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3. Fueling the Anger: The Draft and Black Casualties
- University of Missouri Press
- Chapter
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45 It is not likely to give comfort to Negroes battling to gain equality on the home front to learn that they are being given more than an equal opportunity to die for their country on the battlefields in Vietnam.—New York Amsterdam News, January 8, 1966 During the buildup of forces in Vietnam, the initial response of the black press was generally supportive of the draft. Sometimes the support was effusive . An editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American during the spring of 1965 saw the draft and the military service that followed as an engine of progress for the black community: “Whether they wanted to or not, millions of men in the armed forces received the benefit of . . . travel, discipline and education which they could have gotten in no other way. It was in the Army that it was proved that a nation in peril cannot survive with segregation.”1 A year and a half later, even after mounting black casualties had become an issue of wide concern, the Afro-American was still firmly committed, in principle , to the draft, saying editorially:“When our country needs us for defense, we should serve without quibbling.”2 As draft notices multiplied and the induction net was cast more widely, the African American community began to feel its effects and increasingly 3 Fueling the Anger The Draft and Black Casualties 46 Chronicles of a Two-Front War came to see the draft as fundamentally unfair. As resistance began to coalesce around the drafting of black men, the September issue of Jet quoted a Detroit demonstrator who expressed the growing anger: “The draft takes black people to fight for abstract democracy in foreign lands when there is no complete democracy at home.”3 Others called for more radical ways to confront an unfair draft. On January 7, 1966, Clifford Alexander, a member of the White House staff, wrote a memo to the president informing him of “a distressing story ” on the front page of the New York Times about a statement issued by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) the day before. SNCC had assailed U.S. actions in Vietnam, opposed the draft, and urged “all Americans to seek work in the civil rights movement as a ‘valid alternative to the draft.’” Alexander’s memo then described a series of actions the White House was initiating “to negate the impact of this story.” In addition to discussing the SNCC statement with selected civil rights leaders and some key black congressional figures, Alexander reported, Louis Martin, the publisher of the Michigan Chronicle and a Johnson adviser, had “talked to the Negro Publishers Association and has the feeling that they will strongly denounce the SNCC statements in their editorial columns.”4 The Chicago Daily Defender reported on January 10 that John Lewis, chair of SNCC, had urged members to avoid the draft and, in a gesture of protest, to burn draft cards “if that is their desire.” Lewis held a news conference at which he read a statement condemning U.S. policy in Vietnam and urged Americans to work for civil rights rather than participate in the war.5 The Defender piece, a straight news story, alluded to Lewis’s history as a freedom rider who had been badly injured, and jailed more than once, during civil rights demonstrations. The paper ran no editorial on the controversial statement , perhaps out of deference to the considerable stature Lewis enjoyed among African Americans. However, the Atlanta Daily World castigated the SNCC position, saying, “We disagree with the SNCC . . . position on charges made against our government ’s policy in Vietnam and do not believe any young man should attempt to evade the draft. It is not rational nor logical to expect to enjoy rights and refuse to accept important responsibility such as defending one’s country. There has never been any general doubt about our race’s loyalty to our country, especially in time of war, and it should never be that way.”6 Much of the black press said little about the SNCC statement. Part of the reason was that John Lewis’s controversial statement on the draft was almost immediately overshadowed by a larger story stemming from a relatively obscure young black activist’s comments about the same SNCC statement. Fueling the Anger 47 Julian Bond, SNCC’s communications director, had been elected a state representative in Georgia by a landslide in 1965, capturing 82 percent of the vote in a large, predominately black district in...