7 March 1965, during the Selma voting rights campaign, SNCC chairman John Lewis told reporters that he did not understand how President Johnson could send troops to Vietnam but not to Selma, Alabama.52 On 8 March the NAACP executive committee discussed the violence at Selma, and passed a resolution noting the irony that “the report of these carefully planned attacks on the Negro citizens” shared the “spotlight with the landing of U.S. Marines on Vietnam, sent to protect the Vietnamese against Communist aggression.”53 An editorial in the March edition of the Crisis declared that “the entire nation—the leader of the free world—has been compromised by the defiance of law, morality and humanity at Selma. American pleas for the ‘free and unfettered ballot’ in distant lands has been made an international mockery by Selma’s arrant flouting of basic democratic principles.”54
While attending the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) Washington Conference on 25 April 1965, John Lewis again attempted to use the war to advance the black cause. He told the delegates at the Metropolitan AME church that “if we can call for free elections in … Saigon, we can call for free elections in Greenwood and Jackson, Mississippi.”55 It would not be long, though, before the radical wing of the civil rights movement abandoned this uncritical approach to the Vietnam conflict and confronted the war head-on.
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.
