On July 7, 1965, a young Mississippi veteran of the civil rights movement, John Shaw, was killed in action in South Vietnam at the age of twenty-three. Back home, their grief turning to anger, his friends Joe Martin (1943–2009) and Clinton Hopson (1935–1978) circulated a leaflet in McComb, Mississippi, in which the struggle for civil rights and the struggle against the war were suddenly one struggle. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party reprinted their words, without officially endorsing them, in its Newsletter on July 28—the same day President Johnson ordered an additional 50,000 troops to head to Vietnam.
The heart of their argument is their testimony: “we don’t know anything about Communism, Socialism, and all that, but we do know that Negroes have caught hell right here under this American Democracy.” Hopson, a law student from New Jersey, had indeed “caught hell” in Mississippi, suffering arrest and the bombing of the house in which he was staying. He later became a Muslim and opened a Black Liberation Center in Newark. Martin, a Mississippi native, had also been jailed and lost his job; he became a prominent citizen of McComb, working to bring legal and health services to the city’s African American community and helping high school students register to vote.
HERE are five reasons why Negroes should not be in any war fighting for America:
1. No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man’s freedom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi.
2. Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go.
3. We will gain respect and dignity as a race only by forcing the U.S. Government and the Mississippi Government to come with guns, dogs and trucks to take our sons away to fight and be killed protecting Miss., Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.
4. 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. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the Colored People of the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause.
5. Last week a white soldier from New Jersey was discharged from the Army because he refused to fight in Vietnam; he went on a hunger strike. Negro boys can do the same thing. We can write and ask our sons if they know what they are fighting for. If he answers Freedom, tell him that’s what we are fighting for here in Mississippi. And if he says Democracy, tell him the truth—we don’t know anything about Communism, Socialism, and all that, but we do know that Negroes have caught hell right here under this American Democracy.