Antiwar Protests Among Black Communities

Although Vietnam was not the first American war to be protested, demonstrations against America’s involvement in Vietnam were larger, more sustained, and, hence, more influential-not only on public opinion but also on the government’s reaction-than protests against the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War I. Unlike the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s lacked centralization and the definitive leadership that Martin Luther King, Jr., provided to that movement. The protests took many forms, such as full-page newspaper advertisements, petitions, letters to the three presidents (John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon) who served during the war as well as to other elected officials, vigils, income tax withholding, draft refusal and evasion, desertion from duty in the armed forces, self-immolation, acts of nonviolent disobedience, destruction of draft board records, property destruction, campus strikes, and organized peace marches.

The people who were involved in the antiwar protests were a diverse group, although the media tended to focus more on college students and hippies, which gave the public the impression that a young, unruly segment of American society primarily interested in rejecting authority led the movement. In reality, the protests were sustained by a coalition of various organizations, including religious groups. Some of these organizations were aligned with the civil rights movement; others were not. Historians note that lifelong pacifist A.J. Muste, who was seventy-seven years old in 1963, was instrumental in the creation of the antiwar movement. Antiwar protestors, although primarily Caucasian, differed in age, occupation, region of the country, and socioeconomic status. The activists had a common bond: They opposed the war on moral and constitutional grounds. Vietnam veterans participated, as did grandmothers and celebrities such as Dr. Benjamin Spock, a renowned pediatrician credited as having a major influence on the childrearing practices for the very generation called to serve in this unpopular war. Housewives, blue-collar workers, educators, and priests such as Philip and Daniel Berrigan (also known as the Berrigan Brothers) participated, to name a few, but students did play a major role not only in marches, but also by participating in teach-ins and moratoriums.

Student consciousness, raised by racial segregation in the South, sent many students to the South in the summer of 1961 on Freedom Rides, where they worked closely with civil rights organizations, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to end segregation and promote voter registration. This student involvement in the civil rights movement acted as a catalyst for student involvement in other pressing social issues of the day, primarily poverty, disarmament, and the Vietnam conflict. In 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued the Port Huron Statement, which was a call to political action. Robert ”Al” Haber and Thomas Hayden, based at the University of Michigan, were the primary authors of this document. The SDS organized numerous protests against the war. One of the most violent protests occurred in April 1968, during one of the bloodiest years of the war, when Mark Rudd, leader of Columbia University’s SDS chapter, aided by hundreds of students, occupied five campus buildings and held a dean hostage. Approximately 700 were arrested, 148 injured, and 120 charges of police brutality were filed.