Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War

2. African Americans and the Long Cold War Thaw, 1954-1965

37 2 african americans and the long Cold War thaw, 1954–1965 most liberals think of mississippi as a cancer, as a distortion of America. But we think Mississippi is an accurate reflection of america’s values and morality. Why can’t the people who killed andrew, James, and mickie be brought to justice, unless a majority of the community condones murder? Sheriff Rainey is not a freak; he reflects the majority. And what he did is related to the napalm bombing of “objects” in Vietnam. —Robert moses, 1965 The Geneva Accords of 1954 signified the end of France’s colonial empire in the Far east. among other things, it temporarily divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel and called for free elections by 1956. Wishing to distance themselves from the taint of compromise with the communist forces, President eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to sign the accords; they perceived the French withdrawal as a fresh opportunity to create an independent capitalist bastion in South Vietnam, free of the stench of colonialism. the eisenhower administration breathed a sigh of relief when the election that would have unified Vietnam never occurred—an election that Ho Chi minh would have won. Starting in 1956, U.S. assistance to South Vietnam’s government, led by avowed Catholic and anticommunist ngo Dinh Diem, totaled more than $300 million annually, most of which went to buy military goods. eisenhower’s decision to invest millions of dollars to create an anticommunist buffer in South Vietnam was rooted in his adherence to the domino theory, and it would contribute to the massive military involvement a decade later.1 38 Selma to Saigon like most americans, civil rights leaders did not consider events in faraway Vietnam a pressing matter. During the second week of the conference at geneva, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision , which seemingly validated the naaCP’s strategy of litigation and its partnership with Cold War liberalism. Brown was also predictive of a diminution in anticommunist hysteria, opening up a small crevice for dissent by african americans and other opponents of america’s hawkish foreign policy. meanwhile, cracks in the pall of american conformity began to surface in the period following Brown and the geneva accords. With the end of the Korean War, the passing of mcCarthyism, and the relaxation of Cold War tensions following Stalin’s death (which lessened the likelihood of nuclear confrontation), forums for expressing dissent against the prevailing zeitgeist occurred with greater frequency.2 as early as 1955, Paul Robeson (still without his passport) observed this new spirit when he addressed students at Swarthmore College, which had maintained its commitment to peace and disarmament during the height of the Red scare. Robeson said he was buoyed by the “stirring of new life among the students ” and relieved that “the ivy Curtain of conformity, which for a decade has shut them off from the sunlight of independent thinking, is beginning to wilt.”3 Robeson was also heartened by attempts to reconstitute the pacifist movement around the issues of world peace and nuclear disarmament, another sign of a thaw in the Cold War. in 1956 David Dellinger, a longtime pacifist and World War II conscientious objector, founded a radical bimonthly newspaper called Liberation, which signaled a new moment in american political and cultural dissent.4 in addition to Dellinger, Liberation ’s editorial board comprised prominent individuals who would play crucial roles in the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s, including Staughton lynd, Howard Zinn, Bayard Rustin, lorraine Hansberry , James Baldwin, and Robert Williams. Liberation published one of the first articles touting the leadership skills of a young minister in Alabama named martin luther King Jr., who was gaining notoriety for leading the montgomery bus boycott.5 only a few years later, albert Bigelow, a World War ii veteran turned civil rights activist and Quaker pacifist, generated publicity when he was arrested for attempting to sail his thirty-two-foot boat, the Golden Rule, into the U.S. bomb-test site at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific.6 although the peace movement remained largely on the periphery, the abatement of the Red scare and the government’s lessened interest in prosecuting african americans and the long Cold War thaw 39 and harassing suspected communists provided small openings for opposition to the Cold War. these small forums enabled a few african american leftists to...