Party line on most issues was well known, Ho Chi Minh was the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China, and he wondered aloud whether “Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi” would be sent to “shoot down brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?”27 Speaking shortly before his assassination, Malcolm declared that Vietnam, Mississippi, Alabama, and Rochester, New York, were all victims of racism.28 It was a view that would increasingly be accepted by both the white New Left and the radical black movement.
While Martin Luther King was in many ways less radical than either Malcolm X or Paul Robeson, and tended to engage with the Cold War simply to gain concessions for blacks at home, there is some evidence of the radicalism that characterized his later opposition to Vietnam. In May 1961, King was asked for his reaction to the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba. He declared that “For some reason, we just don’t understand the meaning of the revolution taking place in the world. There is a revolt all over the world against colonialism, reactionary dictatorship, and systems of exploitation.” King continued, “unless we as a nation … go back to the revolutionary spirit that characterized the birth of our nation, I am afraid that we will be relegated to a second-class power in the world with no real moral voice to speak to the conscience of humanity.”29 King went on to state that he was as concerned about international relations as he was about the domestic civil rights movement.30
In early 1965, as the climactic battle of the civil rights movement was unfolding in Selma, a Cold War conflict came to the fore that would have profound consequences for America. The United States had been sending military advisors to South Vietnam since 1959, having previously supported France’s attempt to regain control of her colony. But American involvement increased rapidly after Lyndon Johnson’s election in November 1964. The bombing of North Vietnam, which began in February 1965, was followed by the deployment of American ground forces. In early March, two battalions of marines were placed near Danang to defend an air base, and by the middle of June there were approximately 50,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. The number would more than double by the end of the year.31 By then, important civil rights groups and leaders, including SNCC, CORE, and King, would either have opposed the war, or signaled extreme unease over it.
African Americans certainly had good reasons to oppose the war in Vietnam. With their racial consciousness raised by the civil rights movement, many blacks wondered why they should fight abroad for a nation that still denied them first class citizenship. As Martin Luther King explained, “we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”32 SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael urged blacks not to fight since they were denied freedom at home, and went so far as to term black soldiers mercenaries. He explained that a “mercenary will go to Vietnam to fight for free elections … but doesn’t have free elections in Alabama…. A mercenary goes to Vietnam and gets shot … and they won’t even bury him in his own home town.” Carmichael concluded, “we must … when they start grabbing us to fight their war … say, ‘Hell no’.”33 Many civil rights activists argued that, rather than fight in Vietnam, African Americans should instead be focusing their energies on the struggle for change in America.34
A second objection to the war derived from the discriminatory nature of the draft. It was not unknown for the Selective Service System to give black militants and civil rights organizers “special attention.” In January 1966, for example, the Selective Service announced it was reviewing the Conscientious Objector (CO) status of SNCC’s John Lewis because of his recent antiwar and antidraft statements.35 Mississippi native James Jolliff, an epileptic, found his classification upgraded from 4-F to 1-A after he became president of his local NAACP chapter.36 The Selective Service also drafted blacks in disproportionate numbers. In the early years of the war African Americans accounted for more than 20 percent of all draftees, despite making up just 10 percent of the U.S. population.37 A mentally qualified white inductee was 50 percent more likely than a mentally qualified African American to fail his pre-induction physical in 1966, and the following year 64 percent of eligible blacks were drafted compared with 31 percent of eligible whites.38
At the same time, there were almost no African Americans serving on draft boards. In 1966 blacks made up just 1.3 percent of total draft board membership. Some board members were staunch racists. Jack Helms, head of the largest draft board in Louisiana, was a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan.39 In 1968 the chairman of Atlanta’s draft board referred publicly to former SNCC activist Julian Bond as a “nigger” and expressed regret that he had not been drafted.40 This was not lost on black activists as they formulated their response to the war. SNCC’s Walter Collins, for example, denounced the draft as a “totalitarian instrument used to practice genocide against black people.”41
The fact that America was waging war on a non-white people also caused a good deal of concern among many black Americans. Increasingly, black activists took the position that the war was itself racist. In a posthumously published essay Martin Luther King declared that America’s “disastrous experiences in Vietnam … have been, in one sense, a result of racist decision-making. Men of the white West, whether or not they like it, have grown up in a racist culture, and their thinking is colored by that fact…. They don’t really respect anyone who is not white.”42 Carmichael also linked the war to a version of white paternalism that was remarkably similar to King’s analysis. He explained that “we are going to kill for freedom, democracy, and peace. These little Chinese, Vietnamese yellow people haven’t got sense enough to know they want their democracy, but we are going to fight for them. We’ll give it to them because Santa Claus is still alive.”43 Many black Americans developed a sense of racial solidarity with the Vietnamese, as illustrated by the comments of one SNCC fieldworker who stated “you know, I just saw one of those Vietcong guerrillas on TV. He was dark-skinned, ragged, poor and angry. I swear, he looked just like one of us.”44
Other reasons for African Americans and the civil rights movement to oppose the war in Vietnam included the commitment to the philosophy of nonviolence. Martin Luther King explained that it was becoming impossible for him to speak out against violence in the ghettos whilst refusing to condemn America’s use of military force in Vietnam.45 A more practical reason for opposing the war was its negative effect on Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to build a Great Society in the United States. Being disproportionately poor, black Americans stood to gain most from domestic liberal-reform policies like the war on poverty.46 However, the war in Vietnam helped to undermine the Great Society—both by diverting political attention from the domestic to the foreign sphere and by siphoning off billions of dollars in federal funding that might have otherwise have been spent on welfare programs.47 King referred to the war as “an enemy of the poor” in April 1967.48
Throughout 1965–1972, African Americans appear to have been more opposed than white Americans to the Vietnam War. Opinion polls repeatedly showed that blacks were the “most dovish” social group.49 In April 1967 the Chicago Defender surveyed black opinion regarding the war. The poll showed that 57.3 percent of blacks favored the United States pulling its troops out of Vietnam, always the least popular sentiment among opponents of the war.50 But black hostility to the war did not translate into active support for the peace movement. Despite widespread opposition to the war within the civil rights movement, and the peace movement’s consistent attempts to attract black support, the mostly white antiwar leadership was discussing the lack of black participation in 1972, just as it had been in 1965.51
Initially, the civil rights movement responded to the Vietnam War by stressing the discrepancies between America’s claims to be fighting for freedom in Southeast Asia while denying millions of blacks basic democratic rights at home. The legitimacy of the war itself was left unquestioned. African American leaders simply tried to use the conflict to increase the pressure on the federal government to meet the movement’s demands.
