Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall
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civil rights struggle.”63 Many of the antiwar student radicals were veterans of the black freedom struggle, and a significant proportion of the peace marchers, perhaps 10 percent, were African American. This seemed to represent the beginning of a new working alliance between the peace and freedom movements. As one reporter commented, “the most important new liaison was that between the young, vibrant freedom workers of the South and the peace-oriented students of the North.”64
The growing opposition to the war within the civil rights movement seemed to suggest that the black movement might provide an important source of strength to the peace forces. Indeed, when Martin Luther King, his Christian conscience troubled by events in Vietnam, began to express hostility to the war, it seemed that the antiwar movement might have found a potential leader with huge crossover appeal. King first voiced opposition to the war on March 2, 1965. Speaking to an audience at Howard University, he called for a negotiated settlement and declared that the war was “accomplishing nothing.”65 However, the road from civil rights to antiwar activism would not be an easy one for black leaders to tread.
CORE’s national director James Farmer had endorsed the April march and had also linked the struggles for peace and freedom. On CBS’s Face the Nation, on April 25, he had stated “I think as American citizens, persons who participate in the civil rights movement have not only a right, but a duty to be interested in all activities of our government—domestic policies outside of the civil rights area and foreign policy.”66 In early June, Farmer had been one of many sponsors of an “Emergency Rally on Vietnam,” held at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The rally, called by SANE and supported by SDS, had significant black support. SNCC and the Northeastern Regional Office of CORE gave their endorsement, black entertainer Ossie Davis was a co-chairman of the rally, and Martin Luther King’s wife Coretta gave a speech. Bayard Rustin, a featured speaker, talked about the “common ground” shared by the peace and freedom movements.67
At a news conference in Durham, North Carolina, on the eve of CORE’s 1965 national convention, a reporter asked Farmer whether the civil rights and peace movements were synonymous. He explained that the civil rights movement was an autonomous movement, but that it was proper for civil rights people “as concerned citizens” to be interested in such issues as peace.68 As well as the involvement of civil rights leaders and organizations in anti-Vietnam activities, there was also growing opposition to the war within CORE itself. On April 10 the organization’s principal policy-making body, the National Action Council, decided to endorse “efforts across the country to gain peace in Vietnam and wage war on discrimination.”69 However, events at its 23rd annual convention would reveal that the organization was deeply split over the nature of its relationship with the antiwar movement.
During June, the membership of Brooklyn CORE had passed an antiwar resolution which had subsequently been unanimously endorsed at the Eastern Region CORE conference in New York City. The resolution declared that “to fight for human freedom at home and seek to destroy it abroad is the height of immorality”; described the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam as “utterly incomprehensible”; and called for the withdrawal of American troops.70 Historians August Meier and Elliot Rudwick have argued that by the summer of 1965 CORE was split on a number of issues, one of which was Vietnam. One faction within the organization believed that, for tactical reasons, CORE should refrain from publicly opposing the Vietnam War. This put them in conflict with those who believed that the organization should move in a more radical direction.71
On July 5, meeting in closed session, the convention debated an antiwar resolution. Although a majority of the 1,000 delegates opposed the war, many were wary of committing the organization to such a controversial stand. After a lengthy and heated discussion, a resolution calling for an “immediate withdrawal of American troops” from Vietnam, and condemning the Johnson administration’s foreign policy as racist, was passed by just ten votes.72 Farmer had not been present during this debate, and he quickly attempted to reverse the decision. At first sight his actions seem surprising—Farmer had personally made many antiwar statements and had taken an active role in peace demonstrations. In addition, his annual report to the convention had stated that “it is impossible for the Government to mount a decisive war on poverty and bigotry in the United States while it is pouring billions down the drain in a war against people in Vietnam.”73 However, the national director urged the delegates to table the motion on Vietnam because it was not an issue on which CORE could get the unanimous support of the ghetto community, and opposing the war might also jeopardize public support for the civil rights movement.74 Farmer argued that although individuals should support the peace movement, CORE as an organization should not “get out of step” with the community.75
The resolution was duly withdrawn, over the furious objections of chapter heads Ollie Leeds and Lincoln Lynch, and for the time being the organization refrained from taking an antiwar position.76 Farmer subsequently explained that he believed that protesting Vietnam would “provide too easy a cop-out for some of our chapters who were trying to tackle complex Northern issues”; would confuse two issues which he felt should be separate; and would open up CORE to possible communist infiltration—which had been a problem in the past.77 Although the organization had pulled back from opposing the Vietnam War, many of its members would become increasingly active in the antiwar movement. Indeed, the organization would continue to travel in a radical direction—moving from nonviolence to self-defense, and from integration to Black Power.
The MFDP also found the Vietnam issue problematic. In July 1965 John D. Shaw joined the growing list of black American GIs who had been killed in Vietnam. Shaw, a twenty-three-year-old native of McComb, Mississippi, had been active in the local civil rights movement, having been involved in SNCC’s first direct action campaign in the state. McComb activists Clint Hopson and Joe Martin responded to Shaw’s death by writing and circulating a radical antiwar leaflet in the local community, which counseled draft resistance:
No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the white man’s freedom, until all the Negro people are free in Mississippi.
Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go.
We will gain respect and dignity as a race only by forcing the United States Government and the Mississippi government to come with guns, dogs and trucks to take our sons away to Wght and be killed protecting Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana.
No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other colored people in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the white American can get richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the colored people in the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause.78
The leaflet suggested hunger strikes as a possible protest tactic. The July 28 issue of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Newsletter reprinted this leaflet, without comment, just as it had done previously with letters that expressed opposition to the war. However, this action set off a storm of controversy that threatened to engulf the organization.
Opponents of the MFDP seized on the chance to undermine it by portraying its members as unpatriotic, communistic traitors. Writing in the Delta Democrat, liberal journalist Hodding Carter III argued that the leaflet was “close to treason,” while Claude Ramsey of the AFL-CIO compared the MFDP to the Ku Klux Klan.79 Rather than defending the right to free speech, many liberals joined in the assault on the Freedom Democrats. Black Representative Charles Diggs, for example, called the draft statement “ridiculous and completely irresponsible.”80 In his syndicated newspaper column, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins condemned the “smart-alecks” and “young squirts” who had played into the hands of Mississippi racists.81
The leadership of the MFDP sought desperately to deflect the criticisms that were being leveled against them. On July 31, Lawrence Guyot, chairman of the MFDP executive committee, and the Rev. Edwin King, white chaplain at Jackson’s Tougaloo College and a leading MFDP figure, made a statement. They explained how television and newspaper reports had been claiming that the party had been circulating material urging blacks to resist the draft or, if they were already in