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America’s “ideological enemies.”44 Wilkins’s patriotism is revealed in comments that he made in the spring of —“I don’t speak as a hawk or a dove . . . But, is it wrong for people to be patriotic? Is it wrong for us to back up our boys in the field . . . They’re dying while we’re knifing them in the back at home.” He continued, “Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned . . . maybe we are wrong, maybe we shouldn’t be in Vietnam. But when you’re out there in the trenches being fired at, you have to fight back.”45 For the NAACP leadership, issues of respectability were linked intimately with the question of anticommunism. In the early postwar period the Association had adopted the central tenets of cold war liberalism and, as Herbert Hill explained, his colleagues in the national office“were Cold Warriors.”46 In December ,for example,NAACP assistant executive director John Morsell wrote one antiwar critic explaining that he was“thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of the objective”inVietnam and pointing out that many liberals believed that “a free and stable world” was “incompatible with Communist aggression.”47 The NAACP leadership also believed that antiwar agitation was fomented by communist agitators,and director of branches Gloster Current interpreted antiwar sentiment at the local level of the Association as a product of “left-wing shenanigans.”As he explained, the“left-wing . . . is having a field day! Its most recent project is to create problems over our country’sVietnam policy.”48 Roy Wilkins shared this concern—in a newspaper column warning against the civil rights movement involving itself in debates over the war he explained that there were “of course, many kibitzers in the civil rights campaign whose No.  objective is not the attainment of the civil rights of Negro citizens.”49 In , with a Republican in the White House, opposition to the war widespread among liberal Democrats, and an emergent “respect able ”peace movement centered on theVietnam Moratorium Committee , Wilkins and the NAACP finally took a position against the war in Vietnam.At the annual convention in July,delegates adopted a strongly worded resolution that condemned the war as “cruel, inhuman, and unjust,”and called upon the United States to withdraw quickly and“concentrate our wealth and skills on peaceful measures to prosecute our own domestic war on poverty.”50  SIMON HALL In explaining the NAACP’s opposition to Black Power, historians have tended to emphasize fundamental ideological differences.51 Certainly areas of disagreement existed, most notably regarding the NAACP’s continued commitment to integration and support for interracialism . In private, however, the Association’s leaders acknowledged that they actually agreed with much of Black Power,at least when it came to the pluralistic version as defined by Stokely Carmichael and the political scientist Charles Hamilton during –. Armed self-defense, the mobilization of black voting strength, calls for economic empowerment ,and the fostering of racial pride were all things that the nation’s oldest civil rights organization could endorse.52 In September , for example,John Morsell explained that“by and large there is no disagreement with most of the specific objectives”outlined by Black Power leaders .53 Two months later Morsell wrote that “all of the goals which Mr. Carmichael . . . asserts to be comprehended in the phrase‘Black Power’ turn out, on inspection, to be merely restatements of goals pursued by the NAACP since its founding.”54 Nevertheless, the NAACP leadership sought to distance itself from Black Power, and their public criticisms remained robust. To a considerable extent, however, this appears to have owed more to concerns about image than to ideological conviction. A central characteristic of Black Power was its militant, uncompromising, sometimes antiAmerican rhetoric. Stokely Carmichael, for example, urged blacks to “take over,” told whites to “Move on over, or we’ll move on over you,” and declared that Black Power meant“bringing this country to its knees . . . smash[ing] everything Western civilization has created.”55 CORE leader Floyd McKissick,an early advocate of Black Power,told reporters that “the greatest hypocrisy we have is the Statue of Liberty. We ought to break the young lady’s legs and point her to Mississippi.”56 The fiery rhetoric may have been designed to“rouse the slumbering masses—not . . . promote riots,” as historian William Van Deburg has pointed out, but this distinction was lost on most observers.57 “Happily or unhappily ,”wrote John Morsell,“the extreme statements”made by Black Power...

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