American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism by Seymour Richard

Author:Seymour, Richard [Seymour, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Revolutionary, Sociology, Social Science, ebook, US History/Politics, General, United States, Anti-Imperialist Movements, Political Science, Social History, Civics & Citizenship, epub, History
ISBN: 9781608461417
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-06-12T05:00:00+00:00

More grievously, however, grassroots activists were in particular danger of violent assault. The Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles, representing Mexican American antiwar protest, was attacked by policemen with guns and clubs during a protest in 1970, leaving three protesters and one journalist dead.53

Nonetheless, civil rights activists and leaders were essential to the success of the antiwar movement, and the connections between a racist system and a racist war were quickly drawn by its articulate spokespeople. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that the use of conscription in this war involved “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people.”54 In July 1965 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, organized in Mississippi the previous year with the assistance of SNCC to challenge the all-white southern Democratic Party, issued a leaflet against black participation in the war: “No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored people in Santo Domingo and Vietnam so that the White American can get richer.” In January 1966, SNCC adopted a position against the war: “We believe the United States government has been deceptive in the claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of the colored people in such countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia and in the United States itself.”

Martin Luther King Jr., against the advice of allies in the civil rights struggle, finally spoke out in 1967, belaboring “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” In a carefully targeted intervention, he pointed out that black soldiers were dying in numbers disproportionate to their representation in the general population, ostensibly to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”55 In April 1968, in the week following King’s assassination, 125 towns and cities went into rebellion.

This had a tremendous impact on the availability of black troops, and worried generals sick. It also stressed where the real battle for freedom for African Americans was taking place. The slow, legal overthrow of Jim Crow had done little as yet to ameliorate the economic conditions of working-class blacks, especially as war brought conscription and inflation to the ghettos. Rebellions broke out in the ghettos in 1964 and, as noted, Malcolm X, following the tradition in which the Nation of Islam stressed the colonized identity of black people, linked the black liberation struggle to that of the national liberation movements. The “long, hot summers” of inner-city rebellion began thus. The Pentagon was sickened, too, when it learned of the growing convergence between the Black Power and antiwar movements.56

Antiwar activists made use of some of the same tactical repertoire as CORE and SNCC. Many leaders of the New Left, for example in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), emerged directly from the civil rights movement. Until the

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