Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ the unity of the peace movement, and there was also a belief that SANE was moving in a radical direction—it was, for example, being less exclusionary than normal. Indeed, during the mid-1960s SANE, which had been founded by radical pacifists and peace liberals in 1957, was wracked by internal divisions between radicals and moderates who disagreed over policy and tactics. As well as seeing the chance to “connect” with the radical segments of SANE’s middle-class constituency, the NCC also saw an opportunity to link the peace and freedom movements. It was rumored that SANE was trying to persuade Martin Luther King to speak at the antiwar rally, and the radicals noted that

      Negroes from the South are being mobilized for a demonstration in Washington. If we hope to involve civil rights as a component in a broad struggle for human rights, we can do it only if we have a conference in Washington after a rally at which King speaks of peace. There may never again be such an opportunity … to hear the Southern part of the dialogue.¹⁰⁵

      However, it is worth noting that, although a number of African Americans attended the NCC convention, only about 5 percent of those participating in the SANE march were black, and, contrary to the King rumor, no important civil rights leader spoke.¹⁰⁶

      Indeed, the late summer of 1965 had seen a blow to efforts to unite the civil rights and peace movements, as Martin Luther King retreated from his initial opposition to the war in Vietnam. He had first spoken out in March, before making an important speech at an SCLC rally in Petersburg, Virginia, on July 2. Before a cheering crowd of 2,000 at a local football stadium, King declared that “the United States should spare no effort in pursuing” a negotiated settlement to the conflict, even if that meant talking to the Viet Cong. Moreover, King suggested that Americans should hold peace rallies, “just like we have freedom rallies.”¹⁰⁷ However, several members of the SCLC board were uneasy over King’s Vietnam comments. While his right to express dissent was confirmed, the board also made it clear that the SCLC did not have enough resources to work for peace as well as civil rights. This did not prevent King from announcing, in early August, a plan to write letters to LBJ and the leaders of the USSR, China, North and South Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front (NLF), calling on them to begin negotiations. He also urged Johnson to consider a bombing pause and to indicate willingness to negotiate with the Viet Cong.

      King, though, quickly came under pressure to retreat from his antiwar stance. Johnson chided him for his antiwar comments, and at the beginning of September UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg met with King to bring him “on-side.” The next day, Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd, a close Johnson ally, publicly attacked King for his antiwar remarks and pointed out that it was illegal for private citizens to engage in independent foreign policy ventures. The message was clear—LBJ would brook no dissent over Vietnam. If King persisted with his antiwar activism he could expect a barrage of stinging criticism and frosty relations with the Johnson White House. King confessed to aides that he did not have the strength to take on the power structure over the war while fighting for civil rights. Furthermore, he was reluctant to break with the president at a time when the Voting Rights Act and war on poverty seemed to offer huge opportunities for black advancement. Consequently, the letter writing idea was quietly dropped and King refrained from public condemnation of the war for eighteen months.¹⁰⁸

      Despite its growing aversion to mass marches and its critique of SANE-style liberalism, SDS, like the NCC, decided on a policy of cooperation. As new SDS president Carl Oglesby explained, they could either have sat on the sidelines and seen the march fail or “go in there and try to make it work.”¹⁰⁹ After tense negotiations it was agreed that, in return for participating, SDS could issue its own call to the march and would be allowed to appoint a speaker.¹¹⁰ In contrast to SANE’s demands for a cease-fire and negotiations, and its strategy of staging a “responsible” single-issue protest that was designed to generate broad support, SDS called for a withdrawal of American troops and articulated an antiwar strategy based on a multi-issue perspective. SDS’s official “call” to support the November march stated that “the only way to stop this and future wars is to organize a domestic social movement which challenges the very legitimacy of our foreign policy.” Such a movement “must also fight to end racism, to end the paternalism of our welfare system, to guarantee decent incomes for all, and to supplant the authoritarian control of our universities with a community of scholars.”¹¹¹ Seeing an opportunity to proselytize to a largely liberal audience, Oglesby readily agreed to be the SDS spokesman.

      On a chilly overcast Saturday, November 27, 1965, around 30,000 people surrounded the White House before marching to the Washington Monument to hear protest songs and antiwar speeches.¹¹² With the sun setting, Carl Oglesby rose to make a searing indictment of America. The SDS president, a thirty-two-year-old father of three with working class roots, attacked corporate liberalism, with its imperialistic tendencies that he argued had caused the war in Vietnam. Oglesby, an intellectual and some-time playwright, also linked Vietnam and the black freedom struggle—“this country, with its thirty-some years of liberalism, can send 200,000 young men to Vietnam to kill and die in the most dubious of wars, but it cannot get 100 voter registrars to go into Mississippi.” He called on “humanist liberals” to support the broad, multi-issue movement for real democracy that SDS and its allies was trying to construct. The applause was deafening, and Oglesby received a standing ovation.¹¹³

      The NCC convention held November 25–28 was far from successful, particularly in its attempts to bring the peace and freedom movements closer together. The NCC had, from its inception in August, linked the civil rights and antiwar movements. At a September meeting of the steering committee, for instance, NCC leader Frank Emspak, a resident of Madison, Wisconsin who had been raised by left wing trade union parents in New York, “read a letter from Mississippi, stressing the consensus of people in McComb that Vietnam and civil rights were only two aspects of what they understand as human rights. Frank asked that this be the organizing focus of the meeting; although the South was not represented, he said, we ‘are not talking just to ourselves.’”¹¹⁴ A number of civil rights activists from groups like SNCC and MFDP attended the NCC convention, which brought together 1,500 participants from about 100 local and national antiwar organizations.¹¹⁵ Unfortunately for most of these “ordinary people,” the convention quickly descended into internecine factional warfare. On one side of the ideological divide were the Communist Party and Du Bois Clubs, who favored creating a broad multi-issue organization concerned with civil rights, poverty, and university reform as well as Vietnam. They were opposed by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance, who wanted a singleissue coalition based on the demand for immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam. It was a split that would become a depressing characteristic of the peace movement. One participant recalled that “factions, maneuvers, caucuses, deals, parliamentary procedure and parliamentary disruption flew about like bats in a dark cave,” and this “fighting about trivia” alienated the vast majority of delegates.¹¹⁶ Berkeley’s Marilyn Mulligan remembered how the experience was “demoralizing to the whole antiwar movement. Anybody who came to that convention who was just an ordinary person … and not a member of one of those political groups was totally demoralized … these people closeted themselves out of reach.”¹¹⁷

      The African American delegates were especially alienated by the proceedings. At a meeting of black southerners this resentment was expressed freely. Ray Robinson explained how black people had failed to relate to the white peace movement at the April and August actions as well as at the NCC convention—“people from Mississippi have traveled here 3 or 4 times. Each time they came here they’ve felt unrepresented. In April they just marched. In August they just sat on the grass. Today they watched all this shit. They came here with the idea of finding out how people can help each other. But that isn’t what these people seemed to want to talk about.”¹¹⁸ Another announced that “it’s fine for these people to come from Chicago and want to manipulate the power structure, to play politics,” but “where is people making sense to themselves and each other?” Clarence Senior addressed the problems that many of the civil rights workers had in communicating with the white “intellectuals”—“we need to find a way to get СКАЧАТЬ