This document summarizes how the Vietnam War impacted race relations in the United States. It discusses how the draft system benefited white Americans over black Americans, with things like student deferments and health requirements. It also notes that black leaders and civil rights groups like SNCC increasingly opposed the war, seeing it as detrimental to the fight for racial equality at home. As the war escalated in the late 1960s, it exacerbated racial tensions and contributed to rebellions in cities across America.
2. Democratic Republic of
Viet Nam (Communist)
led by Ho Chi Minh
(Vietminh) in Hanoi
Military: NVA (aka PAVN)
* allied with nationalist
NLF (aka VC) in South
----------------------------------
Republic of Viet Nam
(backed by U.S.)
led by Ngo Dinh Diem in
Saigon
Military: U.S., ARVN
4. Biases of the Selective Service System (aka “the draft”)
• Composition of local draft boards, which determined the outcome of questionable cases.
• Standards of deferment
• Student and “conscientious objector” status—benefited those who could afford to enroll in
school indefinitely and those who belonged to a religion deemed “legitimately” pacifist
(e.g. Quakers).
• Health requirements—needed to have a regular doctor to testify about long-standing
medical issues.
• Intellectual qualifications—score on nationwide Armed Forces Qualifications Test
(AFQT) determined who could be drafted and where they would be placed.
• AFQT determined whether a soldier would serve as an officer or as part of the infantry (i.e. a
foot soldier).
• Sec. of Defense McNamara’s “Project 100,000” (Oct 1966)—under the guise of being an
“anti-poverty” program, this project permitted the induction of 100,000 recruits who failed the
AFQT and otherwise would have been deemed unfit to serve in the military. Recruits brought in
under this program would become infantry.
6. The United States government has “never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly
determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders…[It] is no respecter of persons
or law when such persons or laws run counter to its needs or desires….We are in sympathy with, and
support, the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them
to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the ‘freedom’ we find so
false in this country.”
--SNCC, “On Vietnam” (1966)
In 1966, SNCC became
the first civil rights
organization to take a
public stance in opposition
to the war.
Here, Stokely Carmichael speaks at an antiwar
rally in front of the United Nations building in
New York (Apr 1967).
7. Murder of Samuel Younge Jr.
The immediate impetus for SNCC’s anti-war statement was the
murder of Samuel Younge Jr. in Alabama. After receiving a medical
discharge from the U.S. Navy, Younge had participated in the
Selma march, joined SNCC, and worked with the MFDP in 1965.
He was also a student organizer at the Tuskegee Institute, working
to secure voting rights and desegregation. In Jan 1966, Younge was
shot and killed by an elderly white gas station attendant when he
attempted to use the “white” restroom, despite passage of the 1964
Civil Rights Act which outlawed legalized racial segregation. His
killer was acquitted by an all-white jury in a predominately Black
county after taking little more than an hour to deliberate. In its
statement, SNCC compared Younge’s murder to “the murder of
peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought,
and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In
each case, the United States government bears a great part of the
responsibility for these deaths.”
8. A devout member of the Nation of Islam, professional boxer Muhammad Ali (formerly
known as Cassius Clay) was a vocal opponent of the war and famously refused
induction into the U.S. military in 1967 after his application to be a conscientious
objector was denied under the rationale that the Nation of Islam opposed the Vietnam
war but not all wars. Ali was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in
prison and a fine of $10,000. He was also banned from boxing for three years during
the prime of his career. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971.
Ali Refused to Be Inducted into the U.S. Army (Apr 1967)
9. “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home
and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people
in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? ….No, I am not
going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation
simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the
world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned
that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose
millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion.…But I have said it
once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not
disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who
are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…If I thought the war was
going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to
draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws
of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve
been in jail for four hundred years.”
--Ali, one month before refusing induction into the U.S. military (Mar 1967)
11. “There comes a time when silence is
betrayal.”
--King, quoting Dante (4 Apr 1967,
exactly one year before his murder)
King famously spoke out
against the war in 1967 in
Manhattan’s Riverside
Church.
12. “A Time to Break Silence”
“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my
own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart
of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: ‘Why are
you speaking about the war, Dr. King?’ ‘Why are you joining the voices
of dissent?’ ‘Peace and civil rights don’t mix,’ they say. ‘Aren’t you
hurting the cause of your people,’ they ask? And when I hear them,
though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless
greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not
really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions
suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”
13. “A Time to Break Silence”
“…the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five
years ago he said, ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will
make violent revolution inevitable.’ Increasingly, by choice or by
accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who
make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the
privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of
overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right
side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical
revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...the shift from a thing-
oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
14. “A Time to Break Silence”
“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order
and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling
our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting
poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally
humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically
deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual death.”
15. Discussion:
King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (1967)
• What arguments does King offer against the war?
• How does King tie his antiwar position to his advocacy for civil
rights?
• How does King work to humanize the “enemies” of the U.S. in
Vietnam? How does he work to validate their grievances?
• What comments does King offer about the United States in general,
and its government in particular?
16. Johnson’s Fateful Choice
“I knew from the start that I was bound
to be crucified either way I moved. If I
left the woman I really loved—the
Great Society—in order to get involved
in that bitch of a war on the other side
of the world, then I would lose
everything at home. All my
programs….But if I left that war and
let the Communists take over South
Vietnam, then I would be seen as a
coward and my nation would be seen
as an appeaser and we would both find
it impossible to accomplish anything
for anybody anywhere on the entire
globe.”
--President Johnson,
after leaving office
24. “[A] new black soldier had
appeared…Replacing the careerists
were black draftees, many just steps
removed from marching in the
Civil Rights Movement or rioting
in the rebellions that swept the
urban ghettos from Harlem to
Watts. All were filled with a new
sense of black pride and purpose.”
--Wallace Terry, Bloods (1984), xiv.
25. “…if the U.S. is successful in
[Vietnam], then it will be the
black man’s turn again to face
the lyncher and burner of the
world: and face him alone.
…Black Americans are
considered to be the world’s
biggest fools to go to another
country to fight for something
they don’t have for
themselves.”
--Eldridge Cleaver,
Soul on Ice (1968)
