Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
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. While many historians view Johnson as a courageous president who did much to advance the cause of black rights, movement activists had less reason to feel grateful to him. This was because they had “suffered years of jailings and beatings, and visited morgues to identify the bodies of victims, all the time waiting for the federal government to act” to protect them from racist violence.11 SNCC’s disillusionment with the federal government could be seen in a sign that was often hung on the walls of its Freedom Houses, which stated:
There’s a street in Itta Bena called FREEDOM
There’s a town in Mississippi called LIBERTY
There’s a department in Washington called JUSTICE12
With less residual loyalty toward the Johnson administration, it would be easier for these civil rights activists to oppose its policies in Vietnam.
Black Mississippians and seasoned civil rights workers had long understood the violence that underpinned race relations and institutionalized white supremacy in the Magnolia State, and they also expected the federal government’s stubborn response. However, for the hundreds of white volunteers who traveled to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 the lesson was both new and sobering. One volunteer, Michael Kenney, wrote that Mississippi was the only state where “you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting…. Negroes disappear down here every week and are never heard about.” Kenney explained that “things are really much better for the rabbits here. There is a closed season on rabbits when they may not be killed. Negroes are killed all year round. So are rabbits. The difference is that arrests are made for killing rabbits out of season…. Jesus Christ, this is supposed to be