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

3. Vietnam and Civil Rights

73 3 Vietnam and Civil Rights The Great Diversion, 1965 my own feeling was that the anti-war movement took the wind out of the sails of the civil rights movement. to put it another way—one of the many victims of Vietnam was the southern civil rights movement, if because the country’s attention was turned away from the South and the movement to a war. —Danny lyon, SnnC photographer the Vietnam War . . . has practically pushed the civil rights movements off the center page of american history. —a. Philip Randolph on august 6, 1965, approximately six months after transforming the conflict in Vietnam into an American war, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act in a solemn ceremony at the Capitol. approximately seventy years since african americans were systematically disenfranchised in the South, this historic piece of legislation guaranteed voting rights to all african americans. as Dr. martin luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and other luminaries of the civil rights community sat nearby in seats of honor, President Johnson addressed the nation and proclaimed the act “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.” Later that day, King spoke for virtually all african americans when he praised the president’s speech as “eloquent and persuasive” and touted the law for its removal of “all the obstacles to the right to vote.”1 Coming on the heels of Johnson’s extraordinary commencement speech at Howard University and the passage of 74 Selma to Saigon key elements of his great Society, the president’s signing of the Voting Rights act marked the apogee of the civil rights movement. after decades of struggle, both ordinary african americans and civil rights leaders were justifiably imbued with an unprecedented degree of optimism and felt an abiding fidelity to the president.2 For David Dellinger and Bayard Rustin, who had been allies in the fight against militarism and segregation for decades, this historic event should have been an occasion for celebration. in spite of their different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, Dellinger and Rustin were part of the same cohort that had gravitated to left-wing politics and pacifism during the great Depression and World War ii. Coincidentally, they both served lengthy prison sentences at the lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania for being conscientious objectors in the “good war” against fascism. Dellinger, born into a prominent white family and reared in an affluent Boston suburb, graduated from Yale in 1936. As a young man, he forsook his parents’ affluent lifestyle and dedicated himself to the struggle against racism and militarism—he even undertook a near-fatal hunger strike to protest racial segregation while imprisoned at lewisburg.3 Dellinger and Rustin bore similar scars from the repressive years of the Cold War and mcCarthyism, and by the early 1960s, they represented an important bridge between the old left and the new left. Rustin was a coeditor of Liberator, Dellinger’s left-leaning bimonthly publication, and it was influential among the new generation of political activists who materialized in the early 1960s. in the months leading up to the signing of the Voting Rightacts, however, the two men had been embroiled in an increasingly acrimonious controversy over the spiraling war in Vietnam. Rustin’s reluctance to take an unequivocal stand against the war earned him the enmity of Dellinger and his colleague Staughton lynd, who accused Rustin of betraying “the essential moralism which you have taught myself and others over the years.”4 in the early morning of august 6, 1965, Dellinger was at laguardia Airport in New York to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., where he and Robert Parris (formerly Robert moses) were scheduled to lead an anti– Vietnam War protest to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and nagasaki. as Dellinger was boarding the plane, he saw that Rustin was on the same flight, beaming with joy because President Johnson had personally invited him to witness the signing of the Voting Rights act. Dellinger needled Rustin to “be sure to get one of the pens Johnson uses to sign it so you could come out, cross the street into lafay- Vietnam and Civil Rights 75 ette Park and use the pen to sign the Declaration of Conscience” in support of draft resistance. “then,” Dellinger added, “you can say a few words linking Black rights...