Tradition

Our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America.

—Bob Moses, 1965

Toward the end of the summer of 1964, civil rights workers from all over Mississippi traveled to Neshoba County to attend a memorial service for James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. These three civil rights activists, who had been working in the Magnolia State as part of the “Freedom Summer” project, had been abducted and brutally murdered on June 21 after traveling to Longdale, near Philadelphia, to investigate a Ku Klux Klan church-burning. Standing in the quiet sunny glen, amid the blackened rubble of the Mount Zion Baptist Church that had also functioned as a Freedom School, Bob Moses addressed the mourners. Radical historian and activist Howard Zinn recalled that the SNCC leader spoke “with a bitterness we were not accustomed to seeing in him.”¹ Moses condemned the federal government for showing great willingness to send troops thousands of miles to Vietnam to defend “freedom” while consistently refusing to provide civil rights workers protection from white violence.² Referring to the headline of the morning newspaper, which read “President Johnson Says ‘Shoot to Kill’ in Gulf of Tonkin,” Moses said, “that is what we’re trying to do away with—the idea that whoever disagrees with us must be killed.”³ During the early 1960s, as civil rights workers strove to mobilize African Americans at the grass-roots level, they became radicalized by their experiences. This, in turn, helped shape their response to the war in Vietnam.

Between June and August 1964, the SNCC-dominated Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launched a major civil rights organizing drive in Mississippi. Known as “Freedom Summer,” it brought hundreds of white, middle-class northern college students to the Magnolia State to work with veteran black civil rights activists, in a bold and creative attempt to focus national attention on the problems facing Mississippi blacks and compel the federal government to intervene. The project’s major strategies were voter registration drives (in Mississippi only 6.4 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote); the promotion of black dignity and self-respect through the use of Freedom Schools that also taught African Americans vital skills; and the organization of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In organizing the MFDP, black activists were responding to the fact that the regular state party practiced systematic discrimination in order to exclude blacks from the political process. The civil rights movement hoped that the MFDP would undermine the state’s lily-white Democrats and help reshape the national party into a more effective force for social change. This would be achieved by pressing for MFDP delegates to be recognized as the official state delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention, in Atlantic City.⁴

The level of violence encountered by Freedom Summer volunteers and those they worked with in Mississippi was horrifying. Four people were killed, 80 were beaten, 1,000 were arrested, and over 60 churches, homes, and businesses were burned or bombed.⁵ Civil rights workers constantly asked the federal government to provide them with protection and were consistently told that it did not have the power to do so. Indeed, the failure of the government to protect activists was an open sore in the movement. As civil rights workers in the early 1960s quickly discovered, the federal government was extremely reluctant to intervene to protect them even when local law enforcement was clearly inadequate. When SNCC activists intensified their voter registration efforts in Mississippi in 1962, for example, they believed that the Justice Department had promised protection—but none was forthcoming. This fact contributed significantly to SNCC’s growing disenchantment with the federal government even before Freedom Summer. In his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, for example, SNCC chairman John Lewis addressed the lack of federal protection for civil rights workers when he asked, “what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat attorney C. B. King and left him half-dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?”⁶

The answer to those questions was, at best, “very little.” The government took the position that law enforcement was the responsibility of the states and that the constitutional “balance of powers” prevented it from taking decisive action where local law enforcement was nonexistent or, as was often the case, part of the problem. At the Oxford, Ohio, orientation sessions for the Freedom Summer volunteers, for example, the Justice Department’s John Doar explained that the government was unable to offer protection to the civil rights workers because there was no federal police force and it was unwilling to create one.⁷ SNCC activists, in contrast, held a much broader view of federal authority. Supported by numerous legal experts, they argued that the federal government was obliged to guarantee first amendment rights that were protected by the fourteenth amendment. Furthermore, they insisted that the government could use the powers assigned to it under Section 242, Title 18 and Section 3052, Title 18 of the U.S. code. These provisions provided for the punishment of those who denied citizens their constitutional rights and allowed the FBI to make arrests, without warrants, “for any offense against the United States committed in their presence.”⁸ SNCC activists, along with others in the civil rights movement, considered it the duty of the president, as the ultimate defender of the Constitution, to enforce the laws in every part of the Republic, including the South.

The federal government, however, often gave the impression that it was more concerned with placating southern Democrats, mollifying the potential “white backlash,” and constraining dissent than with upholding or enforcing the constitutional rights of African Americans. President Johnson refused to meet Freedom Summer leaders to discuss the issue of protection before the project began, and when a group representing the parents of volunteers requested a meeting, Johnson again declined. Presidential assistant Lee White told LBJ that “it is nearly incredible that those people who are voluntarily sticking their head into the lion’s mouth would ask for somebody to come down and shoot the lion.”⁹ It should be noted, however, that this attitude was not new. Dwight Eisenhower, a gradualist on civil rights, was reluctant to use the power of the federal government on behalf of black rights. This reflected both his personal empathy with white southerners and his strong belief in federalism. John Kennedy’s approach, at least until 1963, was similar. He shied away from deploying federal force or taking a proactive stance on civil rights for fear of alienating powerful southern Democrats and undermining his efforts to fight the Cold War and revive the economy.¹⁰

One effect of this policy of nonintervention was to increase civil rights activists’ disillusionment with the Democratic Party in particular and American democracy more generally. While many historians view Johnson as a courageous president who did much to advance the cause of black rights, movement activists had less reason to feel grateful to him. This was because they had “suffered years of jailings and beatings, and visited morgues to identify the bodies of victims, all the time waiting for the federal government to act” to protect them from racist violence.¹¹ SNCC’s disillusionment with the federal government could be seen in a sign that was often hung on the walls of its Freedom Houses, which stated:

There’s a street in Itta Bena called FREEDOM

There’s a town in Mississippi called LIBERTY

There’s a department in Washington called JUSTICE¹²

With less residual loyalty toward the Johnson administration, it would be easier for these civil rights activists to oppose its policies in Vietnam.

Black Mississippians and seasoned civil rights workers had long understood the violence that underpinned race relations and institutionalized white supremacy in the Magnolia State, and they also expected the federal government’s stubborn response. However, for the hundreds of white volunteers who traveled to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 the lesson was both new and sobering. One volunteer, Michael Kenney, wrote that Mississippi was the only state where “you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting…. Negroes disappear down here every week and are never heard about.” Kenney explained that “things are really much better for the rabbits here. There is a closed season on rabbits when they may not be killed. Negroes are killed all year round. So are rabbits. The difference is that arrests are made for killing rabbits out of season…. Jesus Christ, this is supposed to be America in 1964.”¹³ While the depth of poverty and racism in Mississippi helped to radicalize many of the volunteers, what shocked them most of all, as Doug McAdam has shown, was the extent of federal complicity in maintaining Mississippi’s segregationist system.

If SNCC field secretaries had already begun to doubt Washington’s commitment to civil rights, most of the volunteers who arrived in June generally held positive views of the federal government, and many had been inspired by John F. Kennedy’s call to service. Initially, many of the volunteers went to Mississippi under the impression that the “redneck farmer, Southern sheriff, and Dixiecrat politician” were the enemy.¹⁴ They soon discovered that the situation was far more complex, as volunteer Brian Peterson explained: “the Klansman-assassin at the local gas station has close connections with the local sheriff, who in turn has connections with the legislature and governor, who in turn have connections with Congress and the President.”¹⁵ Karen Duncanwood, a freshman at San Francisco State College, traveled to the Magnolia State a selfdescribed “patriotic American,” but quickly became disillusioned by her experiences. She had low expectations of the local law enforcement agencies, but she had anticipated more from the federal government. Duncanwood recalled that “people’s lives were in danger, people were getting fire-bombed and shot up and beat up, and the FBI knew exactly who was doing it. It was a real shock to realize that the federal government didn’t give a hoot if you lived or died.”¹⁶

Indeed, many of the volunteers’ fiercest criticisms were leveled at the FBI, whose agents were frequently disobliging or hostile when called upon to investigate violence against Freedom Summer projects or staff. Often, the most the FBI would do was take notes. Doug McAdam has argued persuasively that, to an overwhelming degree, the volunteers left Mississippi with a much more pessimistic opinion of the federal government—which, in their eyes, had shown itself to be cowardly and amoral.¹⁷

The traumatic events at the Democratic Party National Convention, held in Atlantic City at the end of August, seemed to confirm radicals’ claims that the federal government was part of the problem. The MFDP demanded recognition as the legitimate Mississippi delegation on the grounds that the state regulars prevented blacks from participating in precinct, county, and state elections. They believed they had enough liberal support on the credentials committee to force a debate and “roll call” vote on the convention floor. Once it became clear, however, that any seating of the MFDP would precipitate a Southern walk-out, Lyndon Johnson ensured that they would not be seated. Johnson, dangling the vice-presidency before Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, arranged for the doyens of American liberalism—including the UAW’s Walter Reuther—to urge the MFDP to accept a compromise in which they would accept two at-large seats and a promise of future reform. At the same time, supporters of the Freedom Democrats on the credentials committee came under intense pressure not to force the issue onto the convention floor. The MFDP ultimately voted to reject the compromise, Mississippi sharecropper and FDP spokesperson Fannie Lou Hamer explaining that they had not traveled all the way to Atlantic City for “no two seats” because “all of us is tired.”¹⁸

Numerous historians have joined movement veterans in seeing Atlantic City as a decisive moment in the relationship between the Democratic Party and the activist civil rights movement.¹⁹ SNCC’s Joyce Ladner described the convention as the “end of innocence,” while Bob Moses stated that “Atlantic City was a watershed in the movement because up until then the idea had been that you were working more or less within the Democratic Party…. With Atlantic City, a lot of movement people became disillusioned…. You turned around and your support was puddle-deep.”²⁰ The Democratic Party’s refusal to recognize the Freedom Democrats helped destroy SNCC members’ remaining faith in American liberals. Former SNCC activist Courtland Cox recalled that the liberal power structure’s machinations against the FDP at Atlantic City were particularly radicalizing. He explained that SNCC activists “went there feeling that if you played by the rules, that is to say even if it was dangerous you played by the rules, you got the votes, you did all the things that people said you should do, then the rules would work.” Not only was it clear that playing by the rules did not work, but “the coalescing of the power structure against us,” particularly the use of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther, was a radicalizing influence for SNCC members. “From that day on,” Cox recalled, “we felt that playing by the rules was not enough, that the power was aligned to maintain itself and that in fact the sense … that if you did everything right they would be on your side, people said no. Just not going to happen.”²¹

The Democratic Party’s liberal establishment was prepared to sacrifice principle and morality on the altar of political expediency. Fears about the white backlash or a Barry Goldwater victory in the November election may have had a degree of legitimacy, but for people who had risked death for the cause of equality, such arguments were irrelevant. Courtland Cox has explained how the arguments about the “wider picture,” such as the need to avoid harming Johnson’s chances for election, were received unsympathetically by SNCC activists and FDP delegates. According to Cox, “nobody cared about that. The reality was, our view was that these people were suffering, they had suffered all this time, that they were going to go back to a hostile environment, their lives were on the line that summer. You know … people got killed and nobody cared. So our agenda was the primary agenda, we were not going to view that their agenda was the primary agenda and ours secondary, no.”

When black Representative William L. Dawson attempted to persuade the FDP delegates that they had to support Lyndon Johnson, Annie Devine replied that “we have been treated like beasts in Mississippi. They shot us down like animals. We risk our lives coming up here … politics must be corrupt if it don’t care none about the people down there.”²² Although many FDP members continued to believe that the Democratic Party could become a worthy ally, and the party campaigned for Johnson in the November election, most SNCC members now dismissed the Democrats as part of the problem.²³

SNCC executive director James Forman explained how Atlantic City brought home to grass-roots civil rights activists the realization that the federal government, and in particular the national Democratic Party, was not the savior of black people, that in fact the federal government was an opponent rather than an ally. Forman, who was at least ten years older than most of his SNCC comrades (he had been born in Chicago in 1928) had been a reporter and school teacher before becoming involved in the civil rights movement at the end of the 1950s. According to Forman, who had joined SNCC in the fall of 1961, “Atlantic City was a powerful lesson…. No longer was there any hope, among those who still had it, that the federal government would change the situation in the Deep South.” Forman stated that five years of struggle had radically changed many people, “changed them from idealistic reformers to fulltime revolutionaries. And the change had come through direct experience.”²⁴

SNCC’s radicalization continued in the aftermath of Atlantic City when eleven activists traveled to the West African state of Guinea. This experience encouraged them to view the black struggle in America in a global context, and the sight of blacks running their own country left a lasting impression. Although most returned to the U.S. on October 4, John Lewis and Donald Harris stayed for another month, visiting Egypt, Liberia, Ghana, and other countries. A chance encounter with Malcolm X in Nairobi led to the former Nation of Islam spokesman seeking to forge links with SNCC during the remaining months of his life.²⁵

Despite historians’ emphasis on the progressivism of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, many civil rights workers remained unconvinced about the administration’s commitment to the cause of black equality.²⁶ Black activists’ direct experience of the Democratic Party was often a negative one. South of the Mason-Dixon line the party was the enemy of the freedom movement, which was denounced, red-baited, and opposed by the likes of James Eastland, George Wallace, and Paul Johnson—all important Democrats. Despite the liberal reputation of the national administration, events after Atlantic City further undermined the confidence of civil rights workers in the party. James Coleman’s nomination to the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals in June 1965 was one such instance.²⁷

Coleman, a former governor of Mississippi (1956–1960), was a staunch segregationist who had played a leading role in Mississippi’s response to desegregation. As governor he had opposed school desegregation, black voting, and “race-mixing,” and he had helped create the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission—a secret police force tied to the white supremacist Citizens’ Councils. The Commission’s official role was to “prevent encroachment upon the rights of this and other states by the Federal Government.” Described by one journalist as “something akin to the NKVD among the cotton patches,” it wiretapped phones, infiltrated civil rights organizations, and influenced local press coverage.²⁸ Running for governor again in 1964, Coleman’s platform had included continued support for segregation.²⁹ To make matters worse, at the time of his nomination Coleman was acting as an attorney for four of the five Mississippi representatives whose seating was being challenged in Congress by SNCC and the MFDP on the basis that blacks had been “systematically and deliberately excluded from the electoral process.”³⁰ Coleman’s nomination was, unsurprisingly, condemned by civil rights groups. The MFDP’s Victoria Gray stated that “it is with unbelieving and indescribable shock and fear that we learned … of the tragic nomination.” She pointed out that Coleman had “spent almost all of his adult life advising and planning in one way or another how to continue the suppression and dehumanization of the Negro people in Mississippi.”³¹

The NAACP leadership had initially asked Johnson simply to reconsider the nomination, but grass-roots pressure at the 1965 annual convention forced a stronger line—the Association’s leaders were instructed to put pressure on senators to oppose the nomination.³² There can be little doubt that the nomination of Coleman damaged Johnson’s claims to be a friend of the civil rights movement, especially in the eyes of activists working at the local level. Referring to the president’s March 15 speech advocating voting rights legislation, an editorial in The Movement questioned the national government’s commitment to black America when it asked LBJ, “when you said, We Shall Overcome—who did you mean by ‘we’?”³³

Civil rights workers understood that passage of civil rights legislation, while welcome, would mean nothing without vigorous enforcement backed by the federal government. For many SNCC and MFDP activists, the Johnson administration failed to do this adequately. Writing in the summer of 1965, SNCC’s Jack Minnis was critical of the “shoddy” enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with respect to the desegregation of schools and hospitals. He was also pessimistic about the impact of the proposed voting rights legislation—“the law won’t be worth a damn if Lyndon won’t enforce it—and we have no reason to think he will.”³⁴ The Voting Rights Act, which became law in August 1965, did result in hundreds of thousands of blacks being registered to vote, but widespread violations of the law occurred. Howard Zinn declared that, “while the nation congratulates itself over the voting bill, intimidation and violence continue in the rural counties of the Deep South, mostly unreported in the newspapers, and lost in the glow of legislative accomplishment.”³⁵

The government was reluctant to use its new powers to send federal voting registrars to the South, preferring this only as a last resort while relying on “voluntary compliance.” Initially, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent officials to just eight Mississippi counties, for example.³⁶ In May 1966, only 40 of 600 Southern counties had federal officials observing voter registration.³⁷ In Mississippi, as late as March 1966, 30 counties where black registration was below 25 percent had yet to be visited by federal registrars. One of these, Sunflower County, was the home of influential Democratic senator James Eastland.³⁸ After Katzenbach stated that new laws might be needed to prevent the problem of all-white juries finding racists innocent of crimes against blacks, Jack Minnis pointed out that laws already existed that prevented keeping blacks off juries because of their color. The problem was that such laws were not enforced. Why not enforce them? he asked—“but no. That’s not how the Great Society works. It doesn’t enforce civil rights laws. It passes them. And passes them. And passes them.”³⁹ Even Roy Wilkins conceded that “it is a justifiable criticism to state that civil rights legislation has been enforced spottily,” although he made sure to exempt President Johnson from his comments.⁴⁰

The “on the ground” experience of civil rights activists shaped their attitudes toward the federal government, the Democratic Party, and America itself. The government’s failure to protect civil rights workers from white violence; the refusal to seat the MFDP at Atlantic City; and problems involving the enforcement of civil rights laws all contributed to a loss of faith in the “American System” among the radical wing of the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1966, veteran leftist and civil rights activist Anne Braden explained how SNCC’s turn toward “Black Power” was not a sudden change in direction but part of a long-term trend and a product of its experiences. SNCC’s disillusionment with the government, Braden asserted, had started when “civil rights workers’ calls for help brought much talk but little action; when FBI agents kept taking endless notes but people kept getting shot and beaten and killed; when new laws were passed but scantily enforced and nothing really changed in the South.”⁴¹ Many activists, who had started out as reformers with a faith in the underlying goodness of the United States, became revolutionaries demanding fundamental structural changes to America’s socioeconomic and political system. As SNCC’s Mike Thelwell explained, “there was a naïve notion in the beginning that as long as we open [racism] up and expose it to the light of day the high-flown principles of American democracy and constitutional promises will come into play and the system will correct itself. It would never happen.” Indeed, “it turned out the system was absolutely complicit in the oppression that was going on, the exploitation. And they weren’t doing anything to keep the promises they had made to the movement … [and] the government itself and the system was proving itself to be bankrupt and corrupt. And that’s very disillusioning.”⁴²

George Vlasits, a community organizer in North Carolina, articulated the psychological, emotional, and intellectual journey that many activists made during the 1960s. In September 1968, prior to being sentenced to five years imprisonment for refusing induction into the armed services, Vlasits explained that, after “discovering” poverty, racism, and injustice in late 1950s America, his reaction had been to “work to reform this society. After all, the basic institutions are good—justice, freedom, equality—they are not just empty sounding words—they are what America really stands for.” However, Vlasits’s experience as an activist had taught him that he had been naïve—“racism is not a problem of a few individuals like Bull Connor and George Wallace. It is a basic institution of American society.” Vlasits concluded his courtroom remarks by declaring that “the man makes the rules and he don’t make them for us—he don’t make them for poor folk, he don’t make them for dissenters, he don’t make them for blacks—he makes them for the man.”⁴³ Carl Davidson, a Freedom Summer volunteer and student leader, put it more succinctly—“I learned it from the Ku Klux Klan and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, that you needed revolution, and that there wasn’t any other way.”⁴⁴

The radicalizing experience of civil rights work at the grass-roots level would help shape responses to the Vietnam War within organizations such as SNCC, CORE and the MFDP. Writing in the Student Voice in August 1965, Howard Zinn—one of SNCC’s “adult advisors”—encouraged the organization to oppose the war in Vietnam. Movement people, he said, were in the best position to understand America’s immoral actions in Southeast Asia, not from any expert knowledge of foreign policy, but because they knew so much about America. Zinn explained that “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.”⁴⁵ In late 1965, Zinn eloquently argued that opposition to the Vietnam War among black civil rights activists in the American South did not result from a simple application of leftist ideology. Rather, it came “from the cotton fields, the country roads, the jails of the Deep South, where these young people have spent much of their time.” In other words, antiwar sentiment flowed, at least in part, from the organizing experience itself. As Bob Moses put it, “our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America.”⁴⁶ When SNCC publicly opposed the war in January 1966, it placed its policy within the context of its own experience of America during the previous five years—“our work, particularly in the South, taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens.”⁴⁷

Although the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam began in May 1959, the war did not emerge as an important national issue until 1965. At the end of Johnson’s first year in office, America’s military commitment to Vietnam accounted for just 23,000 troops, but within twelve months it had risen to 181,000. Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was launched in February 1965; this made the war a major political issue, and it also energized a domestic peace movement that had been declining in strength since the 1963 signing of the nuclear test ban treaty. In the same month that the bombing began, the first teach-in on the war was held at the University of Michigan. Within two months hundreds more had occurred, including one at Berkeley that involved 30,000 people and lasted for 36 hours. The teach-ins consisted of lectures, debates, and discussion groups on the war, and served to legitimize dissent. As Charles DeBenedetti has stated, “the vacuum of understanding which they exposed created a market for information,” and this need was met by a cadre of academic experts who challenged national policy and established an alternative source of information.⁴⁸

Any story of the antiwar movement of the 1960s must give some consideration to the emergence and development of the New Left. Not only was it a key participant in the emergent antiwar sentiment of the 1960s, but it also played an important role in forging links between the various social movements of the decade. Always an assorted coalition of different groups, and thus difficult to define, the New Left’s major characteristics were its campus base, its rejection of anticommunism, its high degree of decentralization, its advocacy of participatory democracy, and its emphasis on a politics of authenticity. As the decade progressed, the New Left changed—morphing from a reformist movement inspired by John Kennedy’s call to service into an association of various radical groups that embraced elements of an anti-American worldview and often espoused competing versions of Marxist-Leninism. By the mid-1960s the New Left had been involved in a number of progressive causes—including civil rights, anti-poverty, and campus reform (for example, the Free Speech movement had erupted on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1964). Increasingly, though, student activism would center on efforts to end American involvement in the Vietnam War.⁴⁹

The most important New Left organization was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Formed in 1960 as the renamed Student League for Industrial Democracy, in 1962 it published the Port Huron Statement, a widely influential and much read manifesto for the generation of 1960s student activists. It emphasized participatory democracy and “values,” especially the need for spiritual meaning in modern society, as well as more traditional demands for civil rights, social justice, and an end to militarism. During its early years, SDS focused on the struggle for black rights and also attempted to organize an “interracial movement of the poor” through a program of community organization modeled on SNCC-style activism, known as the Economic and Research Action Project (ERAP). As Vietnam began to emerge as a national issue, however, SDS turned its attention to events in Southeast Asia.⁵⁰

In December 1964, SDS decided to hold an antiwar march in Washington, D.C., the following April.⁵¹ The escalation of the war during early 1965 fueled interest in the prospective action, and SDS responded by hiring more staff to deal with the administrative burdens of staging what would be the first significant national antiwar demonstration. Endorsements were received from James Farmer, Staughton Lynd, Harvard historian and SANE leader H. Stuart Hughes, Berkeley Free Speech icon Mario Savio, veteran pacifist A. J. Muste, and Howard Zinn, among others.⁵² The SDS decision to adopt a nonexclusionary approach to antiwar activity, however, produced controversy and dissent. The official call stated that “we urge the participation of all those who agree with us that the war in Vietnam injures both Vietnamese and Americans and should be stopped.”

Antiwar liberals did not take kindly to the idea that they might be marching alongside communists.⁵³ In New York, a few days before the march, Stuart Hughes, A. J. Muste, socialist Norman Thomas, and Bayard Rustin warned people away from the event because of its alleged communist taint. The group declared that they were concerned about Vietnam, but believed in “the need for an independent peace movement, not committed to any form of totalitarianism or drawing inspiration from the foreign policy of any government.”⁵⁴ A New York Post editorial added fuel to the fire when it claimed that “on the eve of this weekend’s ‘peace march’ … several leaders of the peace movement have taken clear note of attempts to convert the event into a pro-Communist production.”⁵⁵ Hughes and Thomas subsequently apologized to SDS for their involvement in this unsavory episode, although the issue of nonexclusion (or anti-anticommunism) would continue to be debated furiously within the peace movement.⁵⁶

April 17, 1965 was “one of those flawless Washington spring days,” and it augured a successful march. Perhaps as many as 25,000 people attended, and they came from all over the country. African Americans were particularly well represented—partly the result of “conscious effort” by the SDS to get a black turnout.⁵⁷ SNCC’s Bob Moses was a featured speaker, and he compared the killing in Vietnam to the killing in Mississippi. He told the crowd to ask themselves and their government whether they had the “right to plot and kill and murder in defense of the society you value?”⁵⁸ Moses was perhaps the SNCC member most active in the early antiwar movement, and he frequently linked his opposition to the war with his own experiences in the Deep South. For example, he had told the audience at a Berkeley teach-in that “the South has got to be a looking glass, not a lightning rod. You’ve got to learn from the South if you’re going to do anything about this country in relation to Vietnam.”⁵⁹ The influence of the civil rights movement on the anti-Vietnam War movement, and its desire to generate black support for peace actions, were evident from the start.

SDS president Paul Potter closed the rally with a fiery speech that placed the Vietnam War firmly within a wider context, and called for the building of a multi-issue movement for progressive change in the United States. Potter asked, “what kind of system is it that justifies the United States … seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose?” He continued, “what kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves millions upon millions of people … excluded from the … promise of American society … and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world?” In a memorable peroration Potter declared, “we must name that system, we must name it, describe it, analyze it and change it. For it is only when that system is changed and brought under control that there can be any hope for stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam today or a murder in the South tomorrow.” Potter then called for the creation of a massive social movement that understood “Vietnam in all its horror as but a symptom of a deeper malaise.” After applauding Potter’s speech enthusiastically, the large crowd marched from the Washington Monument down the mall toward the Capitol, singing “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the civil rights movement. About 150 yards from the Capitol the crowd stopped and a small contingent handed a peace petition to a congressional aide.⁶⁰

In terms of linking Vietnam with the civil rights movement, the march appeared to be a success. The SDS action had been supported by CORE’s James Farmer as well as senior SNCC representatives. Indeed, SNCC’s Executive Committee had decided “with little discussion and no dissent” to support the April march. On the eve of the action, SNCC members meeting in Holly Springs, Mississippi, had discussed both Vietnam and the SDS march. Silas Norman argued that the war was a logical extension of American imperialism, and stated that a consensus existed within the organization over supporting the march. In addition—“we have people taking an active part in the march and we have helped people get students (from the South) for it.” SNCC chairman John Lewis also spoke in favor of taking an antiwar position, arguing that the U.S. should withdraw from Vietnam.⁶¹

A group of black high school students from Mississippi were among those participating in the Washington protest. Signaling the continuity between the peace and freedom movements was the fact that all the students were veterans of the Freedom Schools that had been established during Freedom Summer. Otis Brown, a sixteen-year-old student leader from Indianola, explained that they had come to Washington “because we have to look beyond just Negro freedom. We don’t want to grow up ‘free’ at home in a country which supports this kind of war abroad.”⁶²

The civil rights and antiwar movements were also linked by a common spirit, one SDS leader explained that the “breadth and urgency of the march could never have been achieved without the life instilled in the student movement by the Southern civil rights struggle.”⁶³ Many of the antiwar student radicals were veterans of the black freedom struggle, and a significant proportion of the peace marchers, perhaps 10 percent, were African American. This seemed to represent the beginning of a new working alliance between the peace and freedom movements. As one reporter commented, “the most important new liaison was that between the young, vibrant freedom workers of the South and the peace-oriented students of the North.”⁶⁴

The growing opposition to the war within the civil rights movement seemed to suggest that the black movement might provide an important source of strength to the peace forces. Indeed, when Martin Luther King, his Christian conscience troubled by events in Vietnam, began to express hostility to the war, it seemed that the antiwar movement might have found a potential leader with huge crossover appeal. King first voiced opposition to the war on March 2, 1965. Speaking to an audience at Howard University, he called for a negotiated settlement and declared that the war was “accomplishing nothing.”⁶⁵ However, the road from civil rights to antiwar activism would not be an easy one for black leaders to tread.

CORE’s national director James Farmer had endorsed the April march and had also linked the struggles for peace and freedom. On CBS’s Face the Nation, on April 25, he had stated “I think as American citizens, persons who participate in the civil rights movement have not only a right, but a duty to be interested in all activities of our government—domestic policies outside of the civil rights area and foreign policy.”⁶⁶ In early June, Farmer had been one of many sponsors of an “Emergency Rally on Vietnam,” held at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The rally, called by SANE and supported by SDS, had significant black support. SNCC and the Northeastern Regional Office of CORE gave their endorsement, black entertainer Ossie Davis was a co-chairman of the rally, and Martin Luther King’s wife Coretta gave a speech. Bayard Rustin, a featured speaker, talked about the “common ground” shared by the peace and freedom movements.⁶⁷

At a news conference in Durham, North Carolina, on the eve of CORE’s 1965 national convention, a reporter asked Farmer whether the civil rights and peace movements were synonymous. He explained that the civil rights movement was an autonomous movement, but that it was proper for civil rights people “as concerned citizens” to be interested in such issues as peace.⁶⁸ As well as the involvement of civil rights leaders and organizations in anti-Vietnam activities, there was also growing opposition to the war within CORE itself. On April 10 the organization’s principal policy-making body, the National Action Council, decided to endorse “efforts across the country to gain peace in Vietnam and wage war on discrimination.”⁶⁹ However, events at its 23rd annual convention would reveal that the organization was deeply split over the nature of its relationship with the antiwar movement.

During June, the membership of Brooklyn CORE had passed an antiwar resolution which had subsequently been unanimously endorsed at the Eastern Region CORE conference in New York City. The resolution declared that “to fight for human freedom at home and seek to destroy it abroad is the height of immorality”; described the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam as “utterly incomprehensible”; and called for the withdrawal of American troops.⁷⁰ Historians August Meier and Elliot Rudwick have argued that by the summer of 1965 CORE was split on a number of issues, one of which was Vietnam. One faction within the organization believed that, for tactical reasons, CORE should refrain from publicly opposing the Vietnam War. This put them in conflict with those who believed that the organization should move in a more radical direction.⁷¹

On July 5, meeting in closed session, the convention debated an antiwar resolution. Although a majority of the 1,000 delegates opposed the war, many were wary of committing the organization to such a controversial stand. After a lengthy and heated discussion, a resolution calling for an “immediate withdrawal of American troops” from Vietnam, and condemning the Johnson administration’s foreign policy as racist, was passed by just ten votes.⁷² Farmer had not been present during this debate, and he quickly attempted to reverse the decision. At first sight his actions seem surprising—Farmer had personally made many antiwar statements and had taken an active role in peace demonstrations. In addition, his annual report to the convention had stated that “it is impossible for the Government to mount a decisive war on poverty and bigotry in the United States while it is pouring billions down the drain in a war against people in Vietnam.”⁷³ However, the national director urged the delegates to table the motion on Vietnam because it was not an issue on which CORE could get the unanimous support of the ghetto community, and opposing the war might also jeopardize public support for the civil rights movement.⁷⁴ Farmer argued that although individuals should support the peace movement, CORE as an organization should not “get out of step” with the community.⁷⁵

The resolution was duly withdrawn, over the furious objections of chapter heads Ollie Leeds and Lincoln Lynch, and for the time being the organization refrained from taking an antiwar position.⁷⁶ Farmer subsequently explained that he believed that protesting Vietnam would “provide too easy a cop-out for some of our chapters who were trying to tackle complex Northern issues”; would confuse two issues which he felt should be separate; and would open up CORE to possible communist infiltration—which had been a problem in the past.⁷⁷ Although the organization had pulled back from opposing the Vietnam War, many of its members would become increasingly active in the antiwar movement. Indeed, the organization would continue to travel in a radical direction—moving from nonviolence to self-defense, and from integration to Black Power.

The MFDP also found the Vietnam issue problematic. In July 1965 John D. Shaw joined the growing list of black American GIs who had been killed in Vietnam. Shaw, a twenty-three-year-old native of McComb, Mississippi, had been active in the local civil rights movement, having been involved in SNCC’s first direct action campaign in the state. McComb activists Clint Hopson and Joe Martin responded to Shaw’s death by writing and circulating a radical antiwar leaflet in the local community, which counseled draft resistance:

No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the white man’s freedom, until all the Negro people are free in Mississippi.

Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go.

We will gain respect and dignity as a race only by forcing the United States Government and the Mississippi government to come with guns, dogs and trucks to take our sons away to Wght and be killed protecting Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana.

No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other colored people in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the white American can get richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the colored people in the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause.⁷⁸

The leaflet suggested hunger strikes as a possible protest tactic. The July 28 issue of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Newsletter reprinted this leaflet, without comment, just as it had done previously with letters that expressed opposition to the war. However, this action set off a storm of controversy that threatened to engulf the organization.

Opponents of the MFDP seized on the chance to undermine it by portraying its members as unpatriotic, communistic traitors. Writing in the Delta Democrat, liberal journalist Hodding Carter III argued that the leaflet was “close to treason,” while Claude Ramsey of the AFL-CIO compared the MFDP to the Ku Klux Klan.⁷⁹ Rather than defending the right to free speech, many liberals joined in the assault on the Freedom Democrats. Black Representative Charles Diggs, for example, called the draft statement “ridiculous and completely irresponsible.”⁸⁰ In his syndicated newspaper column, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins condemned the “smart-alecks” and “young squirts” who had played into the hands of Mississippi racists.⁸¹

The leadership of the MFDP sought desperately to deflect the criticisms that were being leveled against them. On July 31, Lawrence Guyot, chairman of the MFDP executive committee, and the Rev. Edwin King, white chaplain at Jackson’s Tougaloo College and a leading MFDP figure, made a statement. They explained how television and newspaper reports had been claiming that the party had been circulating material urging blacks to resist the draft or, if they were already in the army, to stage hunger strikes. Guyot and King stated that “the news media are totally inaccurate in saying that this is an MFDP position or policy. At no time has the State Convention, the State Executive Committee, or any county MFDP Executive Board voted on such a position.” Furthermore, “a group of McComb citizens, many of whom are active in the FDP, circulated a petition as a result of [John D. Shaw’s] untimely death. This activity was reported as a news story in the MFDP Newsletter—a report on current activity within the state—not as an editorial or official policy of the MFDP.” As part of the story, they had reprinted the antiwar leaflet that had been distributed. After distancing themselves from the leaflet, Guyot and King went on to express a degree of sympathy with the sentiments behind it, when they linked hostility to the war with local experience:

It is very easy to understand why Negro citizens of McComb, themselves the victims of bombings, Klan-inspired terrorism, and harassment arrests, should resent the death of a citizen of McComb while fighting in Viet Nam for “freedom” not enjoyed by the Negro community of McComb. However, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party does not have such a position.

As the Negroes of Mississippi continue our struggle for the freedom to participate totally in the decisions which govern our lives, it is inevitable and desirable that a growing interest and awareness in local and national issues such as war and peace must follow. The MFDP encourages and welcomes discussion and debate of these issues among its members. We reaffirm the right of our members to take public positions and actions on any issue. As we understand democracy, this is what it means ….

[We] are proud to have been part of the movement in Mississippi which has liberated people to the point where they feel free to express their feelings on issues which affect them.⁸²

Although Guyot later told the New York Times that he would serve in the armed forces if drafted, the damage to the party had already been done. The MFDP lost the support of moderates in Mississippi and the congressional challenge suffered.⁸³ Indeed, Guyot voiced the suspicion that the fierce criticism leveled against the MFDP over the Vietnam leaflet was “quite possibly an attempt to project as unpatriotic and irresponsible the Freedom Democratic Party because of the political and moral ramifications of our challenge now before Congress.”⁸⁴

Edwin King later recalled that the MFDP was grappling with the Vietnam issue during the summer of 1965, but that the “evil” attacks by people like Carter tried to force the organization into a position that it was reluctant to assume. He explained that “the FDP’s questioning of the war early on was turned … into a kind of absolutist position against the war, which we didn’t really take for another year.” While the party was “obviously … headed that way,” they “wouldn’t let us play the kind of nuances.” Even though the majority of MFDP executive committee members opposed the war, they did not want to come out against it because “it wasn’t that much of an issue to the local people. We would not go too far beyond the local people or take a stand and impose it on them. But we would support them as we could. Nobody liked that. They wanted to push us.”⁸⁵ This desire to not get ahead of “the people” illustrates nicely a point made by Charles Payne, who has argued that community organizers had to “confront the complexities and contradictions of flesh-and-blood people,” who were “in many respects culturally conservative, deeply religious, patriotic Americans.”⁸⁶

The MFDP leaders may have wished to distance themselves from the McComb anti-draft leaflet, but many in the party and the wider community were sympathetic to its radical message. Freedom School teacher Rainer Seeling claimed that his class had written statements on their feelings about the war—“they all say they don’t want anything to do with [it].” Clint Hopson, the black law student who had helped write the controversial pamphlet, told journalists that MFDP leaders had seen the McComb leaflet, and praised it, prior to its publication. Hopson described Guyot’s statement as an effort to keep the party “off the line.” Hopson declared that the opposition to the war “came from the people … this is how they feel, we just put their feelings into words after talking with them, singing with them and living with them.”⁸⁷

Although it is hard to generalize about the extent to which black Mississippians agreed with the antiwar sentiments expressed in McComb in the summer of 1965, such support certainly existed. On July 28 Daniel J. Wacker, a civil rights volunteer working with the Delta Ministry, talked with a black Korean War veteran in a chicken shack—“news of the increased draft brought the comment: why should we fight in some other country when we are not free here.”⁸⁸ An African American mother in Natchez told Dick Gillian of KZSU radio that “it’s not our war cuz we don’t have no right and we don’t have no freedom.”⁸⁹ Stewart Meacham and Paul Lauter of the American Friends Service Committee spent a month in Mississippi and Louisiana talking about peace and the Vietnam War. They were convinced that antiwar sentiment was widespread—“everything we saw and heard led us to the inescapable conclusion that there is a strong, grassroots, anti-war sentiment building in the Negro community in the Deep South.”⁹⁰ The national peace movement would hope to build both on this grassroots black opposition to the war, and the growing antiwar sentiment within national civil rights organizations.

In August 1965, the black freedom struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement briefly intersected in a formal way, through the Assembly of Unrepresented People. The AUP was conceived by Staughton Lynd—Yale historian, pacifist, and civil rights supporter (he had been heavily involved in the organization of the Freedom Schools)—who advocated convening a new Continental Congress to help launch a new form of politics in America, one that would be founded on participatory democracy.⁹¹ A central tenet of New Left political ideology, participatory democracy exerted great influence within both SDS and SNCC. At its core was the notion of a “democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those … decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”⁹²

From its inception, the AUP was designed as a multi-issue organizing project that would attract support from the peace and civil rights movements, as well as from assorted radical, new left, anti-poverty, and reformist groups. The AUP’s official call stated that it intended to bring together opponents of the Cold War, civil rights activists, and those who were opposed to “inquisition by Congressional committees, inequities in labor legislation, the mishandling of anti-poverty and welfare funds, and the absence of democratic process on the local level.”⁹³ In July several SNCC field secretaries, including Bob Moses and Courtland Cox, had argued that it was necessary for SNCC people to address themselves to the “broader implications” of their work in the South, “such as in relation to foreign policy.” They went on to explain that the idea for the AUP had come out of a number of “exploratory meetings” involving civil rights, peace, church, community groups, and interested individuals.

SNCC was hoping to build support for the MFDP congressional challenge, but recognized that “a large amount of activity” during the summer would be “concerned with protesting the war in Vietnam.” SNCC wanted to channel some of that energy into support for the Freedom Democrats, but acknowledged that peace activists would be more likely to support the challenge if they were convinced that it would “foster a growing concern among civil rights people about the question of peace.” The SNCC activists pointed out that “people active in various protest movements in the country have always talked from time to time about the need for communication between movements … sharing ideas … manpower, and generally strengthening each other,” and they viewed the summer as an “opportunity to begin the long-awaited dialogue between activists in various political struggles.”⁹⁴

The link between the civil rights and antiwar movements was made explicit by the AUP—“in Mississippi and Washington the few make the decisions for the many. Mississippi Negroes are denied the vote; the voice of the thirty per cent of Americans now opposed to the undeclared war in Vietnam is not heeded and all Americans are denied access to facts concerning the true military and political situation.”⁹⁵ This argument was echoed in the fall by Ray Robinson, Jr., an African American antiwar activist and former Golden Gloves boxer. Robinson declared that “the same people who won’t let the people of Vietnam decide what’s best for them are the same people that won’t let the Negroes of the South decide who should represent them.”⁹⁶ The AUP’s program included demonstrations against the war and workshops designed to facilitate dialogue between people active in various “progressive” movements. Approximately 2,000 people attended the AUP, and on August 6 the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima was marked with a silent vigil outside the White House. Three days later, on the anniversary of Nagasaki, the AUP concluded its activities with an antiwar march of 800 people from the Washington Monument to the Capitol.⁹⁷ A total of about 350 activists were arrested for engaging in acts of civil disobedience over the weekend.⁹⁸

Despite the involvement of civil rights figures such as Moses and Cox at the leadership level of the AUP, most SNCC workers were less interested in antiwar protest, preferring to focus their attentions on organizing around civil rights in the black community. Only a handful of southern civil rights workers were actively involved in the AUP, and black movement activists were a “distinct minority” at the Assembly.⁹⁹ The NAACP, anxious to dissociate the civil rights movement from Vietnam dissent, had attacked the AUP as an attempt to hoodwink civil rights groups into supporting protests against U.S. policy in Vietnam. Roy Wilkins accepted that the AUP’s official call mentioned civil rights, but he argued that the “main emphasis” was on Vietnam, and that “Mississippi” was just a “come-on word”. The NAACP executive director thus warned Branch and Youth Council presidents against becoming involved in the AUP.¹⁰⁰

Although Wilkins was being unfair in claiming that the AUP was designed to co-opt the civil rights movement, its goal of generating productive dialogue between various progressive movements remained largely unfulfilled. In part this was because so few civil rights people attended—there was a “busload from Mississippi, two delegates from New Orleans, small groups from other Southern communities, and a few staff members of civil rights organizations,” but that was all. A second reason was that for many of the participants Vietnam was the overriding issue, and many peace activists were prepared to sacrifice the success of the workshops in order to protest against the war. As Anne Braden explained, for opponents of the war, “sitting down in the gates of the White House seemed more urgent” than trying to build constructive working relationships with various groups around a broad range of issues. Consequently, there was a tendency for peace and civil rights activists to meet separately. However, on the occasions when they did get together, there were problems with “intellectuals using big words and dominating conversations.” Only once during the weekend, at the “community people’s workshop,” was productive cooperation achieved—and this was because the people from Mississippi talked and requested that the “intellectuals” just listen.¹⁰¹

Jack Newfield’s report on the AUP was even less positive than Braden’s—he claimed that “all the contradictions and polarities within the new radical movement crystallized during the four picnic-like days of the assembly.” Newfield described an incestuous gathering of movement people that seethed with tensions. There were tensions between black and white, between radical and moderate, and between those who wanted to bear religious witness against Vietnam and those who wished to organize a radical political movement that focused on the war.¹⁰²

Newfield documented one clash that offers an interesting insight into the tension that existed between the civil rights and peace activists. On the final morning of the Assembly, Clint Hopson, the black activist from McComb whose anti-draft work had recently landed the MFDP in hot water, read a statement urging Mississippi blacks to refuse to register for the draft. He also accused the MFDP of employing “expediency” in its refusal to support the call for draft resistance. Bob Moses, angered by the enthusiastic response of the 800-strong, mostly white crowd, took the floor. He defended the party and criticized what one might term the rhetorical radicalism of many of the delegates. Moses explained that he had “watched MFDP people risk their lives and I’ve heard you folks debate for the last three days about going to jail for a few hours…. Mississippi people have paid a terrible price and I don’t see anybody here doing that. You people should be supporting the Congressional challenge, not attacking the MFDP.”

In many ways the AUP augured the shape of things to come regarding attempts to bring about closer cooperation between the peace and freedom movements. Arguments about emphasis and multi-issuism, the cultural and “intellectual” barriers between white student antiwar activists and black civil rights workers, and interracial tensions would, throughout the decade, plague efforts to build a broad, radical, multiracial, multi-issue antiwar coalition.

The fissures within the antiwar coalition over race, multi-issuism, and exclusionism and the tensions between radicals and liberals came to the fore once again during antiwar activities in the nation’s capital over the 1965 Thanksgiving holiday. Two important events coincided—the first national convention of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCC) which had been founded at the AUP, and a National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE)-sponsored peace march.

Sanford Gottlieb, coordinator of the SANE march, had announced that one of his objectives was to keep “kooks, communists or draft-dodgers” out of the demonstration in an attempt to appeal to moderates.¹⁰³ But despite SANE’s policy of rejecting civil disobedience and discouraging communist support, radicals were not completely alienated from proceedings. Although signs calling for immediate withdrawal were strongly discouraged, for example, they were not banned, and the radicals’ commitment to inclusiveness obliged them to give at least grudging support.¹⁰⁴ The NCC decided to support the SANE march for a number of reasons. It was considered important to try to maintain the unity of the peace movement, and there was also a belief that SANE was moving in a radical direction—it was, for example, being less exclusionary than normal. Indeed, during the mid-1960s SANE, which had been founded by radical pacifists and peace liberals in 1957, was wracked by internal divisions between radicals and moderates who disagreed over policy and tactics. As well as seeing the chance to “connect” with the radical segments of SANE’s middle-class constituency, the NCC also saw an opportunity to link the peace and freedom movements. It was rumored that SANE was trying to persuade Martin Luther King to speak at the antiwar rally, and the radicals noted that

Negroes from the South are being mobilized for a demonstration in Washington. If we hope to involve civil rights as a component in a broad struggle for human rights, we can do it only if we have a conference in Washington after a rally at which King speaks of peace. There may never again be such an opportunity … to hear the Southern part of the dialogue.¹⁰⁵

However, it is worth noting that, although a number of African Americans attended the NCC convention, only about 5 percent of those participating in the SANE march were black, and, contrary to the King rumor, no important civil rights leader spoke.¹⁰⁶

Indeed, the late summer of 1965 had seen a blow to efforts to unite the civil rights and peace movements, as Martin Luther King retreated from his initial opposition to the war in Vietnam. He had first spoken out in March, before making an important speech at an SCLC rally in Petersburg, Virginia, on July 2. Before a cheering crowd of 2,000 at a local football stadium, King declared that “the United States should spare no effort in pursuing” a negotiated settlement to the conflict, even if that meant talking to the Viet Cong. Moreover, King suggested that Americans should hold peace rallies, “just like we have freedom rallies.”¹⁰⁷ However, several members of the SCLC board were uneasy over King’s Vietnam comments. While his right to express dissent was confirmed, the board also made it clear that the SCLC did not have enough resources to work for peace as well as civil rights. This did not prevent King from announcing, in early August, a plan to write letters to LBJ and the leaders of the USSR, China, North and South Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front (NLF), calling on them to begin negotiations. He also urged Johnson to consider a bombing pause and to indicate willingness to negotiate with the Viet Cong.

King, though, quickly came under pressure to retreat from his antiwar stance. Johnson chided him for his antiwar comments, and at the beginning of September UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg met with King to bring him “on-side.” The next day, Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd, a close Johnson ally, publicly attacked King for his antiwar remarks and pointed out that it was illegal for private citizens to engage in independent foreign policy ventures. The message was clear—LBJ would brook no dissent over Vietnam. If King persisted with his antiwar activism he could expect a barrage of stinging criticism and frosty relations with the Johnson White House. King confessed to aides that he did not have the strength to take on the power structure over the war while fighting for civil rights. Furthermore, he was reluctant to break with the president at a time when the Voting Rights Act and war on poverty seemed to offer huge opportunities for black advancement. Consequently, the letter writing idea was quietly dropped and King refrained from public condemnation of the war for eighteen months.¹⁰⁸

Despite its growing aversion to mass marches and its critique of SANE-style liberalism, SDS, like the NCC, decided on a policy of cooperation. As new SDS president Carl Oglesby explained, they could either have sat on the sidelines and seen the march fail or “go in there and try to make it work.”¹⁰⁹ After tense negotiations it was agreed that, in return for participating, SDS could issue its own call to the march and would be allowed to appoint a speaker.¹¹⁰ In contrast to SANE’s demands for a cease-fire and negotiations, and its strategy of staging a “responsible” single-issue protest that was designed to generate broad support, SDS called for a withdrawal of American troops and articulated an antiwar strategy based on a multi-issue perspective. SDS’s official “call” to support the November march stated that “the only way to stop this and future wars is to organize a domestic social movement which challenges the very legitimacy of our foreign policy.” Such a movement “must also fight to end racism, to end the paternalism of our welfare system, to guarantee decent incomes for all, and to supplant the authoritarian control of our universities with a community of scholars.”¹¹¹ Seeing an opportunity to proselytize to a largely liberal audience, Oglesby readily agreed to be the SDS spokesman.

On a chilly overcast Saturday, November 27, 1965, around 30,000 people surrounded the White House before marching to the Washington Monument to hear protest songs and antiwar speeches.¹¹² With the sun setting, Carl Oglesby rose to make a searing indictment of America. The SDS president, a thirty-two-year-old father of three with working class roots, attacked corporate liberalism, with its imperialistic tendencies that he argued had caused the war in Vietnam. Oglesby, an intellectual and some-time playwright, also linked Vietnam and the black freedom struggle—“this country, with its thirty-some years of liberalism, can send 200,000 young men to Vietnam to kill and die in the most dubious of wars, but it cannot get 100 voter registrars to go into Mississippi.” He called on “humanist liberals” to support the broad, multi-issue movement for real democracy that SDS and its allies was trying to construct. The applause was deafening, and Oglesby received a standing ovation.¹¹³

The NCC convention held November 25–28 was far from successful, particularly in its attempts to bring the peace and freedom movements closer together. The NCC had, from its inception in August, linked the civil rights and antiwar movements. At a September meeting of the steering committee, for instance, NCC leader Frank Emspak, a resident of Madison, Wisconsin who had been raised by left wing trade union parents in New York, “read a letter from Mississippi, stressing the consensus of people in McComb that Vietnam and civil rights were only two aspects of what they understand as human rights. Frank asked that this be the organizing focus of the meeting; although the South was not represented, he said, we ‘are not talking just to ourselves.’”¹¹⁴ A number of civil rights activists from groups like SNCC and MFDP attended the NCC convention, which brought together 1,500 participants from about 100 local and national antiwar organizations.¹¹⁵ Unfortunately for most of these “ordinary people,” the convention quickly descended into internecine factional warfare. On one side of the ideological divide were the Communist Party and Du Bois Clubs, who favored creating a broad multi-issue organization concerned with civil rights, poverty, and university reform as well as Vietnam. They were opposed by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance, who wanted a singleissue coalition based on the demand for immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam. It was a split that would become a depressing characteristic of the peace movement. One participant recalled that “factions, maneuvers, caucuses, deals, parliamentary procedure and parliamentary disruption flew about like bats in a dark cave,” and this “fighting about trivia” alienated the vast majority of delegates.¹¹⁶ Berkeley’s Marilyn Mulligan remembered how the experience was “demoralizing to the whole antiwar movement. Anybody who came to that convention who was just an ordinary person … and not a member of one of those political groups was totally demoralized … these people closeted themselves out of reach.”¹¹⁷

The African American delegates were especially alienated by the proceedings. At a meeting of black southerners this resentment was expressed freely. Ray Robinson explained how black people had failed to relate to the white peace movement at the April and August actions as well as at the NCC convention—“people from Mississippi have traveled here 3 or 4 times. Each time they came here they’ve felt unrepresented. In April they just marched. In August they just sat on the grass. Today they watched all this shit. They came here with the idea of finding out how people can help each other. But that isn’t what these people seemed to want to talk about.”¹¹⁸ Another announced that “it’s fine for these people to come from Chicago and want to manipulate the power structure, to play politics,” but “where is people making sense to themselves and each other?” Clarence Senior addressed the problems that many of the civil rights workers had in communicating with the white “intellectuals”—“we need to find a way to get our feelings made known to the body in our own language. We want to be part of the whole movement, not caught up in parliamentary procedure and factionalism. If some of the speakers get up in the clouds, we need to have someone to get him to break it down.”

The “tedious debate” over the structure of the NCC, which dominated the convention, antagonized the southern civil rights delegates—many of whom were so repelled by the factionalism that they left early.¹¹⁹ The NCC’s Frank Emspak recalled how the political maneuverings of leftist factions often resulted in African Americans feeling estranged from the antiwar movement. He explained that “some of the maneuvering was carried on in such a way … that turned off black people deliberately—you would have black people speaking and disrupted.” In addition,

the black organizations that came actually had a mass base. You talk about the Methodist Student Movement, or you talk about SCLC, or … the NAACP to the extent that some people came from those chapters—who were these people, these kids raising hell all the time and disrupting things and making it impossible to function, who do they represent, you know, ten people? Then they go back to some town someplace and they have a chapter of several hundred people, and they say “what happened up there?” you know, so it was that kind of … disconnect because, for the black organizations … they saw the war as important, but … that wasn’t their crucial thing, they had another agenda. So then to be insulted on top of everything else, you know they don’t need it.¹²⁰

The year 1965 saw the first stirrings of antiwar dissent within the civil rights movement. Often, black activists’ opposition to Vietnam was shaped by their experience of civil rights organizing itself. As the war in Southeast Asia intensified, it fueled the growth of a domestic peace movement. This movement, many of whose leaders had been involved in the struggle for racial justice, sought to forge links with their black counterparts almost immediately. However, the problems of white politicking and intellectualism, and the failure to link the antiwar cause with the civil rights struggle in anything more than a rhetorical way, undermined black involvement in the predominantly white antiwar movement. These problems, evident from the very moment that civil rights and antiwar groups began trying to work together, remained largely unresolved and would continue to hamper the peace movement’s efforts to attract substantial African American support.