Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to oppose the war in Vietnam, which was later published in the Student Voice. Zimmerman, a native of the Bronx who had first been inspired to activism by the Cuban Missile Crisis, had spent the summer of 1964 working in SNCC’s Atlanta office. He arrived in Arkansas in August 1965 and served as communications officer for the project. In addition, Zimmerman was also involved in organizing around school board elections in the delta.³⁴

      Some thirty-five years later, Zimmerman disagreed with his warning against taking an antiwar position. It was, he said, “cowardly,” “timid,” and “wrong.”³⁵ Zimmerman’s caution in the autumn of 1965, however, was not borne of personal doubts about the immorality of the war. As early as December 1965, activists in the Arkansas project, including Zimmerman, were attacking America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. William Hansen, a white field secretary from Cincinnati who had been active in SNCC since 1961, and who had arrived in Arkansas in the fall of 1962, wrote to the Arkansas Gazette condemning American foreign policy. In a letter that was published on December 1, Hansen denounced America’s policies in Rhodesia, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. The civil rights leader charged that U.S. foreign policy was predicated on race and that America defined its “sphere of influence” on the basis of skin color.³⁶ A few days later Zimmerman attacked the Vietnam War and linked the conflict to the black freedom struggle. He complained that those who had the power to change things in the South were concentrating their efforts elsewhere—“like protecting the ‘freedom’ of the Vietnamese peasants to have their villages destroyed by napalm. No price is too high for us to inflict it upon the Vietnamese to prevent them from rejecting the American Way of Life—nor is any opportunity sufficiently costless for us to protect the rights of Negro Americans.”³⁷

      Following the controversy generated by SNCC’s antiwar statement, Hansen offered an explanation to the Arkansas Democrat. He asserted that the antiwar pronouncement was “general” and “not intended to dictate a position for all [SNCC] members.” But he went on to say that African Americans were beginning to realize the effect of the war on them, which led to questions and protests. The newspaper article noted that three Arkansas SNCC members had registered as conscientious objectors.³⁸

      One of the COs was Vincent O’Connor, a devout Catholic and committed pacifist from San Francisco. Although he initially registered with the Selective Service as a CO, O’Connor later withdrew from cooperation with the system.³⁹ After leaving SNCC in the summer of 1966, he became active in local efforts to mobilize Vietnam dissent and worked with Arkansans for Peace in Vietnam.⁴⁰ In January 1966, though, O’Connor was opposed to SNCC using its limited resources to aid the peace movement—especially a peace movement that could be too easily tarred with the twin evils of leftist sectarianism and counterculturalism.

      On January 12, 1966, the Pine Bluff Commercial carried a story about a planned antiwar demonstration, to be held in Pine Bluff on February 12. The action had been called by the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCC) during a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The date, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, was chosen to “symbolize the freedom movement.” Jon Jacobs, director of the Southern Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SCC) explained that Pine Bluff had been chosen because of the SNCC presence there—“SNCC’s activities lead us to believe that the people of Pine Bluff are open to such a movement.”⁴¹ O’Connor fired off a response to Jacobs in which he stated that while he might participate in an antiwar demonstration he would not engage in organizing activity around the war—“I am not in Pine Bluff to organize peace demonstrations.”

      O’Connor explained that as a pacifist he was opposed to all wars, and that he did not care for “leftist revolutionary factions” (at a press conference Jacobs had worn a Du Bois Club badge). He also pointed out that, in the South, association with countercultural forms of expression would serve only to hinder the forces of progress. O’Connor explained that “many people who’ve come South to work for freedom have shaved off beards & done other things to make it less easy for people to reject them—not what they say—as “Beat” or “Red” or whatever.” He expressed hope that “in future those who work for peace … would refrain, knowing the mind of the South, from wearing buttons that might tend to turn people off.” O’Connor suggested Little Rock as a more appropriate location for an antiwar demonstration and implied that there would be little support in Pine Bluff for peace activity. O’Connor again emphasized that SNCC’s purpose was not to organize peace demonstrations, which, he said, would be a full-time task.⁴²

      Despite such objections, there were a small number of antiwar activities in Arkansas СКАЧАТЬ