Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978

3. Economic Conversion, Survival, and Race in “Dodge City”

Over the Easter and Passover weekend of 1964, an ad hoc committee comprising a broad range of religious, peace, civil rights, labor groups, and progressive political parties held a Walk and Rally for Peace,JobsandFreedom.Thisevent,andongoingcoalitionwork,advanced the idea that peace abroad and justice at home were mutual goals: “Issues can no longer be treated as separate and distinct. We are part of a common thread of humanity that is seeking peace, a better standard of living, emancipation from oppression, and opportunity for our youth.” Jobs served as thesymbolicandconcreteconnectionbetweenpeaceandfreedomwhereby economic conversion was necessary to advance the civil rights struggle. The group contended: “Without peace, there can be no freedom. Without • CHAPTER 3 • Economic Conversion, Survival, and Race in “Dodge City” In discussing “Watts,” we are dealing with something more than a local issue, or civil rights. We are coming to grips with a national threat, with our policy of dealing with emerging and undeveloped nationsandoursurvivalasfreepeoples.Forbehindsuchtroubledspots is a yearning on the part of people everywhere for self-government, freedom, security, and human dignity. —Congressman Augustus Hawkins, “Remarks to McCone Commission” Like the first generation of urban blacks (and that’s us, the BLACK PANTHER PARTY), we’ve been pushed into corners, into ghettos, you dig it? And the only time that we come into contact with, I mean into visual, physical contact, is either through the businessman, the avaricious businessman, the insurance salesman, the milkman, or the occupying forces of the pigs, you dig it? —Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, The Black Panthers Speak • 79 • jobs,freedombecomesamockery.Withoutopportunity,thefutureremains insecure.”1 Such increasingly visible connections between the peace and Black freedom movements drew the concern of the Establishment media and the FBI alike, who monitored Coretta Scott King’s movements, including her meetings with women’s peace groups.2 Journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak observed that “Freedom Now” picket signs in the South had been replaced by the joint demand for “Peace and Freedom Now.” They condemned the evolution: “This is not the case of one movement reinforcing another. The fight for civil rights is a broad-based crusade with specific, attainable goals. The ban-the-bomb crowd has fringe support at best in its quixotic quest for fuzzy, unobtainable objectives.”3 The connections did not seem so obscure to Southern California Women Strike for Peace, which reprinted in their newsletter an article first published in Liberation, a radical pacifist journal based in New York: “At one time [Southern civil rights] demonstrators were told to take off their nuclear-disarmament buttons. Now they wear them proudly. As one participant expressed it: ‘When we ask our young people to vote, many of them say, “Why should we bother, when we’re all going to be blown up tomorrow anyway?”’”4 Nor did the astute social critic Carey McWilliams miss the connection. He had observed in 1962 that the peace and civil rights movements faced a common political impasse: “Like the civil-rights movement in the South, the peace movement is seeking a way out of the political trap in which we find ourselves. Neither party will do for Negroes in the South what should be done; Southern Negroes must emancipate themselves, as they are doing; and, in the process, new political energies are being released. And so with the peace movement. The ‘bomber’ liberals of both parties will have nothing to do with the movement, nor will the ‘hard line’ conservatives of both parties.”5 Popular understandings of social movements of the 1960s also tend to treat the peace movement and racial liberation movements as distinct, implicitlyunderstandingpeaceasa “white”causeandracialjusticeasa“minority ” issue. Historian Simon Hall’s Peace and Freedom takes an important step in dispelling this myth in his examination of the efforts that civil rights and peace movement took to form coalitions. I suggest that a focus on coalition work alone cannot capture the change generated by these movements . These movements created and shared an interracial political terrain on which even conflictual political relationships transformed these 80 ECONOMIC CONVERSION, SURVIVAL, AND RACE movementsandunderstandingsofthetiesbetweenracismandwar.So,how didracialliberationandpeacemovementscometounderstandeachother’s work as mutually supportive projects, and how did their collaborations shape new understandings of peace and freedom? To answer these questions, I suggest that we need to rethink a naturalized geography of violence that maps peace as an external, international issue and civil rights as an internal, domestic problem. Such gendered dichotomies of war versus peace have shaped received histories of postwar...