Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
the Federal Government.” Described by one journalist as “something akin to the NKVD among the cotton patches,” it wiretapped phones, infiltrated civil rights organizations, and influenced local press coverage.28 Running for governor again in 1964, Coleman’s platform had included continued support for segregation.29 To make matters worse, at the time of his nomination Coleman was acting as an attorney for four of the five Mississippi representatives whose seating was being challenged in Congress by SNCC and the MFDP on the basis that blacks had been “systematically and deliberately excluded from the electoral process.”30 Coleman’s nomination was, unsurprisingly, condemned by civil rights groups. The MFDP’s Victoria Gray stated that “it is with unbelieving and indescribable shock and fear that we learned … of the tragic nomination.” She pointed out that Coleman had “spent almost all of his adult life advising and planning in one way or another how to continue the suppression and dehumanization of the Negro people in Mississippi.”31
The NAACP leadership had initially asked Johnson simply to reconsider the nomination, but grass-roots pressure at the 1965 annual convention forced a stronger line—the Association’s leaders were instructed to put pressure on senators to oppose the nomination.32 There can be little doubt that the nomination of Coleman damaged Johnson’s claims to be a friend of the civil rights movement, especially in the eyes of activists working at the local level. Referring to the president’s March 15 speech advocating voting rights legislation, an editorial in The Movement questioned the national government’s commitment to black America when it asked LBJ, “when you said, We Shall Overcome—who did you mean by ‘we’?”33
Civil rights workers understood that passage of civil rights legislation, while welcome, would mean nothing without vigorous enforcement backed by the federal government. For many SNCC and MFDP activists, the Johnson administration failed to do this adequately. Writing in the summer of 1965, SNCC’s Jack Minnis was critical of the “shoddy” enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with respect to the desegregation of schools and hospitals. He was also pessimistic about the impact of the proposed voting rights legislation—“the law won’t be worth a damn if Lyndon won’t enforce it—and we have no reason to think he will.”34 The Voting Rights Act, which became law in August 1965, did result in hundreds of thousands of blacks being registered to vote, but widespread violations of the law occurred. Howard Zinn declared that, “while the nation congratulates itself over the voting bill, intimidation and violence continue in the rural counties of the Deep South, mostly unreported in the newspapers, and lost in the glow of legislative accomplishment.”35
The government was reluctant to use its new powers to send federal voting registrars to the South, preferring this only as a last resort while relying on “voluntary compliance.” Initially, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent officials to just eight Mississippi counties, for example.36 In May 1966, only 40 of 600 Southern counties had federal officials observing voter registration.37 In Mississippi, as late as March 1966, 30 counties where black registration was below 25 percent had yet to be visited by federal registrars. One of these, Sunflower County, was the home of influential Democratic senator James Eastland.38 After Katzenbach stated that new laws might be needed to prevent the problem of all-white juries finding racists innocent of crimes against blacks, Jack Minnis pointed out that laws already existed that prevented keeping blacks off juries because of their color. The problem was that such laws were not enforced. Why not enforce them? he asked—“but no. That’s not how the Great Society works. It doesn’t enforce civil rights laws. It passes them. And passes them. And passes them.”39 Even Roy Wilkins conceded that “it is a justifiable criticism to state that civil rights legislation has been enforced spottily,” although he made sure to exempt President Johnson from his comments.40
The “on the ground” experience of civil rights activists shaped their attitudes toward the federal government, the Democratic Party, and America itself. The government’s failure to protect civil rights workers from white violence; the refusal to seat the MFDP at Atlantic City; and problems involving the enforcement of civil rights laws all contributed to a loss of faith in the “American System” among the radical wing of the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1966, veteran leftist and civil rights activist Anne Braden explained how SNCC’s turn toward “Black Power” was not a sudden change in direction but part of a long-term trend and a product of its experiences. SNCC’s disillusionment with the government, Braden asserted, had started when “civil rights workers’ calls for help brought much talk but little action; when FBI agents kept taking endless notes but people kept getting shot and beaten and killed; when new laws were passed but scantily enforced and nothing really changed in the South.”41 Many activists, who had started out as reformers with a faith in the underlying goodness of the United States, became revolutionaries demanding fundamental structural changes to America’s socioeconomic and political system. As SNCC’s Mike Thelwell explained, “there was a naïve notion in the beginning that as long as we open [racism] up and expose it to the light of day the high-flown principles of American democracy and constitutional promises will come into play and the system will correct itself. It would never happen.” Indeed, “it turned out the system was absolutely complicit in the oppression that was going on, the exploitation. And they weren’t doing anything to keep the promises they had made to the movement … [and] the government itself and the system was proving itself to be bankrupt and corrupt. And that’s very disillusioning.”42
George Vlasits, a community organizer in North Carolina, articulated the psychological, emotional, and intellectual journey that many activists made during the 1960s. In September 1968, prior to being sentenced to five years imprisonment for refusing induction into the armed services, Vlasits explained that, after “discovering” poverty, racism, and injustice in late 1950s America, his reaction had been to “work to reform this society. After all, the basic institutions are good—justice, freedom, equality—they are not just empty sounding words—they are what America really stands for.” However, Vlasits’s experience as an activist had taught him that he had been naïve—“racism is not a problem of a few individuals like Bull Connor and George Wallace. It is a basic institution of American society.” Vlasits concluded his courtroom remarks by declaring that “the man makes the rules and he don’t make them for us—he don’t make them for poor folk, he don’t make them for dissenters, he don’t make them for blacks—he makes them for the man.”43 Carl Davidson, a Freedom Summer volunteer and student leader, put it more succinctly—“I learned it from the Ku Klux Klan and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, that you needed revolution, and that there wasn’t any other way.”44
The radicalizing experience of civil rights work at the grass-roots level would help shape responses to the Vietnam War within organizations such as SNCC, CORE and the MFDP. Writing in the Student Voice in August 1965, Howard Zinn—one of SNCC’s “adult advisors”—encouraged the organization to oppose the war in Vietnam. Movement people, he said, were in the best position to understand America’s immoral actions in Southeast Asia, not from any expert knowledge of foreign policy, but because they knew so much about America. Zinn explained that “they understand just how much hypocrisy is wrapped up in our claim to stand for ‘the free world.’ … Events in Vietnam become easier to understand in the light of recent experience in the South.”45 In late 1965, Zinn eloquently argued that opposition to the Vietnam War among black civil rights activists in the American South did not result from a simple application of leftist ideology. Rather, it came “from the cotton fields, the country roads, the jails of the Deep South, where these young people have spent much of their time.” In other words, antiwar sentiment flowed, at least in part, from the organizing experience itself. As Bob Moses put it, “our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America.”46 When SNCC publicly opposed the war in January 1966, it placed its policy within the context of its own experience of America during the previous five years—“our work, particularly in the South, taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens.”47
Although the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam began in May 1959, the war did not emerge as an important national issue