Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
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dichotomy. Both “hardliners” and “floaters” opposed the war, most came to support SNCC’s adoption of an official antiwar stance, and, ultimately, very few black SNCC field secretaries involved themselves in efforts to build an interracial antiwar movement.
The racist murder of a black SNCC worker, Sammy Younge, Jr., in Alabama, provided the catalyst for the release of a militantly antiwar statement by the organization.15 Younge, a U.S. navy veteran enrolled at Tuskegee Institute, was shot to death by Marvin Segrest, a white gas station employee, on January 3, after he tried to use a restroom that was for “whites only.” Cleveland Sellers recalled that “the absolute absurdity of a man having to die for attempting to [use] a toilet filled us with rage,” and the contradiction between “the freedom that Americans were killing and dying for in Vietnam and the race hatred that motivated Sammy’s murder” was evident to all.16 For SNCC communications director Julian Bond, Younge’s death provided him with an epiphany on Vietnam. He recalled that it “crystallized everything. Everything became so stark.” The fact that Younge was a veteran made his murder even more powerful.17
On Thursday January 6, 1966, the day after Younge’s funeral, SNCC issued its antiwar statement.18 The organization asserted its “right and responsibility” to dissent with American foreign policy when it saw fit; accused the U.S. government of being “deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people”; and it drew a parallel between America’s democratic claims in Southeast Asia and its alleged inaction and indifference to murder and law-breaking in the South. SNCC also questioned America’s leadership in the Cold War struggle against communism. The group suggested that the “cry of ‘preserve freedom in the world’” was “a hypocritical mask behind which [America] squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United States cold war policies.” SNCC noted the disproportionate drafting of African Americans, expressed solidarity with draft-resisters in America, asked “where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?” and called on those who preferred to “use their energy to build democratic forms in this country” to work with civil rights and human rights organizations as a “valid alternative” to the draft.19 Indeed, concern over the inequities of the Selective Service System played an important role in SNCC’s opposition to the war. The disproportionate drafting of black Americans was an understandable cause of concern for the organization, and a good deal of the discussion at the November 1965 staff meeting had been centered around this.20
SNCC’s antiwar pronouncement came during a period of great turmoil for the organization, which was increasingly turning away from its nonviolent, interracial roots and embracing black separatism and armed self-defense. Evidence of increasing radicalization was not hard to find. In the summer of 1965, for example, SNCC workers founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, designed to win political power for local blacks. The all-black party took a black panther as its symbol. The year 1966 saw SNCC’s Atlanta Project, located in the Vine City neighborhood, take an anti-white, racially separatist line. In May 1966 John Lewis would be replaced as SNCC chairman by the twenty-four-year-old Stokely Carmichael—and by the end of the year the remaining white members of the organization would be expelled. Julius Lester, who joined SNCC after Carmichael’s election, wrote that the “angry children of Malcolm X” were replacing the idealistic activists of the early 1960s.21
As well as earning SNCC the wrath of the establishment, the ire of liberals, and the condemnation of former allies in the civil rights struggle, the war also had serious repercussions for Julian Bond, who had recently won election to the Georgia state legislature.22 He was preparing to take his seat, representing the 136th district in Atlanta, when the antiwar statement was released—a statement that he endorsed. Amid accusations of “treason,” Bond was denied his seat on January 10; his struggle to regain it occupied much of the next twelve months and was finally resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in December.23 Bond recalled that James Forman told him he was naïve, but “who would think that you would win the election, and then have the election declared null and void … I couldn’t believe that when it happened…. of course I woke up fast, quickly. But … I had no idea that would happen.”24
Support for Bond’s right to be seated came from a wide variety of sources. John Lindsay, Republican mayor of New York, said that he wished that he still practiced law so that he could represent him.25 Martin Luther King led a march in support of Bond and declared that “our nation is approaching a dangerous totalitarian periphery when dissent becomes synonymous with disloyalty.”26 The would-be legislator also received overwhelming backing from his Atlanta constituents—“there was almost unanimity in support of my right to be seated, and my right to have this opinion.” But while local African Americans backed Bond’s bid to claim his seat, there was less support for SNCC’s attack on the Vietnam War. Bond recalled that “lots of people were against the antiwar statement but didn’t say.” Many constituents were “fairly conservative, and had a conservative world view, and this is a fight against communism, and the communists are bad, we have to fight them, they’re exploiting these people, and so on. So there wasn’t an embrace, by any means, of the statement. But there wasn’t real hostility to it or pulling back from it.”27 This reflected the findings of a Harris poll commissioned by Newsweek, which showed that only 18 percent of African Americans favored a unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam; 37 percent apparently supported LBJ’s policies in Southeast Asia, with the same number unsure. While this survey indicated that a relatively large segment of black America was either opposed to, or hesitant about, Vietnam, it also revealed that the type of radical antiwar stance adopted by SNCC at the beginning of 1966 did not yet command widespread support among ordinary blacks.28
An editorial in the Movement claimed that the denial of Bond’s seat validated SNCC’s criticisms of America. The organization’s antiwar statement had declared that “We know for the most part, elections in this country … are not free.” As the Movement noted, “this month, in a revealing display of attitudes in the “New South,” the Georgia legislature proved this point.”29 The editorial placed Bond’s exclusion within a wider indictment of the Johnson administration. It argued that the government’s failure to protect black lives in the South, James Coleman’s nomination to the federal bench, and the “pitiful number” of federal registrars dispatched to the South “all fly in the face of the government’s pious pleas that the movement work through ‘acceptable’ channels.”
The episode propelled Bond into both the national limelight and the peace movement. According to John Lewis, Bond became seduced by the “flush of celebrity. He was a star, and he liked it.”30 At times, however, Bond seemed a little resentful that Georgia reactionaries had pushed him into the leadership of the antiwar struggle. In February 1967 he told one journalist that he had “begun to receive honors based on my ability to represent at once youth, peace and civil rights, and wanted only to represent the 136th District of Georgia.”31 He later recalled, “it seemed to me that … being elected to the legislature was a real accomplishment of which I was quite proud. Being involved in the antiwar movement in this way, was something other people had done to me.” While he was proud of his role in the peace movement and “believed in it strongly,” his election was “the thing I was most proud of, and most wanted to do.”32
The Bond incident was one example of how the Vietnam War could affect the civil rights movement at the local level. Another came from Arkansas, where from late 1965 through 1966 the war intruded into the SNCC-related civil rights project there. SNCC’s Arkansas Project was established in the autumn of 1962, after a formal request from the Arkansas Council on Human Relations. The project’s headquarters was in Little Rock, but other movement centers included Gould, Pine Bluff, and Helena. The Arkansas movement helped desegregate lunch counters, hotels and theaters by early 1963, and in the summer of 1965, a “Summer Project” was initiated in order to register voters.33 Beginning in the autumn of 1965, the Vietnam War began to emerge as an issue within Arkansas SNCC.
In September 1965, Mitchell Zimmerman, a SNCC worker with the Arkansas Project, had penned a rebuff to Howard Zinn’s call for the organization