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.
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
