Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
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1965 would become $10 billion the following year and, despite impressive Pentagon statistics, it soon became clear to the American people that the war would not be over quickly. Indeed, by the spring of 1966 the phrase “credibility gap” was widely used to describe LBJ’s tendency to mislead the public, and the president’s approval rating was falling.2 The pollster Louis Harris reported that “a sense of ‘travail without end’” was “straining both the patience and normal optimism of the American people.”3 Dissent from within South Vietnam itself by Buddhists, students, and even factions within the South Vietnamese military compounded the situation, and increasing numbers of Americans wondered whether their presence in South Vietnam was even wanted. As the military effort in Vietnam bogged down, domestic disquiet over the war increased.
Toward the end of 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began to consider adopting an official position on the Vietnam War. The organization had already begun to develop links with the nascent peace movement. During the April 1965 antiwar demonstration in Washington, for example, it had shared its office with Students for a Democratic Society. SNCC chairman John Lewis had signed the Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam, in which signatories affirmed their noncooperation with the war effort and offered support to draft resisters. And during August, Bob Moses had helped organize the AUP. As Clayborne Carson has asserted, the overwhelming majority of SNCC activists “opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam as soon as they became aware of it.” There was a reservoir of pacifist sentiment within the organization, which helped shape its response to Vietnam; while for others opposition to the war was rooted in a general distrust of the federal government, or in a sense of solidarity with the worldwide struggle against white imperialism.4 Despite this antiwar feeling, the organization had not taken a formal position against the war. James Forman recalled that most SNCC members had considered Vietnam “not irrelevant, but simply remote. Its importance to black people had not come home to us.”5
Some within the group began to push for an official antiwar pronouncement during the summer of 1965. The August 30, 1965, issue of SNCC’s newspaper, the Student Voice, ran an article by the radical white historian and civil rights activist Howard Zinn, along with Miss Ella Baker, one of SNCC’s “adult advisors.” After asking, “should civil rights workers take a stand on Vietnam?” Zinn gave three reasons why civil rights groups and SNCC in particular should oppose the war. First, the black movement had a duty to offer support to its allies. Zinn pointed out that if peace groups were asked to support civil rights initiatives and “said they supported them, but could not come out publicly because it would harm their peace work, movement people would be rightly indignant.”6 Second, he explained that opposing the war would not mean giving up on civil rights to focus on peace—SNCC could simply offer a feasible level of support to the antiwar movement. Third, Zinn placed opposition to the war in the context of civil rights activists’ experiences. He explained that “movement people’ were in an ideal position to understand America’s actions in Vietnam—“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.”7
Bob Moses also argued in favor of adopting an official antiwar position and, like Zinn, he believed that the experiences of civil rights activists made them more likely to be skeptical of the noble claims that America was making about Vietnam. Moses declared that there was a “sickness in America” regarding the way that it viewed the world, and that it was “possible that those who have been part of the agonies of the South in recent years” were better able to understand this than others. The SNCC leader went beyond this, though, to place opposition to the war within a broader conceptual framework of participatory democracy. Moses attacked those who argued that civil rights groups had no business commenting on foreign policy issues. He explained that one of the fundamental rights that the civil rights movement had been fighting for was the “right to participate fully in the discussions of the great issues that face the country.” This included foreign policy which, as Moses noted, was generally left in the hands of the president. But the civil rights movement, or at least the portion that Moses represented and inspired, believed that “people should be involved in all the major decisions that affect them.”
Moses also thought that Vietnam cut to the nature of the movement itself. The SNCC veteran did not believe that it was possible for the civil rights movement to simply “join” the peace movement. Instead, the “question we must ask ourselves is what kind of a movement are we going to be … are we going to address ourselves to the broader problems of society? Can we build a wider base for a movement in this country; and actually can the freedom movement as it has existed survive and achieve its goals unless it does this?”8
Not all SNCC members agreed that it made sense to attack the Vietnam War. Mitchell Zimmerman, a white activist with SNCC’s Arkansas project, wrote to the Student Voice criticizing Zinn’s call for an antiwar stance. Zimmerman acknowledged that there was a “certain level of agreement within SNCC” about the war, but that this did not “settle the question as to whether SNCC as an organization should take a stand.” He argued that civil rights work was more acceptable to the wider American public than peace work, and that while peace groups would gain from associating with the black movement, civil rights groups would suffer. Indeed, Zimmerman asserted that SNCC ran the risk of being “seriously injured by being identified with dissent on Vietnam.” Opposing the war would, he argued, hand the movement’s enemies an effective means of red-baiting them, compromise the organization’s fundraising capability, and curtail any further cooperation with the federal government. Moreover, Zimmerman felt that the peace movement was doomed to fail, and that “left wing dissent on Vietnam will have no significant impact on either our foreign policy, or on public opinion.” The young activist concluded that “while we care a great deal about both Vietnam and civil rights, we can’t do anything to help the Vietnam situation, and we can hurt ourselves by trying.”9
SNCC finally debated Vietnam at a staff meeting held at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta at the end of November. The discussion, which took place on the evening of November 29, was generally supportive of taking an antiwar position. Marion Barry—a former graduate student at Fisk who had played a leading role in the Nashville student movement—and his allies, who feared that opposing the war would damage the organization, were in the minority.10 Gwendolyn Patton, for example, urged that SNCC “talk to the people about how rotten the country is that we live in. The MONSTER we live in.” James Forman recognized the importance of the draft to an organization in which 80 percent of the staff were eligible, but also cautioned against shifting their focus. Forman explained that the peace movement did not have grassroots work going on, that SNCC could “relate things to people where we work,” and urged that any action on Vietnam be made relevant to current work with black people.11 Cleveland Sellers recalled Courtland Cox’s role in persuading SNCC to adopt an antiwar policy. According to Sellers, Cox took the floor and “waxed eloquently” on the parallels between Vietnam and black America—“Mississippi and Vietnam; they are very much alike. Think about Vietnam’s Ky and Senator James O. Eastland…. Think about the problems of Mississippi’s poor, disenfranchised blacks and the problems of Vietnam’s poor, disenfranchised peasants … consider the similarities between Vietnam’s National Liberation Front and SNCC. They ought to be very much alike!’”12 The discussion, which apparently involved much “debate and hassle,” concluded with a decision to authorize the Executive Committee to draft an antiwar statement that would subsequently be released to the press.13
It is tempting to try to link the position on the war to the developing factionalism within SNCC. Clayborne Carson has argued that during 1965 the organization was torn by a dispute between “floaters” such as Bob Moses, who opposed centralizing and bureaucratizing trends within the group, and “hardliners” like Cleveland Sellers and James Forman, who favored greater discipline to make the organization more effective.14 There are indications that the “Freedom High” or “floater” faction within SNCC was keener than “hardliners” on antiwar activism. Bob Moses, for example, had been the black staff member most active in antiwar activities, while at the November staff meeting Marion Barry spoke out against opposing the war on the grounds