the nature of the relationship between antiwar civil rights organizations and the mainstream peace movement is analyzed. On the surface there were good reasons why they should have cooperated closely: many early white opponents of the war were veterans of the civil rights movement; African Americans had powerful reasons to oppose the war in Vietnam; and the two movements shared a similar critique of American society. For a variety of reasons, though, a meaningful coalition was never constructed. Nothing better illustrates this than the fact that at both the 1967 March on the Pentagon and the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, two protests that have come to symbolize the peace movement in the popular imagination, African Americans were conspicuous by their absence.
Any account of the relationship between the peace and freedom movements must acknowledge the historical background to this story. From the abandonment of the freed people by Republicans during Reconstruction through to the present, the relationship between Afro-America and white radicals has rarely been straightforward. With regard to the modern black freedom struggle, the 1930s saw widespread cooperation between white leftists and the nascent civil rights movement. The U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) took the lead, becoming a fierce opponent of racism and a champion of civil rights. This commitment was epitomized by their vigorous defense of the Scottsboro Boys—nine blacks who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama in 1931. But despite their courageous stands on civil rights and bold advocacy of racial justice, Communists proved to be less than reliable allies—often because of their propensity to switch policy dramatically at the request of the Kremlin. Even their involvement in Scottsboro was controversial. The NAACP, for example, believed that the CPUSA was more interested in discrediting the American legal system and recruiting new members than in actually securing the release of the black plaintiffs. The Communists, meanwhile, condemned the NAACP as “bourgeois misleaders.”
During the Popular Front period (1934–1939), when the CPUSA made common cause with the non-Communist left, tensions between black activists and Communists continued. The National Negro Congress (NNC), a coalition of almost every important black group in America, represented a “coming together of left-wing radicalism, labor militancy, and heightened racial consciousness,” according to Adam Fairclough. Set up in 1936, it was headed by Asa Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first all-black union. But he resigned in 1940 in protest at Communist manipulation of the NNC and their efforts to secure its opposition to U.S. entry into World War II. Indeed, the CPUSA’s U-turns on the war following the Nazi-Soviet Pact and then the launch of Operation Barbarossa caused many former allies, white and black, to view Communists as little more than incorrigible cynics. Nevertheless, there had been signs of black-white tension within the Congress before Communist manipulation came to the fore. In his inaugural address Randolph had welcomed white support, but noted that “in the final analysis, the salvation of the Negro … must come from within.” This was a theme that he returned to when organizing his March on Washington in January 1941 to oppose racial discrimination in the armed services and defense industries. Believing that “all oppressed people must assume the responsibility and take the initiative to free themselves” he restricted the effort to blacks only. Another reason for excluding whites was to reduce the chance of Communist manipulation.5
There were other leftists and non-communist socialists who appealed for black support and responded to black needs during the New Deal era. In 1932 Myles Horton, a graduate of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Dedicated to promoting the tenets of grassroots, interracial democracy, Highlander produced two generations of civil rights and labor activists and symbolized the best about relations between black activists and white leftists. Organized labor also became increasingly responsive to black concerns during this period and made big efforts at unionizing black workers—for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons (white employers frequently used blacks as strike breakers). The militant trades unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations—especially the United Auto Workers, led by Walter Reuther, and John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers, which organized workers without respect to race—were particularly appealing to blacks. The civil rights movement’s increasing orientation toward the labor movement was most clearly indicated in 1941, when NAACP executive secretary Walter White traveled to Detroit to rally black support for a UAW strike against the Ford Motor Company. Nevertheless, white working-class racism remained a significant obstacle to interracial unionism, and many of the CIO’s southern leadership were reluctant to attack Jim Crow—due both to personal prejudice and a desire not to alienate white workers.6
Despite McCarthyism’s decimation of the legacy of the interracial leftist activism of the 1930s and 1940s, this prehistory is important. While the experiences of the New Deal era showed that interracial cooperation on the American left was both possible and potentially fruitful, it also revealed the problems and obstacles that existed. These problems—black fears of cooptation by white leftists; concern that whites sought black support merely to legitimate their own radicalism; and the sense of whites as potentially unreliable allies—would all characterize the relationship between the peace and freedom movements during the sixties.
The civil rights movement’s response to the Vietnam War and its relationship with the peace movement was also shaped by the historic links between the black movement and American pacifism. Although not all black critics of the war were pacifists, some of the earliest and most prominent were—or else held a deep commitment to the philosophy of nonviolence. Though a product of a number of factors the antiwar positions of people like James Farmer (CORE), Bob Moses and John Lewis (SNCC), and Martin Luther King were shaped by pacifism and Gandhianism. While historians such as Tim Tyson have shown that perceptions of “the civil rights movement” as wholly nonviolent are simplistic, the black freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s tended to use nonviolent direct action as its weapon of choice, and did so to great effect. Moreover, there were a number of important organizational and personal links between the black movement and American pacifism. Activists with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), for example, founded the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. FOR, a nondenominational body that rejected violence and war, was headed by Abraham J. Muste—a six-foot tall, gaunt, thin, one-time Communist turned dedicated Christian pacifist. Muste became a key figure in the 1960s peace movement. CORE’s leader in the early 1960s, James Farmer, had helped found the organization while race relations secretary with FOR. A man of “robust physique” who “spoke with the resonant tones of a Shakespearean actor,” Farmer refused to fight in World War II (he was granted a draft deferment). He also helped pioneer the application of Gandhian tactics to the civil rights struggle—launching a number of sit-in protests in Chicago during 1942, for example. Farmer himself represents the intersection of the pacifistic and leftist traditions within black America, and also offers a link with the New Left of the 1960s. As well as opposing World War II, Farmer briefly worked for the League for Social Democracy—a non-communist, pro-union social democratic organization. During his tenure as student field secretary, he worked for the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the forerunner of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most influential radical student organization of the 1960s.7
SNCC was one of the most militant civil rights groups of the 1960s. Founded at Shaw University in April 1960, it engaged in grassroots organizing in an attempt to nurture indigenous black leadership and build community institutions. Its young organizers, fired by a faith in the ability of ordinary people to make their own decisions and committed to interracial cooperation, sought to build the “Beloved Community” in some of the most inhospitable areas of the Deep South. Like CORE, SNCC had strong links with the pacifist movement. James Lawson, who helped draw up the organization’s founding statement—a searing advocacy of Christian love and redemptive nonviolence—had chosen prison rather than military service during the Korean War. He subsequently became FOR’s first southern field secretary. In the late 1950s he played a vital role in stimulating nonviolent civil rights activism in Nashville. Bob Moses, an icon of the civil rights movement and leading SNCC activist was another who had moved in pacifist circles. At the end of his junior year at New York City’s Hamilton College he had worked at a European summer camp sponsored by the pacifist American Friends Service Committee.
