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73 4 African American Opposition to the War in Vietnam But looming darkly . . . is the long fattened and still grinning evil of Jim Crow, the American demon we have never chosen to exorcise with the selfpreening righteousness we brandish as we pursue the ragged peasants of the Viet Cong.—New York Amsterdam News, May 6, 1967 When Martin Luther King Jr. was released from jail in Selma, Alabama, on February 5, 1965, he confided to reporters that he would be meeting with President Johnson to urge the passage of strong voting rights legislation so African Americans like those in Selma, for whose cause King had gone to jail, would be guaranteed their rights as American citizens. The very next day the Vietcong staged an assault on the U.S. base at Pleiku in Vietnam’s central highlands. The attack killed seven Americans, wounded more than a hundred others, and precipitated a full-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam. The assault also riveted the attention of the administration and the nation on events in Vietnam. With the president preoccupied, King’s visit was postponed .Although he finally got in to see Johnson a few days later, the delay was an intimation of the shift in priorities that ultimately would diminish, then marginalize, the civil rights movement. The focus of national concern was shifting inexorably to Vietnam. 74 Chronicles of a Two-Front War If the attack on Pleiku failed to make the change in priorities apparent, the progression of events would. On March 8, a day after Alabama state troopers waded into a peaceful column of demonstrators in Selma on what came to be called Bloody Sunday, clubbing and teargassing the marchers, U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Danang. The turmoil in Selma still held national attention , but the deployment of marines moved the Vietnam War higher on the nation’s agenda.1 The civil rights movement was beginning to lose what it needed to be successful in the long run. The president was allowing his calendar to be monopolized by theVietnam War, and the far-off war was pulling the attention of the American people away from the vivid stories of the civil rights struggle. With the escalation of the war came a fundamental shift in the political situation,an erosion of presidential political capital available for domestic initiatives, and demands on Johnson’s time and attention. This shift made African American leaders increasingly uncomfortable and caused the black press to raise frequent alarms decrying the disproportion in the vast commitment of financial resources to the war and the relatively modest allocation of resources to fund the Great Society. Johnson’s fundamental desire to further the cause of equal rights and economic opportunity for African Americans remained strong but could not withstand political opposition that arose, in part, on the strength of its assertion that LBJ could not have both “guns and butter,” as he believed he could. Perhaps Johnson meant well, but one consequence, whether direct or indirect, of his decision to pursue a policy of escalation in Vietnam was the weakening of federal support for the reform agenda of blacks. Several black leaders lashed out at the U.S. government for its misplaced priorities. John Lewis, whose skull was fractured on Bloody Sunday, was angry at the president’s shifting priorities. Just before the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) checked out of the hospital, his head wrapped in bandages, he said in evident frustration,“I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam . . . and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.”2 According to Jet magazine, the customarily mild-mannered head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, usually deferential to LBJ, observed with uncharacteristically salty language that if the administration could send the marines into Vietnam, then,“dammit, they can send somebody to Alabama and defend the government right here.”3 In his column in the Afro-American, Whitney Young elaborated a more complex argument: “The people and the soil of Alabama ought to be as precious to us as the people and the soil of Vietnam, where we have only in the past week dispatched 3,500 Marines. If we cannot protect our own citizens in Alabama, how can the world expect us to protect the Vietnamese in Asia?” Opposition to the War 75 Later in the column Young became even more pointed: “Make no mistake about it: if we, the people of America, lose in Alabama, we will never...

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