Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960-1970

8. The War in the South

225 CHAPTER EIGHT The War in the South STUDENT ACTIVISM reached its second zenith in the South in the two years that preceded May 1970. On most of the region’s major public and private university campuses, activists forced at least one dramatic confrontation between early 1968 and the end of the 1969–70 academic year. These confrontations involved large numbers of students—often hundreds and sometimes even thousands. The issues that resonated during these demonstrations varied. The autonomy of students as masters of their own private lives and active participants in their own educational lives provided mobilizing issues on a number of campuses. And racial issues loomed especially large in a region in which desegregation proceeded haltingly down an uncertain path. These issues all had roots in the desegregation-related crises of the early 1960s. American involvement in Vietnam, which stretched back to the 1950s but nevertheless did not emerge as a large-scale issue until after 1965, provided the final ingredient for late-1960s activism. But Vietnam was more than simply one of a list of issues that concerned students. Instead, it joined race as one of the two dominant issues on southern campuses. In an increasingly polarized climate, support for or opposition to the war in Vietnam often served as a litmus test of political orientation, much in the same way that support for integration had indicated a willingness to dissent on a number of issues. Vietnam never completely replaced race as the most important issue on southern campuses, and many students became adept at weaving the two issues into one analysis. For black students, racial issues still dominated, though the concerns associated with Black Power modified black students’ dissent. Black students who addressed Vietnam often incorporated the issue into a larger concern with racism—“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Nigger.” To be sure, racial politics and the war were not mutually exclusive. Black and white activists pointed out connections between racial discrimination at home and American policy abroad from the earliest days following escalation. 226 CHAPTER EIGHT In the midst of the Selma clashes in March 1965, John Lewis asked why the United States could send troops to Vietnam and not to the South to protect civil rights workers. At a May 1965 teach-in at Berkeley, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc) activist Bob Moses suggested that black people were members of the Third World, a mirror that facilitated a clearer understanding of American policies in other parts of the world. In the following years, opposition to the war was evident in student newspapers on black campuses, and African American students participated in some demonstrations against the war. Members of a generation for whom American policy in Vietnam represented a core issue, black southern students added their voices to protests against the war.1 However, as historian Simon Hall suggests, black people had particular reasons for opposing the war. They questioned the necessity of supporting and fighting abroad when they were treated as second-class citizens at home. And they criticized the draft, which was at times applied unfairly to activists and which was carried out with little African American participation on selective service boards. Finally, the growing tendency to see African Americans as linked with people of color in other parts of the world fed black opposition to the war. When Moses looked at a photo of a Vietnamese boy being captured by a U.S. Marine, he saw “a little colored boy, standing against a wire fence, with a big, huge white marine with a gun at his back. But what I knew was that the people in this country saw a communist rebel.” Black and white Americans “travel in different realities.”2 Those different realities seemed to forestall significant levels of cooperation between black and white students in the southern antiwar movement, although a few exceptions existed. In 1967, sncc made antidraft activity part of its southern campus program. “The campus traveler can initiate mobilization around the anti-draft program which can become a central issue,” a February 1967 sncc report suggested. Nevertheless, this issue was buried on a list with various other items that received more prominent play, including university reform, the distribution of independent publications, and the application of pressure on student governments.3 On historically black and predominantly white campuses, the application of Black Power to the campus loomed larger for African American students than did the war. And while many black students expressed opposition to the war, the...