Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
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Convention, the State Executive Committee, or any county MFDP Executive Board voted on such a position.” Furthermore, “a group of McComb citizens, many of whom are active in the FDP, circulated a petition as a result of [John D. Shaw’s] untimely death. This activity was reported as a news story in the MFDP Newsletter—a report on current activity within the state—not as an editorial or official policy of the MFDP.” As part of the story, they had reprinted the antiwar leaflet that had been distributed. After distancing themselves from the leaflet, Guyot and King went on to express a degree of sympathy with the sentiments behind it, when they linked hostility to the war with local experience:
It is very easy to understand why Negro citizens of McComb, themselves the victims of bombings, Klan-inspired terrorism, and harassment arrests, should resent the death of a citizen of McComb while fighting in Viet Nam for “freedom” not enjoyed by the Negro community of McComb. However, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party does not have such a position.
As the Negroes of Mississippi continue our struggle for the freedom to participate totally in the decisions which govern our lives, it is inevitable and desirable that a growing interest and awareness in local and national issues such as war and peace must follow. The MFDP encourages and welcomes discussion and debate of these issues among its members. We reaffirm the right of our members to take public positions and actions on any issue. As we understand democracy, this is what it means ….
[We] are proud to have been part of the movement in Mississippi which has liberated people to the point where they feel free to express their feelings on issues which affect them.82
Although Guyot later told the New York Times that he would serve in the armed forces if drafted, the damage to the party had already been done. The MFDP lost the support of moderates in Mississippi and the congressional challenge suffered.83 Indeed, Guyot voiced the suspicion that the fierce criticism leveled against the MFDP over the Vietnam leaflet was “quite possibly an attempt to project as unpatriotic and irresponsible the Freedom Democratic Party because of the political and moral ramifications of our challenge now before Congress.”84
Edwin King later recalled that the MFDP was grappling with the Vietnam issue during the summer of 1965, but that the “evil” attacks by people like Carter tried to force the organization into a position that it was reluctant to assume. He explained that “the FDP’s questioning of the war early on was turned … into a kind of absolutist position against the war, which we didn’t really take for another year.” While the party was “obviously … headed that way,” they “wouldn’t let us play the kind of nuances.” Even though the majority of MFDP executive committee members opposed the war, they did not want to come out against it because “it wasn’t that much of an issue to the local people. We would not go too far beyond the local people or take a stand and impose it on them. But we would support them as we could. Nobody liked that. They wanted to push us.”85 This desire to not get ahead of “the people” illustrates nicely a point made by Charles Payne, who has argued that community organizers had to “confront the complexities and contradictions of flesh-and-blood people,” who were “in many respects culturally conservative, deeply religious, patriotic Americans.”86
The MFDP leaders may have wished to distance themselves from the McComb anti-draft leaflet, but many in the party and the wider community were sympathetic to its radical message. Freedom School teacher Rainer Seeling claimed that his class had written statements on their feelings about the war—“they all say they don’t want anything to do with [it].” Clint Hopson, the black law student who had helped write the controversial pamphlet, told journalists that MFDP leaders had seen the McComb leaflet, and praised it, prior to its publication. Hopson described Guyot’s statement as an effort to keep the party “off the line.” Hopson declared that the opposition to the war “came from the people … this is how they feel, we just put their feelings into words after talking with them, singing with them and living with them.”87
Although it is hard to generalize about the extent to which black Mississippians agreed with the antiwar sentiments expressed in McComb in the summer of 1965, such support certainly existed. On July 28 Daniel J. Wacker, a civil rights volunteer working with the Delta Ministry, talked with a black Korean War veteran in a chicken shack—“news of the increased draft brought the comment: why should we fight in some other country when we are not free here.”88 An African American mother in Natchez told Dick Gillian of KZSU radio that “it’s not our war cuz we don’t have no right and we don’t have no freedom.”89 Stewart Meacham and Paul Lauter of the American Friends Service Committee spent a month in Mississippi and Louisiana talking about peace and the Vietnam War. They were convinced that antiwar sentiment was widespread—“everything we saw and heard led us to the inescapable conclusion that there is a strong, grassroots, anti-war sentiment building in the Negro community in the Deep South.”90 The national peace movement would hope to build both on this grassroots black opposition to the war, and the growing antiwar sentiment within national civil rights organizations.
In August 1965, the black freedom struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement briefly intersected in a formal way, through the Assembly of Unrepresented People. The AUP was conceived by Staughton Lynd—Yale historian, pacifist, and civil rights supporter (he had been heavily involved in the organization of the Freedom Schools)—who advocated convening a new Continental Congress to help launch a new form of politics in America, one that would be founded on participatory democracy.91 A central tenet of New Left political ideology, participatory democracy exerted great influence within both SDS and SNCC. At its core was the notion of a “democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those … decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”92
From its inception, the AUP was designed as a multi-issue organizing project that would attract support from the peace and civil rights movements, as well as from assorted radical, new left, anti-poverty, and reformist groups. The AUP’s official call stated that it intended to bring together opponents of the Cold War, civil rights activists, and those who were opposed to “inquisition by Congressional committees, inequities in labor legislation, the mishandling of anti-poverty and welfare funds, and the absence of democratic process on the local level.”93 In July several SNCC field secretaries, including Bob Moses and Courtland Cox, had argued that it was necessary for SNCC people to address themselves to the “broader implications” of their work in the South, “such as in relation to foreign policy.” They went on to explain that the idea for the AUP had come out of a number of “exploratory meetings” involving civil rights, peace, church, community groups, and interested individuals.
SNCC was hoping to build support for the MFDP congressional challenge, but recognized that “a large amount of activity” during the summer would be “concerned with protesting the war in Vietnam.” SNCC wanted to channel some of that energy into support for the Freedom Democrats, but acknowledged that peace activists would be more likely to support the challenge if they were convinced that it would “foster a growing concern among civil rights people about the question of peace.” The SNCC activists pointed out that “people active in various protest movements in the country have always talked from time to time about the need for communication between movements … sharing ideas … manpower, and generally strengthening each other,” and they viewed the summer as an “opportunity to begin the long-awaited dialogue between activists in various political struggles.”94
The link between the civil rights and antiwar movements was made explicit by the AUP—“in Mississippi and Washington the few make the decisions for the many. Mississippi Negroes are denied the vote; the voice of the thirty per cent of Americans now opposed to the undeclared war in Vietnam is not heeded and all Americans are denied access to facts concerning the true military and political situation.”95 This argument was echoed in the fall by Ray Robinson, Jr., an African American antiwar activist and former Golden Gloves boxer. Robinson declared that “the same people who won’t let the people of Vietnam decide what’s best for them are the same people that won’t let the Negroes of the South decide who should represent