In July 1965, when Clinton Hopson and Joe Martin urged the African American mothers of McComb, Mississippi, to keep their sons from going to Vietnam, their words reflected private grief and anger rather than the official position of any Mississippi civil rights group. Within six months—in a press release dated January 6, 1966—the national Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would adopt opposition to the war in Vietnam as part of its public agenda. In rhetoric much loftier than Hopson and Martin’s, SNCC asked “all Americans” to fight for democracy at home, and to protest the war in Southeast Asia.
Julian Bond, SNCC’s twenty-five-year-old communications director at the time, denied writing the press release but immediately endorsed it: “I like to think of myself as a pacifist and one who opposes that war and any other war,” he told reporters the same day. The Georgia state legislature, to which Bond had recently been elected, attempted to refuse to seat him, calling his comments treasonous. Soon Martin Luther King Jr. would praise the young activist from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist. “If you’re going to be a Christian, take the gospel of Jesus Christ seriously,” he told his audience on January 16, “you must be a dissenter, you must be a nonconformist.” By degrees, the movement was overcoming its reluctance to see its struggle as linked to that of the peace movement, just as peace activists before and since have found common cause with activists on other fronts.
THE Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has a right and a responsibility to dissent with United States foreign policy on an issue when it sees fit. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee now states its opposition to United States’ involvement in Viet Nam on these grounds:
We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of concern for freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia and in the United States itself.
We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black people’s struggle for liberation and self-determination in this country for the past five years. Our work, particularly in the South, has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders.
We ourselves have often been victims of violence and confinement executed by United States government officials. We recall the numerous persons who have been murdered in the South because of their efforts to secure their civil and human rights, and whose murderers have been allowed to escape penalty for their crimes.
The murder of Samuel Young in Tuskegee, Ala., is no different than the murder of peasants in Viet Nam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths.
Samuel Young was murdered because United States law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. The United States is no respecter of persons or law when such persons or laws run counter to its needs and desires.
We recall the indifference, suspicion and outright hostility with which our reports of violence have been met in the past by government officials.
We know that for the most part, elections in this country, in the North as well as the South, are not free. We have seen that the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act have not yet been implemented with full federal power and sincerity.
We question, then, the ability and even the desire of the United States government to guarantee free elections abroad. We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United States cold war policies.
We are in sympathy with, and support, the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Viet Nam in the name of the “freedom” we find so false in this country.
We recoil with horror at the inconsistency of a supposedly “free” society where responsibility to freedom is equated with the responsibility to lend oneself to military aggression. We take note of the fact that 16 per cent of the draftees from this country are Negroes called on to stifle the liberation of Viet Nam, to preserve a “democracy” which does not exist for them at home.
We ask, where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?
We therefore encourage those Americans who prefer to use their energy in building democratic forms within this country. We believe that work in the civil rights movement and with other human relations organizations is a valid alternative to the draft. We urge all Americans to seek this alternative, knowing full well that it may cost their lives—as painfully as in Viet Nam.