Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

      Introduction

      In February 1966, world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali was in Miami, training for his title defense against Ernie “the Octopus” Terrell. One afternoon a television reporter sought Ali’s reaction to the news that the Louisville Draft Board had upgraded his draft status from 1-Y to 1-A, thereby making him eligible for immediate induction into the United States Army. Ali’s retort, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” helped define an era. Fourteen months later Ali refused induction, explaining “I am not going ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill and burn another poor people simply to help continue the domination of white America.”¹ Ali’s response to the war in Vietnam seemed to many to epitomize a new militancy within Black America. The October 1966 platform of the Black Panther Party demanded that all African Americans be exempted from military service—“Black people should not be forced to fight … to defend a racist government that does not protect us.” The Panthers refused to “fight and kill other people of color who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government in America.”² Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) attacked the war too. Speaking at one antiwar march, Carmichael defined the draft as “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people to defend land they stole from red people.”³

      It was not just black militants who were critical of America’s actions in Vietnam. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the nation’s most important and most respected civil rights leader, also condemned the war in the strongest possible way. In the spring of 1967, King bitterly denounced the “madness of Vietnam” and called on his government to take the initiative in halting the conflict.⁴ Indeed, by the time that the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, every major civil rights leader had spoken out against the war.

      The years between 1960 and 1972 saw the emergence of two of the most significant social movements in American history—the African American freedom struggle and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. This book sets out to offer a detailed analysis of the relationship between them, by exploring two key themes.

      First, the response of the various civil rights groups to the war is documented and explained. Although a large number of civil rights groups opposed the war early on—including SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights movement was far from united in its reaction. Important organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League did not initially support civil rights groups speaking out against the war and did not adopt antiwar positions until the end of the 1960s.

      Second, 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