Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
civil rights. Furthermore, he was reluctant to break with the president at a time when the Voting Rights Act and war on poverty seemed to offer huge opportunities for black advancement. Consequently, the letter writing idea was quietly dropped and King refrained from public condemnation of the war for eighteen months.108
Despite its growing aversion to mass marches and its critique of SANE-style liberalism, SDS, like the NCC, decided on a policy of cooperation. As new SDS president Carl Oglesby explained, they could either have sat on the sidelines and seen the march fail or “go in there and try to make it work.”109 After tense negotiations it was agreed that, in return for participating, SDS could issue its own call to the march and would be allowed to appoint a speaker.110 In contrast to SANE’s demands for a cease-fire and negotiations, and its strategy of staging a “responsible” single-issue protest that was designed to generate broad support, SDS called for a withdrawal of American troops and articulated an antiwar strategy based on a multi-issue perspective. SDS’s official “call” to support the November march stated that “the only way to stop this and future wars is to organize a domestic social movement which challenges the very legitimacy of our foreign policy.” Such a movement “must also fight to end racism, to end the paternalism of our welfare system, to guarantee decent incomes for all, and to supplant the authoritarian control of our universities with a community of scholars.”111 Seeing an opportunity to proselytize to a largely liberal audience, Oglesby readily agreed to be the SDS spokesman.
On a chilly overcast Saturday, November 27, 1965, around 30,000 people surrounded the White House before marching to the Washington Monument to hear protest songs and antiwar speeches.112 With the sun setting, Carl Oglesby rose to make a searing indictment of America. The SDS president, a thirty-two-year-old father of three with working class roots, attacked corporate liberalism, with its imperialistic tendencies that he argued had caused the war in Vietnam. Oglesby, an intellectual and some-time playwright, also linked Vietnam and the black freedom struggle—“this country, with its thirty-some years of liberalism, can send 200,000 young men to Vietnam to kill and die in the most dubious of wars, but it cannot get 100 voter registrars to go into Mississippi.” He called on “humanist liberals” to support the broad, multi-issue movement for real democracy that SDS and its allies was trying to construct. The applause was deafening, and Oglesby received a standing ovation.113
The NCC convention held November 25–28 was far from successful, particularly in its attempts to bring the peace and freedom movements closer together. The NCC had, from its inception in August, linked the civil rights and antiwar movements. At a September meeting of the steering committee, for instance, NCC leader Frank Emspak, a resident of Madison, Wisconsin who had been raised by left wing trade union parents in New York, “read a letter from Mississippi, stressing the consensus of people in McComb that Vietnam and civil rights were only two aspects of what they understand as human rights. Frank asked that this be the organizing focus of the meeting; although the South was not represented, he said, we ‘are not talking just to ourselves.’”114 A number of civil rights activists from groups like SNCC and MFDP attended the NCC convention, which brought together 1,500 participants from about 100 local and national antiwar organizations.115 Unfortunately for most of these “ordinary people,” the convention quickly descended into internecine factional warfare. On one side of the ideological divide were the Communist Party and Du Bois Clubs, who favored creating a broad multi-issue organization concerned with civil rights, poverty, and university reform as well as Vietnam. They were opposed by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance, who wanted a singleissue coalition based on the demand for immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam. It was a split that would become a depressing characteristic of the peace movement. One participant recalled that “factions, maneuvers, caucuses, deals, parliamentary procedure and parliamentary disruption flew about like bats in a dark cave,” and this “fighting about trivia” alienated the vast majority of delegates.116 Berkeley’s Marilyn Mulligan remembered how the experience was “demoralizing to the whole antiwar movement. Anybody who came to that convention who was just an ordinary person … and not a member of one of those political groups was totally demoralized … these people closeted themselves out of reach.”117
The African American delegates were especially alienated by the proceedings. At a meeting of black southerners this resentment was expressed freely. Ray Robinson explained how black people had failed to relate to the white peace movement at the April and August actions as well as at the NCC convention—“people from Mississippi have traveled here 3 or 4 times. Each time they came here they’ve felt unrepresented. In April they just marched. In August they just sat on the grass. Today they watched all this shit. They came here with the idea of finding out how people can help each other. But that isn’t what these people seemed to want to talk about.”118 Another announced that “it’s fine for these people to come from Chicago and want to manipulate the power structure, to play politics,” but “where is people making sense to themselves and each other?” Clarence Senior addressed the problems that many of the civil rights workers had in communicating with the white “intellectuals”—“we need to find a way to get our feelings made known to the body in our own language. We want to be part of the whole movement, not caught up in parliamentary procedure 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