Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
men in a car in Pasadena) meant that he was excluded from public leadership, Rustin exerted considerable influence behind the scenes. For example, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott he helped tutor Martin Luther King in nonviolent philosophy, and he was the organizational mastermind behind the awesome 1963 March on Washington, at which King delivered his “I have a dream” oration.9 Moreover, through his friendship with Tom Kahn, one of the few white undergraduates at Howard University and a member of its Nonviolent Action Group, Rustin acted as mentor to a number of activists who would play important roles in SNCC. These included Stokely Carmichael, Charles Cobb, Courtland Cox, Ruth Howard, and Mike Thelwell. Carmichael in particular was impressed by Rustin’s ability to link social democratic politics with the struggle for black rights.10
Other important links between pacifism and the black movement included Liberation Magazine, a journal edited by David Dellinger, a pacifist and future anti-Vietnam War movement leader (Rustin was a coeditor). In the 1950s Liberation offered its support to the civil rights movement, publishing the first piece of political journalism to carry Martin Luther King’s byline. Moreover, many of the civil rights movement’s earliest white supporters came from pacifist circles. A number of white participants in the Freedom Rides of May 1961, for example, were veterans of the pacifist movement.11 Attempting to build links between the 1960s peace movement and the civil rights movement, then, at one level represented a return to the movement’s pacifist roots, and provided at least some common ground on which to construct a coalition.
Frequently portrayed as excessively patriotic in its support for American foreign policy, black opposition to the war in Vietnam has often been viewed as representing a major break with the past. W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1918 exhortation calling on blacks to forget their “special grievances” and “close ranks” with white Americans and the allied nations in support of World War I has been seen as representative of black attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy. But this represents at least a partial misreading of history.12 Indeed, the twentieth century witnessed frequent fierce black criticism of American foreign policy. Gerald Horne, for example, has argued that African Americans “have been among the vanguard of anti-imperialism and militant political activity.”13 Far from representing a break with the past, black leaders’ responses to Vietnam were part of a long tradition of critical engagement with U.S. foreign policy.
Between 1915 and 1920, for instance, the NAACP opposed American military involvement in Haiti—the world’s first black republic. Following a detailed investigation by the Association’s executive secretary, James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP demanded a withdrawal of American troops, and suggested that American policy toward Haiti was racist.14 In the 1920s, Garveyism linked black American progress with a strong and independent Africa, and Garvey himself urged African Americans to fight for Africa, not America.15
The 1930s and 1940s saw much criticism of colonialism by black organizations and leaders. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 generated particular condemnation. On August 3, 1935 approximately 25,000 blacks attended a rally in Harlem organized by the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, a popular front group. The rally’s sponsors included A. Philip Randolph, Lester Granger of the Urban League, and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins.16 Many blacks were also active in popular front activities in support of the Republicans in Spain. In Harlem, the American League Against War and Fascism organized a number of peace marches and conferences in the spring of 1937. Once again Roy Wilkins joined a host of other black activists in supporting popular front actions, believing that African Americans had much to gain by working in anti-fascist organizations that were sensitive to civil rights.17 By the mid-1940s, the NAACP’s opposition to colonialism was strong. Along with the National Negro Congress it had signed the “Declaration by Negro Voters,” calling for an end to imperialism and colonial exploitation.18 In March 1946, NAACP executive secretary Walter White warned that blacks were “determined once and for all to end white exploitation and imperialism.”19 Moreover, throughout the 1940s and early 1950s the pages of the Association’s magazine, The Crisis, often contained articles attacking Western colonialism and empathizing with liberation struggles throughout the Third World.20
Although black America exuded patriotism during the Second World War, attempts were made to use war abroad to gain racial progress at home—the so-called “Double-V” campaign.21 While the NAACP supported the war against Nazism it, along with A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement also pushed for reforms such as fair employment practices and the desegregation of the military.22 This tactic of placing demands for civil rights within a wider framework of patriotism and national service—a tactic that had been used by blacks since the founding of the nation—would remain an important model for the civil rights movement, particularly during the early Cold War.
Though the Cold War was originally seen as a total disaster for the civil rights movement, in recent years a rich scholarship has emerged that reconsiders its impact on black America. Historians such as Thomas Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, Azza Salama Layton, and Penny Von Eschen have shown how the Cold War offered new opportunities to civil rights activists as well as presenting them with new problems.23 It is clear that McCarthyism generated powerful pressures on black organizations to embrace anticommunism or perish. The NAACP therefore quickly softened its stand on anticolonialism and became a firm supporter of anticommunist measures, domestic and foreign. Those civil rights organizations and activists that did not take such steps, such as the Civil Rights Congress, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson were either destroyed or incapacitated as a result.24
Nevertheless, at a time when America was championing the cause of world freedom and attempting to win the hearts and minds of recently decolonized third world peoples, the Cold War offered black leaders new opportunities to press for racial progress at home. Civil rights leaders were well aware that domestic racism was an international embarrassment that threatened to undermine America’s Cold War mission, and they attempted to use this situation to their advantage by pressing for change at home in order to better fight Communism abroad. America’s leaders responded by granting some important concessions.25
Some black leaders, however, went beyond this to make broad criticisms of what they viewed as American imperialism. Malcolm X, for example, repeatedly urged African Americans to internationalize the struggle by taking their grievances to the United Nations. It is not surprising, then, that Malcolm was a fierce critic of the war in Vietnam. He believed that the war and domestic racism were related, and he linked the oppression of African Americans with the use of military force against people of color in Asia. Malcolm declared that “this society is controlled primarily by racists and segregationists … who are in Washington, D.C., in positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in … Vietnam.”26
Malcolm’s views on the war echoed those of Paul Robeson, who in 1954 had condemned American policy toward Vietnam as racist. For Robeson, whose support for the Communist 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