7

Southern College Students

As the Johnson and Nixon administrations made decisions directed toward US withdrawal from Vietnam, student opposition to the war peaked both nationally and in the South. Consistent with the attitudes of their parents, white southern students were significantly more prowar than their peers nationally. Antiwar protests on Dixie’s campuses began later, were less numerous, and attracted fewer participants than those in other regions. While assessing student activism at Vanderbilt University, Paul Conkin noted that within the conservative South, even relatively mild actions appeared “radical” to Dixie’s parents, college administrators, newspaper editors, and political leaders. Greg L. Michel, the historian of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), the principal antiwar and civil rights organization for white students in the South, added that joining SSOC “required great courage” since SSOC activities “could lead to loss of friends, condemnation and rejection by one’s family, and expulsion from school.”1

African American students, for whom attending college was particularly challenging, were even less involved in the antiwar protests. In addition to weighing the same disincentives confronting white students, blacks were keenly aware of the armed attacks of white police and National Guardsmen resulting in student deaths at Jackson State College and three other black schools. Despite these obstacles, Dixie’s student dissidents waged unprecedented protests against the war. In so doing, they, like student dissidents nationally, helped keep the conflict and its agonies before the American public, to restrain Johnson’s and Nixon’s most aggressive tendencies, and to convince national and local leaders that ending the war was essential to restoring domestic order and tranquility.

Antiwar students were a distinct minority on all American campuses, but their status was even more pronounced in the South. Given Dixie’s backing of the conflict and hypersensitivity to outside criticism, southerners had little tolerance for dissenters questioning the war. The experiences of two southern students provide vivid insight into the response that most often greeted protestors. Jeff Shero, a student activist at the University of Texas, declared that joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Texas meant “breaking with your family, it meant being cut off—it was like in early Rome joining a Christian sect. . . . If you were from Texas, in SDS, you were a bad motherfucker, you couldn’t go home for Christmas. . . . In most of those places it meant, ‘You Goddamn Communist.’” Or perhaps, you maniac! When David Doggett, an undergraduate at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, marched for civil rights and against the war and helped start a “Free University” off campus, the academic dean contacted Doggett’s parents and suggested that he was insane and should be removed from school and sent for psychiatric treatment.2

The active hostility of southern political leaders, college administrators, press, and communities toward antiwar students conveyed these regional attitudes. Upon being appointed a trustee at the University of Kentucky, former governor Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, who at one point punched a student demonstrator in the face, opined, “If we can get rid of a lot of the silly, foolish professors who advocate violence on the part of the long-haired students, I think we pretty soon can correct the situation at the university.” Republican governor Claude R. Kirk Jr. of Florida agreed, denouncing the October 1969 Moratorium as an “irresponsible disruption of the learning process.” Voicing a similar perspective, a local South Carolina prosecutor ended a successful summation aimed at closing the UFO, an antiwar GI coffeehouse in Columbia, by citing obscenity, drug use, and opposition to the war and by singing several verses of “The Old Rugged Cross.” The judge followed with a denunciation of outsider agitators who “rebel against our form of life” and “feel they have a right to be critical . . . of the other ninety-five percent of the people who have to work for a living.” Senator Strom Thurmond and Congressman Mendel Rivers sponsored legislation calling for up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for anyone convicted of destroying a draft card or other draft-related materials.3

The overwhelming majority of southern papers concurred. The Dallas Morning News disparaged the “peacenik movement” and “leaping leftists” and admonished students at the University of Texas, Austin, that the institution’s “purpose should continue to be higher education, rather than a political demonstration.” The Montgomery Advertiser hurled similar epithets, such as “spoiled brats,” “campus Jacobins,” and “immature minds” favoring “appeasement and surrender,” and dismissed student unrest at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa as “campus theater of the absurd.” The State in Columbia, South Carolina, railed against “peaceniks, pacifists, and pinkos,” and the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger suggested that when “a stink bomb was thrown among a recent gathering of beatniks and peaceniks, . . . nobody noticed any difference.” In a subsequent editorial entitled “Youthful Leaders Behaved,” the Clarion-Ledger contrasted the “noisy minority [of American students]” who attracted “entirely too much attention” compared to the “serious-minded . . . 4-H, FFA boys and girls” who were “learning to do, to think, to be courteous, to work, to worship, to lead. . . . The South is producing an excellent quota of this promising human resource. Thank God for them.” Even Ralph McGill, the publisher of the more liberal Atlanta Constitution, questioned the judgment of “pacifist professors” and castigated “doomsayers and defeatists.”4

The great bulk of these papers’ readers found this editorial stance most congenial. In the wake of demonstrations at the University of Kentucky protesting the US invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, more than 90 percent of a Lexington Herald Leader poll of over one thousand people agreed with the use of the National Guard on the campus and believed that demonstrators should be expelled from the university. Letters to editors and constituent correspondence to officeholders across the South revealed a similar antipathy toward student dissidents. Southerners castigated student protestors as “raucous rabble,” “hippie idiots, doped lunatics, moral and physical cowards, flag spitters, draft-card burners,” “Typhoid Toms,” “punks,” “hoodlums,” “far left reactionaries,” and “Communists.” Class tensions were evident as a disgruntled Tennessee resident complained that “a good portion of the people paying tuitions came by their money by honest hard work and sweat,” only to have a few spoiled, privileged “rioters destroy” their education. While variously blaming “permissive parents” and “Crack-Pot” professors, other southerners recommended that authorities “quickly arrest and jail and sentence trouble makers.” A retired marine veteran of the Korean War urged that in subduing the youth, who had reached a “new low in patriotism,” no police be asked “to face them with blanks or to shoot high or to wound.” Others echoed the need for law and order while calling for the immediate expulsion of protestors and banishment to “work camps.” A Louisville mother concurred with the need for “severe punishment. . . . The kids have marched, the teachers have marched, the blacks have marched, the poor have marched, about the only ones left are the parents. The only marching left for them is to march those kids to the bathroom with a belt.”5

Even prowar student demonstrators did not escape criticism. In January 1966 a “Draftee’s Parent” doubted that the “spectacle of several hundred draft-deferred Georgia college students” rallying “in support of U.S. involvement in Vietnam” would impress American soldiers, allies, or enemies. Were these students to venture beyond the “comparative safety and comfort of Atlanta’s multi-million dollar sports stadium” and march to a “Selective Service or military recruiting office and volunteer for service,” their “sincerity” would have been “less open to question.”6

This southern hostility toward student protestors was also evident among many university administrators and security personnel. Campus police at Texas A&M arrested student protestors in 1966, drove them eighty miles from College Station, and warned them not to return. That same spring, Mississippi students noted the potential consequences of opposing the war when a Greenwood church was destroyed by arson following an antiwar prayer service. In 1967 an antiwar activist was shot in Austin, Texas. The Florida State Board of Regents banned both the SSOC and SDS from all state-supported schools; the University of Texas, Austin, banished SDS from the campus; and Western Kentucky University administrators secured a restraining order to block civil rights and antiwar activist Carl Braden from speaking on campus. In the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia, the governors of South Carolina and Kentucky were two of only four chief executives nationwide declaring emergencies on their campuses; from 1967 through 1970, off-campus police and the National Guard were most often deployed in the South; and in 1972, police in Gainesville used high-pressure hoses to disperse University of Florida students protesting the US mining of Haiphong harbor. Surreptitious federal government actions reinforced the efforts of university administrators at William and Mary College, the University of Kentucky, and Georgia State University, where the CIA from 1967 to 1973 implemented Project Resistance surveillance activities, and at Louisiana State University in New Orleans from 1968 to 1971, as the FBI recruited students into Cointelpro to observe and disrupt SDS activities.7

Unsurprisingly, given Dixie’s fundamental conservatism and regional support for the war, a clear majority of southern students were more prowar and less activist than their peers from other regions. A survey tracing overall student protests during 1967–1968 found that 36 percent of responding southern institutions reported protests, compared to 49 percent in the Northeast, 44 percent in the Midwest, and 40 percent in the West. A May 1967 national mailing list of antiwar organizations, which were located primarily in towns or cities housing colleges, included ten in the Baltimore/Washington area; thirty in New England; thirty-four in northern California, Oregon, and Washington; but only eleven in the South. Fifty-seven percent of the 1969 freshman class at the University of Kentucky believed that student protestors should be disciplined more harshly. And following President Nixon’s “silent majority” speech in November 1969, 60 percent of southern college students polled said they approved of his handling of the war, while 34 percent disapproved. These responses compared to an approval/disapproval rating of 52 and 43 percent among midwestern students and 36 and 58 percent among students in the East.8

In the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia and the student deaths at Kent State University and Jackson State College in May 1970 and the massive student protests on American campuses, a national Harris poll of eight hundred full-time undergraduates from fifty colleges yielded similar and revealing results. A higher proportion of southern students approved of the invasion, believed the operation would shorten the war, rated Nixon’s handling of the war “excellent” or “pretty good,” and favored “expanding” the war as the best course for ending the conflict. When asked to assess Nixon’s performance as president, Dixie’s undergraduates were significantly more supportive of the chief executive than other American students. Southerners responded with a 45 percent favorable and 55 percent negative evaluation, versus 29 favorable/71 negative for students nationally, 16/84 for both the East and the West, and 36/43 for the Midwest. Southern male students’ attitudes toward the draft clearly reflected the region’s military tradition. In response to the question, “If you were called up for the draft,” 53 percent of southern men answered that they would “accept the draft call and serve”; 25 percent replied that they would “attempt to avoid induction, but serve if these attempts failed”; and 12 percent declared they would “leave the country” rather than be inducted. In contrast, 27 percent of eastern men declared they would accept a draft call, 33 percent of midwesterners, and 23 percent of westerners.9

As was true nationally, southern students responded to the Vietnam War during a time of dramatic changes in American higher education and a more general inclination of young people to question authority. As the “baby boomers,” or the generation born near the end of World War II, came of age, the number of college-age students ballooned from sixteen to twenty-five million. These demographic changes were evident in the South, where enrollments increased by 75 percent from 1960 to 1965. During this time period, the University of Virginia’s student body grew by 31 percent; by 1965, enrollments at the University of North Carolina, Louisiana State University, and the University of Georgia had doubled, compared to 1958; and the University of Tennessee grew by 61 percent from 1964 to 1969.10

Both the vast increase in the number of students and their greater concentration on college campuses created the environment for a youth culture distinguished by its music, dress, and attitudes toward drugs and sexual relations. The participants in this culture came to question their elders on a broad array of issues, ranging from the length of one’s hair to economic justice, civil rights, and US foreign policy. Having gone to college at least in part to escape their parents’ control, college students during the 1960s and early 1970s also resented university-imposed restrictions on their personal behavior. Acting in loco parentis, southern universities legislated on many matters. Students at church-related schools, such as Furman University, attended obligatory chapel services and often were prohibited from sporting beards or dancing. Men and especially women faced curfews, and women frequently endured dress codes. For example, as late as February 1967, University of South Carolina coeds could not wear slacks or Bermuda shorts on campus and were allowed to don tight blue jeans or sweatshirts only if covered by a coat, while women at the University of Georgia were required to wear nontransparent coats to prevent men from seeing their gym uniforms. Students at Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, and William and Mary protested the exclusion of women from men’s dormitories. These attempts to regulate sexual conduct embodied in rules for women’s dress and hours were also evident in Louisiana State University’s decision to ban Playboy from men’s dorm rooms in October 1965. Sex, dress, and church attendance were not the only areas of concern. In Tallahassee in the early 1960s, white students at Florida State University and black students at Florida A&M University could not visit one another without written permission.11

These personal restrictions, together with issues of race, the Civil Rights Movement, and especially the war, produced unprecedented student activism nationally and across the South. Opponents and supporters of US involvement in Vietnam acted in the midst of numerous other student protests. Students at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt University, Western Kentucky University, the University of South Carolina, and Louisiana State University (LSU) decried restrictions on outside speakers. Dissidents at UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and LSU demanded better pay and working conditions for university service employees and marched to improve the lives of African Americans in their communities. Students at LSU criticized the university for closing the swimming pool rather than integrating it in the summer of 1964 and for refusing to integrate intercollegiate athletic teams; and University of Virginia students voted decisively in May 1970 for a student body composed of at least 20 percent African Americans. Southern students also actively objected to restrictions on their personal behavior. Indeed, on some campuses these rules engendered activism rivaling that focused on the war. A March 10, 1970, rally condemning LSU’s discriminatory women’s rules drew a crowd of twelve hundred, nearly twice the number who turned out for the largest on-campus protest directed at the US invasion of Cambodia and the deaths at Kent State University later in the spring.12

Diverse motives prompted southern students to protest the war. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon asserted male students acted out of a desire to avoid combat. LBJ declared, “I don’t give a damn about those little pinkos on the campuses; they’re just waving their diapers and bellyaching because they don’t want to fight.” Nixon agreed that student protestors opposed the war “to keep from getting their asses shot off” rather than out of “moral conviction.” Both presidents were partially correct. Beginning in 1966, the Johnson administration opted to draft undergraduate men whose grade point average fell below a C and the next year ended deferments for graduate students. These changes made the prospect of serving in Vietnam all too real for these students and their families. More ephemeral social attractions brought other students to antiwar rallies. An often-repeated boomer recollection declared, “Protesting was a great place to get laid, get high, and listen to some great rock.”13

Self-preservation and comparatively trivial social considerations did not exhaust the bases for student opposition to the war. As one University of South Florida activist stated, “Some people were there just for the drugs and good times, but the people I knew were really not. We were committed to higher ideals.” In the most general sense, antiwar students challenged the nation to live up to its professed and highest ideals, and these young people believed optimistically in the possibility of positive changes, whether in the realm of foreign policy, race relations, or women’s rights. For these students the path to dissent involved both an emotional and an intellectual transformation, and the latter had often come after reading, attending lectures, discussions, and teach-ins. Steve Smith (pseudonym), a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Georgia, described this process to an Atlanta Constitution reporter in May 1970. From a “reactionary middle-class family” in south Georgia, Smith had been a political conservative in high school; but upon arriving in Athens, he “began to read a lot and began questioning a lot of things I had never thought of before.” Neither a “revolutionary” nor a proponent of violence, Smith came to favor substantive changes in American society and to oppose the “politically, morally and economically unsound” US intervention in Vietnam. After he participated in the October 1969 Moratorium opposing the war, his parents threatened to “disown” him if he continued protesting the war. During his trip home in early 1970, “the local John Birchers” had so “harassed” him and his family that he had “to pack up and leave” since he was viewed as a “Communist.” Smith sadly concluded that when his parents learned that he had demonstrated against the US invasion of Cambodia, he would be unable to “go home anymore.”14

Other southern students elaborated on their reasons and motives for opposing the war. Bentley Alexander, a lonely voice “On the Left” among LSU students in the mid-1960s, contended that US intervention in Vietnam conflicted with the nation’s professed ideals and goal of self-government. He also reminded his classmates that killing people in an “impersonal” fashion with “modern weapons” was no less atrocious than deaths inflicted in a more “personal” and ostensibly more “brutal” way. Another LSU student objected to having his taxes support the war and thereby making him “indirectly responsible for the deaths of innocent people.” Other students believed that the war diverted attention and resources from pressing domestic needs. A Tennessee man observed, “You couldn’t fight poverty, you couldn’t fight racism . . . ’cause everything was being poured into . . . this damn war over in Vietnam.” An editorial writer for the Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia agreed that the “Vietnam Tragedy” had forced the “most serious domestic problems—those of housing, education, job opportunities, urban development, [and] pollution control”—into the background.15

Some students asserted that US involvement in Vietnam was simply bad policy. A North Carolina opponent of the war declared, “We had no business in Vietnam. We had no national interest. . . . It was an unconstitutional war, it was an undeclared war, it was undemocratically decided, and it only benefitted the rich folks—the war machine, the military industrial complex.” Agreeing wholeheartedly with this characterization of the war, Tom Gardner, a prominent member of SSOC and one of the foremost activists at the University of Virginia, perceived opposition to the war as integral to two more ambitious goals: first, to break all Defense Department ties to universities by eliminating ROTC and defense-related and sponsored research; and, second, “to mobilize a group of people which can effect a revolution in this country.” Gardner’s pursuit of revolution placed him considerably to the left of most southern student dissenters, who were politically liberal or moderate and were as likely to oppose the war simply because it was “all so senseless” as to envision radical institutional change in the United States.16

While subscribing to many of these sentiments, antiwar southern Vietnam veterans added an especially powerful voice to the dissenting chorus. The leaders of the University of Georgia’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War chapter declared that after being “honorably discharged from active duty in Southeast Asia,” they had “voluntarily enlisted” in the campaign “to end the war and to see that all Americans are brought home where they may join us in working for a just and peaceful world.” Later, they urged fellow students to attend a rally in Atlanta to highlight the “suffering of the Indochinese people,” the “plight of our brothers in uniform,” and the misery of “American POWs.” When student veterans at LSU castigated demonstrators, a former marine condemned their intolerant, “immature display of PATRIOTISM” and “False Loyalty” and argued that their service gave them no right to suppress dissent. Instead, it obligated veterans “to preserve and defend our society wherein dissent, disagreement, and protest may prevail.”17

Although southern antiwar students acted from diverse motives and voiced numerous objections to the war, they remained a minority on even the most activist campuses, such as the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia, and the University of Texas. The majority of Dixie’s students, like those nationally, were apathetic, supportive of the war, or too busy working and balancing family obligations while attending urban commuter schools or community colleges to have time for antiwar protests. For example, Greg A. Mausz, a former district president of the Florida Junior College Student Government Association, informed President Nixon that he represented “a large majority of . . . concerned students” who “do not grow our hair long, . . . do not have beards, . . . do not protest in the streets, [and] do not riot or burn down R.O.T.C. units.” Similarly, the working and middle class and first-generation college students at the New Orleans branches of Southern University and Louisiana State University (LSUNO), both commuter campuses, were far more interested in “bread and butter” issues such as tuition hikes or the level of state funding for their institutions than the war. In September 1967, the editors of the LSUNO student paper explained: “In addition to the traditional playboys out for a merry old time in college, there are (and this is perhaps the largest group) students who are almost desperately eking out a stake in the economic system and seeking a means to the type of life and work they want.” These students had no “inclination to risk their chances at completing the formal schooling they want so badly.”18

On more traditional, residential southern campuses, prowar students spoke for the majority of their peers. By denouncing antiwar protestors as “dirt-balls,” “hippies and dupes,” “scraggly-bearded men and . . . dirty-haired girls,” and “dirty-armpit Vietniks,” these critics echoed the perspectives of the region’s adults and daily papers. Writing from “The Right Hand Corner,” in the LSU Daily Reveille, Mike Connelly dismissed the “peace movement” as a “gigantic fraud” directed by un-American groups, praised and supported by communists, and selectively opposed to the Vietnam War while ignoring instances of blatant communist aggression. Student supporters of the war argued that the United States had both a moral and a strategic interest in the conflict. They contended that the SEATO agreements legally justified US intervention and that the US government had made a “moral commitment” to safeguard self-government in South Vietnam. Other critics of peace activists declared that protestors demoralized American soldiers, engendered “greater inspiration” among US enemies, and thereby caused “more American and Vietnamese . . . blood [to be] spilled.” Only a “united front” at home would yield “a successful peace negotiation.”19

Prowar students also voiced the region’s fervent anticommunism and forcefully propounded the accompanying strategic rationale for the war. The communist “appetite for power and control” was “insatiable,” and North Vietnam and by extension the People’s Republic of China were waging an aggressive war of “military conquest.” In the process, the “Viet Cong murderers” had committed “atrocities” that surpassed in “scope and technique” the crimes of even the “Nazi terrorists of World War II.” Since this blatant communist aggression and terrorism imperiled not just South Vietnam but all of Southeast Asia, the forceful US application of containment was imperative. Once the United States was involved, the war had to “be fought and won regardless of cost.” To practice “appeasement” would forfeit a strategic region to the communists and embolden the Chinese and Soviets. Losing on this “worldwide stage for a showdown between Communism and Freedom” would destroy US credibility by reducing “us to a third-rate power in the eyes of the world and render our word valueless to all free nations.” “Peace through victory” was the only acceptable path since it would “assure every potential aggressor that any encroachment . . . on the rights of others” would lead to “ultimate destruction.” Achieving this victory required the unrestrained bombing of strategic and military targets in North Vietnam and perhaps even destruction of the dikes containing the Red River.20

Just as Vietnam veterans bolstered the antiwar cause, returning soldiers added an authoritative dimension to the prowar brief. An “outraged veteran” at the University of Virginia was appalled at what he considered “traitorous practices” by groups of “ignorant cowards” and declared he had little hope for the nation if these dissenters were “allowed to dictate policy.” Another Virginia veteran emphasized the complexity of the issues and problems in Vietnam and recoiled at the thought that protestors might have a voice in whether he should be required to return to the battle: “I’m all for love and flowers and irresponsibility—but they don’t” produce “decisions and leadership.” An LSU vet was equally critical of peace demonstrations, which, he believed, served only to “boost” the “egos” of the marchers by thrusting them into the “limelight.” These veterans urged their fellow students to stop the “foolishness” and “get behind the war.”21

In the face of southern conservatism, student dissent emerged more slowly and proved less extensive in Dixie than nationally. As was true nationally, opposition to the war was most often spawned locally, without clear, coherent national or even regional direction. Still, the Southern Student Organizing Committee, founded in Nashville in April 1964 with a self-conscious sense of southern distinctiveness and a determination to pursue social justice without being dominated by any outside group (such as SDS), played a central role in southern student opposition to the war. After initially concentrating on civil rights, SSOC began devoting greater attention to the war in early 1966 by helping to organize the Southern Days of Protest. The high point of these early efforts came on February 12, 1966, when 500 people heard SDS leader Tom Hayden speak at Vanderbilt, 125 protestors attended an antiwar rally in Richmond, and 40 dissenters picketed a prowar Affirmation Vietnam Rally in Atlanta. Later, in May and June, SSOC members distributed protest literature at eighty Selective Service College Qualification Test Centers, where men took exams to gain deferments. In August, a fast and vigil at Nashville’s War Memorial led to the arrest of 21 protestors.22

In an even more ambitious project, SSOC dispatched lecturers on Peace Tours to Florida in February and March 1967 and later to six other southern states during the 1967–1968 school year. The tours were a testament to the dedication and courage of Tom Gardner, David Nolan, and Nancy Hodes, the primary lecturers. Their experiences also afforded great insight into the attitudes of the majority of southern students, college administrators, and local governmental authorities. This intrepid trio gave public lectures on the Vietnam War, US relations with China, and the draft system; staffed tables for distributing antiwar literature; and spoke in classes when invited. During the Florida sojourn, they attracted considerable attention, including an interview on Larry King’s radio show and a surprising amount of television coverage. However, their reception in the Sunshine State was hardly reassuring. Hodes remembered “being the object of incredible hostility” and addressing “crowds who were ready to rip us apart.” After prowar students burned a Conestoga wagon adorned with Peace Tour posters in Gainesville, the SSOC travelers and a local SSOC dissenter were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest at Miami-Dade Junior College, where they refused to abide by an administration-imposed five-minute time limit on talks and a ban on distributing antiwar literature.23

Subsequent Peace Tours to Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia elicited similarly discouraging reactions, ranging from apathy to hostility. Reporting on their treks through Arkansas and Virginia, Nolan complained of “contented radicals” in the former and a “cool” reception in the latter. Such responses were preferable to the Erskine College (South Carolina) student who threatened them with a loaded handgun; the mob at Appalachian State University, which destroyed their antiwar materials and pounded on their car as they hastily departed the campus; or Belmont Abbey undergraduates, who carried signs proclaiming “Commies Go Home” and “God Is A Marine.”24

The SSOC continued its antiwar activities until its dissolution in early June 1969. Both its civil rights work and its opposition to the war had provided a crucial voice for white student dissenters and helped lay the groundwork for the most significant southern student actions against the war, in October 1969 and May 1970. Still, in January 1968 SSOC had just sixteen active chapters, with only the five at the University of Arkansas, Duke University, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, and the University of Virginia at major schools. Like the May 1967 mailing list that cited only eleven southern antiwar centers among eighty-five nationally, the number of SSOC chapters reemphasized the relative conservatism of southern students. Moreover, the SSOC’s restricted organizational reach paralleled the relatively delayed onset of student opposition to the war in the South.25

There were early, but exceptional, southern protests. During the fall of 1965, more than 1,000 students attended the South’s first teach-in at Emory University, featuring the well-known socialist Norman Thomas and Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson; and a comparable crowd witnessed a debate between two faculty members at the University of Florida. In marked contrast, LSU’s Daily Reveille maintained a prowar editorial stance even in the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State deaths; LSU antiwar protestors were physically attacked by other students in May 1967; and the largest campus demonstration prior to the October 1969 Moratorium came in November 1967, when 100 students took part in a panty raid. “Affirmation: Viet Nam,” a Georgia prowar student organization, held a 20,000-person rally at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium in February 1966, when it presented a poll ostensibly demonstrating that 96.6 percent of students consulted at forty-seven of the state’s fifty colleges and universities backed Johnson’s intervention in Vietnam. The University of Tennessee experienced no significant antiwar protests prior to May 1970; but 700 students rallied to support the war in October 1965; 1,000 turned out in January 1970 to see if the university president would accept a student’s challenge to a “duel” via “hand-to-hand combat”; and 1,500 attended an April 1970 rally to protest freshmen women’s dormitory hours. Despite SSOC’s founding and its administrative headquarters being in Nashville, 77 percent of Vanderbilt students polled in November 1967 favored victory in Vietnam. Not until November 1968 did the antiwar perspective become prevalent, when 1,400 students voted for withdrawal from Vietnam, versus 534 who endorsed an increased military effort.26

Developments at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond followed a similar pattern. In both 1965 and 1966 polls, 80 percent of the students questioned endorsed US involvement; and when student sentiment began to change in early 1968, the local Committee to End the War in Vietnam could attract a crowd of only 150 for a peace vigil. In the face of pervasive prowar sentiment at the University of South Carolina, no appreciable antiwar activities occurred until late 1968, and only police intervention saved the thirty students picketing General Westmoreland’s receipt of an honorary degree in May 1967 from physical attack by more than 200 hecklers. The small number of Young Liberals who had emerged by late 1966 at Florida State University regularly had their antiwar literature destroyed and were at times physically attacked by fraternity boys, athletes, and members of the Student Coalition Against Long-Haired Perverts (SCALP). In El Paso, very much a military town with Fort Bliss nearby, the first antiwar march in November 1965 drew 14 participants, 11 of whom were Texas Western University students. Only active police intervention protected these marchers from a hostile crowd of 2,000 to 2,500, who demonstrated their displeasure with eggs and tomatoes. Even at the University of Virginia, a more liberal and activist campus, the first twenty-three organized protestors confronted 300 angry prowar students in February 1966, the first teach-in held a year later drew a comparatively modest 300 participants, and the Cavalier Daily editors maintained a prowar position until fall 1967.27

As southern student dissent grew, it adopted forms and tactics much like those practiced by antiwar students nationally, save being far less radical, violent, and destructive. When assessing the diverse southern protests, it is essential to keep Dixie’s conservative context in mind. Southern students sought to sever what they considered university connections to the American war machine. They objected to mandatory ROTC on campuses, to Dow Chemical Company (the manufacturer of napalm) and the military soliciting new employees and recruits at universities, and to defense-related and -funded research at their schools. In “The Myth of Detachment,” published in the October 20, 1969, Cavalier Daily, Tom Gardner articulated the rationale for these objections. The former SSOC national chairman rejected the assertion by a senior University of Virginia faculty member that the university was “an institution . . . properly dedicated to the promotion of studying and teaching” and should not be used as “an ideological base or a political instrument.” Gardner dismissed this position as naïve, self-serving, and designed to quash dissent. How could the university be “politically and ideologically neutral,” while performing “classified Department of ‘Defense’ research” and incorporating the Judge Advocate General (JAG) school and ROTC into the curriculum? These connections to the military amounted to “nothing less than a significant institutional commitment” to “waging . . . counter-revolutionary warfare . . . against the nationalist forces of Vietnam.”28

Opposition arose to compulsory ROTC on virtually all southern campuses, even the more conservative ones such as LSU, and the most ardent antiwar students called for the complete expulsion of the officer training programs. SDS member Tom Falney at the University of Virginia asserted that ROTC was antithetical to a university’s purposes since it promoted “blind obedience” to orders rather than critical, independent thought and conveyed instruction on “the most efficient means of killing,” which was “completely nonacademic.” Falney’s letter generated a host of responses asserting that ROTC was essential to the nation’s defense, produced broadly educated “citizen soldiers” of whom Jefferson would have approved, and addressed many topics other than “killing and torture.”29

Beginning in 1966, protestors boycotted mandatory ROTC classes at the University of Mississippi, taunted ROTC cadets with water guns at the University of Texas, ran through the ranks and heckled the cadets as they conducted drills at the University of Virginia, and were dragged away by campus police after sitting down on Tulane University’s air force ROTC drill field. Antiwar students at Furman University, a small Baptist school in South Carolina, organized the Furman University Corps of Kazoos, or “F.U.C.K.,” to lampoon an ROTC parade and visiting military officials. Dissidents at Florida State University held “antimilitary balls” to mock the ROTC’s traditional military dances. After women checked their bras at the door for the 1971 event, they and their escorts elected a king and queen of the ball and viewed antiwar films and Tweety Bird cartoons. As the war ground on and student frustrations mounted, a more violent minority of protestors sought to destroy ROTC buildings. During 1969–1970, at the height of student protests, 197 ROTC buildings were attacked nationally. Only a small number of these attacks occurred in the South, where students occupied ROTC buildings at the University of Virginia and Florida State University; spray-painted antiwar slogans on the ROTC headquarters at Mercer University; broke windows at the University of Tennessee; unsuccessfully attempted to burn ROTC facilities at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Georgia; and were assumed (but not proven) to have burned the air force ROTC building at the University of Kentucky.30

Student opposition to defense-related activities included opposition to the Dow Chemical Company recruiting new employees on college campuses. Dow elicited the intense ire of antiwar students by producing and selling napalm, the jellied gasoline that the US military dropped from planes on its enemies (and nearby civilians) in Vietnam. Here again, efforts to disrupt recruiting occurred nationwide. By the end of 1967, Dow recruiters had faced nearly five hundred hostile receptions, often at otherwise quiet campuses. SSOC members at the University of Virginia greeted Dow recruiters in December 1967 with signs proclaiming “Dow Chemical Company, Merchants of Death,” “Napalm, Crime Against Humanity,” and “Burn Baby, Burn.” Eighty protestors confronted Dow representatives at Duke University in February 1968 and subsequently demanded that the university divest its stock holdings in Dow and other “war monger” companies, such as Lockheed. Emory University antiwar students posing as Dow officials interrupted their classmates’ lunch at the student cafeteria by exhibiting a wrought-iron replica of a “charred body” as evidence of napalm’s “effectiveness.” Demonstrations at the University of Florida in early 1968 led to the arrest of thirteen students for physically blocking the door leading to the Dow interview room. And students at both Virginia Commonwealth University and Vanderbilt focused attention on this issue by threatening to burn a puppy and thereby illustrate even more graphically napalm’s devastating effects.31

Southern antiwar activists also engaged in diverse antidraft actions and obstructed on-campus visits by military recruiters. SSOC distributed protest literature at eighty draft testing centers, organized protests in Atlanta and Raleigh to support SSOC members who had refused induction, and conducted numerous teach-ins and draft counseling sessions around the South. University of Virginia SSOC members founded the Charlottesville Draft Counseling Group and even organized a protest by thirteen students at a local high school. In Austin, six women conducted a sit-in at the Selective Service Board headquarters and announced they opposed their “husbands, boyfriends, or sons” being made into “killers in an unjust war.” Students at the University of South Florida threw water and red glitter at navy recruiters. In a much more serious incident, Florida State University officials videotaped sixty students objecting to the presence of marine recruiters and subsequently suspended twelve of the protestors for “deliberately . . . interfering with the rights of others” to enter or leave a university facility. In a variation on these antimilitary tactics, antiwar students at the University of South Carolina lent their support to dissident soldiers at nearby Fort Jackson. AWARE, the antiwar student group, hosted an on-campus “GI’s United Against the War in Vietnam” press conference in February 1969, and, later in April, forty students rallied in support of eight Fort Jackson soldiers charged with disturbing the peace.32

Like their counterparts nationally, southern antiwar students attempted to harass speakers representing both the Johnson and the Nixon administrations. The protestors’ experiences further illustrated the South’s relative conservatism and demonstrated why officials identified with the war ventured into Dixie with far less trepidation than into other regions of the country. Beginning in 1964, the University of Texas SDS chapter organized annual Easter weekend peace vigils at the LBJ Ranch, where they regularly were threatened by Nazi and Ku Klux Klan antagonists. The latter, of course, cared little for President Johnson but despised the student demonstrators. When General Lewis B. Hershey, the director of the Selective Service System, spoke at LSU in April 1966, six protestors braved the rain to brandish their signs reading, “Bring Our Boys Home, We Need Them in Mississippi,” and “Draft Beer not Students.” In a telling commentary on the prowar temper of the campus, a 105-member band welcomed Hershey, and LSU chancellor Cecil G. Taylor and president-emeritus and retired US Army general Troy H. Middleton joined Hershey on the speakers’ platform.33

Vice President Hubert Humphrey received an even warmer welcome a year later at the University of Georgia. Protests were so mild that the vice president, after receiving the blessing of football coach Vince Dooley, complimented the Georgia undergraduates as “the most polite students” he had met. The fifty-five dissenters who greeted Humphrey at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, were not so accommodating, as they brandished signs reading, “Hubie is a murderer of Vietnamese children,” and “Drop Rusk and McNamara, not napalm.” University of South Carolina student protestors who objected to General Westmoreland receiving an honorary doctor of law degree also found themselves in a distinctly minority position. The thirty critics who picketed the ceremony were jeered and threatened by more than two hundred prowar students who were also outside the small chapel where the ceremony was being conducted. Police intervention prevented a violent attack on the protestors but also enabled the officers to confiscate and destroy the anti-Westmoreland signs.34

Members of the Nixon administration encountered similarly determined but badly outnumbered antiwar protestors. Students from the University of South Florida, Florida Presbyterian, the New College in Sarasota, and Florida State attempted collectively to picket the awarding of a doctor of humane letters degree to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird in April 1969 but were stopped a mile from the St. Leo College campus by a combined force of one hundred police and National Guard troops. Still, a few St. Leo students managed to greet Laird upon his arrival with a sign asking, “What is so Humane About 216 G.I.s Killed last week?” Significantly, President Nixon, who had cancelled a trip to Ohio State University in 1969 as students declared “DICK . . . a four-letter word,” and opted not to attend his daughter’s graduation from Smith College the following year so as to avoid the inevitable protestors, accepted the Reverend Billy Graham’s invitation to join him for a session of his Crusade at the University of Tennessee football stadium on May 28, 1970—in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Cambodia and the student deaths at Kent State University and Jackson State College. The four hundred student protestors who came to denounce the war paled in comparison to the crowded stadium of Nixon partisans. The students chanted “peace, peace” when Nixon spoke and carried signs proclaiming “Thou Shall Not Kill.” One dissenter accurately described the scene as “250 Lions to 90,000 Christians,” and the Christians reacted very angrily, threatening to “smack” the protestors and advising one student “to stick it [a sign] up your a—.”35

As was true nationally, the apogee of southern student protests came in 1969–1970, first with the October 15, 1969, Vietnam Moratorium Day and then with the reactions to the US invasion of Cambodia and subsequent student deaths at Kent State and Jackson State. In decided contrast to attacks on ROTC buildings or clashes with university administrators or police, the Vietnam Moratorium was envisioned by two former staffers for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign as a day during which people stopped their regular activities—declared a moratorium—and expressed opposition to the war. By early fall, organizations were in place on at least three hundred campuses when the idea “caught on like wildfire” and spread to schools across the nation. Even more important, what had begun “as a day of student protest spilled out into the adult community” and included at least two million participants.36

Southern college students participated in ways much like the rest of the nation. Now eighty-nine years old, Jeanette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives and who voted against US entry into both World Wars I and II, spoke to a massive crowd at the University of Georgia; 4,500 students rallied for peace at the University of Texas, and a crowd of nearly 12,000 listened to speakers on the state capitol grounds; 1,200 University of Louisville students joined the university president in planting a “peace tree”; 44 Louisiana State University undergraduates conducted an all-night prayer vigil; in New Orleans, 200 Tulane and Loyola University students joined a crowd of 3,000 to hear antiwar speeches near City Hall; 3,000 Florida State students sang antiwar songs and chanted “Stop the War” as they joined a candlelight march around the campus on October 14; 700 Vanderbilt undergraduates attended a sermon, distributed antiwar literature in Nashville, or listened to the names of war dead being read aloud; the Black Student Association at Talladega College declared a day of protest without administration consent; Virginia Commonwealth students joined townspeople in a 2,000-strong procession reaching from the public library to the state capitol; and 1,200 Western Kentucky students attended a five-hour peace rally, which the student newspaper described as the university’s “first bona fide demonstration in memory.”37

At the University of South Carolina, antiwar students attended a memorial service for the war dead, symposia, and films but faced a competing message from the Young Republicans and YAF, who denounced the Moratorium as a “fraud” designed as an excuse to miss classes and sponsored “a positive, pro-American rally” supporting President Nixon and the war. Moratorium organizers at Louisiana State University also encountered opposition. Graves Thomas proclaimed in a Daily Reveille editorial entitled “Moratorium?—Hell!” that calls for immediate US withdrawal would embolden the communists in Vietnam and elsewhere and prolong the war, and YAF members derided the event. In predicting the Moratorium would attract only “a couple of hundred demonstrators” and be a “flop,” Graves underestimated both the protest organizers and the depth of discontent with the war on this decidedly conservative campus. The Vietnam Moratorium Steering Committee wisely emphasized that it was not advocating immediate withdrawal; instead, the day would be devoted to “constructive and peaceful activity” and to providing an opportunity for LSU students to “show their desire for an end to the war.” Operating from this decidedly moderate position, the committee garnered the endorsement of the Inter Fraternity Council and oversaw a day on which forty-four students planted crosses on the “drill field” to honor American war dead, twelve hundred attended an address at midday, and one thousand participated in a candlelight memorial service as the Moratorium ended.38

As Moratorium Day approached at the University of Virginia, protest organizers and the Student Council urged President Edgar Shannon to cancel classes; the YAF threatened to sue for breach of contract if classes were formally suspended; and senior faculty members openly debated the propriety of locating such a protest at the university. Shannon refused to cancel classes, but Moratorium organizers still judged their efforts a success. Senator George McGovern, a prominent critic of the war, spoke on October 10; and Professor Norman A. Graebner, a specialist on US foreign relations, denounced the war on October 14, while other faculty members led discussions in the dorms, and a candlelight march wound through the university grounds. There followed on October 15 a full day of seminars, debates, and chapel services, with fifteen hundred students gathering for a rally at noon. Reflecting the heady optimism that such activities embodied nationwide, the Cavalier Daily proclaimed, “The days of the military domination of United States foreign policy are numbered.”39

Such assumptions proved unfounded as President Nixon effectively countered the Moratorium and the subsequent five-hundred-thousand-plus demonstration in Washington in mid-November 1969 with his “silent majority” speech condemning the minority of protestors and troublemakers who ostensibly endangered the nation’s “future and a free society.” Playing on and reinforcing the general public’s hostility toward the protestors, Nixon declared, “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.” Only unpatriotic, disloyal Americans who undermined the war effort could “do that.”40

The president subsequently squandered his seeming public relations coup by dispatching US troops into Cambodia and provoking “easily the most massive and shattering protest in the history of American higher education.” Outraged that the president appeared to be expanding rather than contracting the war, as he had promised, students lashed out following the nationally televised announcement of his decision on April 30 and his disparaging reference the next morning to “bums” who were “blowing up campuses.” As eleven northeastern student editors called for a national student strike, walkouts erupted spontaneously across the country. Student deaths at Kent State and Jackson State greatly intensified the initial student unrest. After the ROTC building was burned and sixty-nine students arrested on May 3, nervous and exhausted Ohio National Guard troops fired on Kent State students (some who had hurled bricks and insults and others who were just on their way to class). Nine were wounded and four killed. Once again, Nixon heightened student indignation by declaring that events at Kent State “should remind us all . . . that when dissent turns into violence, it invites tragedy.”41

Nine days later, partly in response to the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, a group of about three hundred students at Jackson State College, an all-black school in Mississippi, threw rocks at passing cars and attempted to burn the ROTC quarters. When unrest resumed the next night, May 14, state police fired on the students. Three hundred rounds hit a dormitory, twelve students were wounded, and two young women inside the dorm were killed. The deaths at Jackson State received far less attention than those at Kent State, but the young women’s fate said much about the temper of the times and further stimulated student dissent.42

In the immediate aftermath of the Jackson State tragedy, Turner McCullough, an African American student at the University of South Carolina (USC), spoke for black students across the South when he declared he was not “greatly shocked” at the deaths in Mississippi. Events at Jackson State were simply a “continuation of insults being thrown at black people.” He also drew a pointed contrast between the use of tear gas and clubs against white students in South Carolina and the use of bullets against blacks in Mississippi. Elaborating on this racial dichotomy, McCullough asserted that black students supported the USC protests in Columbia, but “as far as active participation, we know what the University can do. You can fight it if you’re white.”43

McCullough raised two important issues regarding African American students and antiwar protests in the South. First, as was true nationally, black students participated at a lower rate than whites; second, African American students incurred greater personal risks by taking part in any form of protest. At the height of the war, in 1968, most black college students, approximately 150,000, or 61 percent, attended historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the South. These students were not quiescent, but they were, compared to their white counterparts, less inclined to protest the war. Although black undergraduates certainly understood the heavier burden the war placed on young black men, African American students gave greater priority to domestic racial issues, such as the continuing segregation of public facilities, and university matters, such as calls for more black professors and black studies curricula, a greater voice in university decision making, and enhanced pay for campus service workers.44

Black students were also acutely aware of the deadly force directed at the protestors on HBCU campuses. A series of incidents beginning in 1967 demonstrated that police and National Guard troops were even more prone to be employed at black schools than on campuses in the South generally. Jackson State was no aberration. In May 1967 police fired three thousand rounds into a dormitory at Texas Southern University in Houston. The following year members of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division killed three and wounded another thirty students at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. Also in 1968, three hundred National Guards and seventy state troopers were called to Tuskegee University when the students boycotted classes to protest compulsory ROTC and locked twelve university trustees in a guest house. Possible violence was averted when a black sheriff intervened.45

Nineteen sixty-nine brought two similar incidents. Antiwar sentiment was a part of the motivation for student dissent at Voorhees College in Denmark, South Carolina. No shots were fired, but police invaded faculty homes in search of protestors; and in the aftermath of the demonstrations, five faculty were fired for allegedly prompting the student protestors, and seven students were convicted of rioting, looting, and arson and sentenced to eighteen months to two years of hard labor. Following protests over Vietnam and a number of local issues at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro in May, police shot and killed one student, and in a subsequent confrontation five police and two students were wounded. Greensboro’s mayor declared, “It’s just like guerillas in Vietnam,” and Governor Louis B. Nunn dispatched six hundred National Guards, a tank, several armed personnel carriers, an airplane, and a helicopter to the campus in what one journalist termed “the most massive armed assault ever made on an American university.” Finally, in November 1972, sheriff’s deputies killed two unarmed students at the Southern University Campus in Baton Rouge. As the war ended in 1973, a Black Collegian editorial reflected on these campus events at HBCU campuses and the lack of national indignation: “Why are we not screaming about the injustice? Good God, we are being murdered, not just on the college campus, but everywhere, with the same lack of consideration and lack of law as during the days of lynching.”46

Violence was not confined to black campuses in the wake of the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths at Kent State and Jackson State as student opposition to the war rose to a crescendo. More than two million students demonstrated, and approximately 450 colleges and universities experienced strikes or closures. Although outbreaks of violence received disproportionate press attention, the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, with only 5 percent involving violence and 7 percent requiring the intervention of outside police or the National Guard. Consistent with the conservatism of southern students, Dixie’s university and college administrators reported the lowest number (54) and lowest percentage (20.8) of schools experiencing “incidents of campus unrest.” Still, these administrators and southern governors were more likely than officials from other regions to summon off-campus police. Even as southern students demonstrated greater restraint than students nationally, the number of reported incidents of campus unrest more than doubled when compared to the 1968–1969 school year. Still, developments on southern campuses were more than sufficient to elicit vociferous condemnation from public officials, the press, and the southern public.47

The depth of student “frustration” and the “volatile, angry crowd” stunned a Florida State University (FSU) protestor; and the FSU chancellor, who had “never seen students so angry,” spoke for university administrators nationwide. Despite this anger and potential volatility, no violence ensued at FSU. Although students occupied the ROTC building on May 5, they left peacefully when the police arrived. Over the next four days, groups of student protestors ranging from four hundred to four thousand repeatedly ringed the ROTC building. Although a few windows were broken, there were no serious altercations with the authorities. At the urging of students and faculty, classes were officially cancelled on May 8 when one thousand antiwar students marched to the state capitol to present a petition calling for an end to the war. Members of the Florida House of Representatives wearing black arm bands accepted the petition in a civil political gesture complemented by that of Governor Claude Kirk spending the entire night of May 7 on campus answering student questions. Although Kirk, a conservative Republican, did not waver in his support for President Nixon’s Vietnam policies, his calming actions contrasted sharply with those of the president he defended.48

In terms of the number of students involved, the protestors’ tactics, and the frequent use of outside police, events at FSU were generally representative of developments at southern universities. Following a candlelight memorial march by one thousand students at the University of Alabama, approximately fifty of the protestors “liberated” the snack bar at the student union. Later that evening, the students peacefully left the building at the behest of 140 state, university, and Tuscaloosa city police. Governor Albert Brewer then imposed a campus curfew and forbade campus gatherings of more than six people. After a three-day moratorium on demonstrations, a May 12 rally of three hundred students in defiance of the curfew led to fifty-seven arrests. A contingent of five hundred University of Arkansas students marched from the campus to downtown Fayetteville, where fifty-seven of them were arrested for sitting down in the street outside of the local draft board. One thousand University of Miami students attended a rally on May 7. The next day three hundred protestors blocked the entrance to the administration building but dispersed peacefully after the university president agreed to a faculty resolution for a three-day suspension of classes. Nearly one thousand dissidents also attended rallies at Emory, Eastern Kentucky, North Texas State, and the University of Texas at El Paso, the latter in marked contrast to the eleven lonely student marchers in November 1965. After a week of protests, more than one hundred Western Kentucky University students challenged an administration restraining order banning all campus demonstrations. At Tulane University, fistfights broke out between antiwar students and members of the football team and Young Americans for Freedom over whether the American flag should be lowered to half-mast in recognition of the Kent State deaths. Four to five hundred black students marched from the Shaw University campus to the Raleigh, North Carolina, city square, and Shaw president King V. Cheek sent a telegram on behalf of the faculty and students to President Nixon urging him to “hear” the student voices and to create a “less frustrating and more humane climate for free discussion” and dissent by all Americans. Dr. Cheek concluded, “The suppression of dissent on the college campuses by bayonets, live ammunition and inflammatory oratory from our national and state leaders is un-American [and] antithetical to the pursuit of truth in colleges and universities.”49

On May 5 three thousand University of Tennessee students rallied against the war and the Kent State deaths and thereafter carried out a three-day strike. Similarly peaceful gatherings occurred at Vanderbilt, where rallies in support of the war equaled those in opposition, and at LSU, where two thousand attended a memorial for the Kent State students, but letters to the editor and the Daily Reveille’s editorial stance remained supportive of the war. Protestors at the University of Georgia were less orderly but hardly radical. After fifty students broke windows, forced their way into the Academic Building, and set off the sprinkler system on May 6, President Fred C. Davison addressed a crowd of three thousand. Many jeered when he agreed to optional class attendance for the next two days but rejected calls to suspend classes officially. Students confronted Davison again the next day at his home with demands that he sign a letter denouncing Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia. Davison again refused; and after the university secured a restraining order barring students from entering buildings “for any purpose” other than normal “educational and business affairs,” the Red and Black’s headline, “protest fizzles,” proved accurate. There followed a two-week student senate debate that yielded only a bland statement in response to Cambodia and Kent State and a referendum in which students opposed the Cambodian intervention by a 2,064 to 1,682 vote but endorsed Nixon’s overall Vietnam policies by a vote of 1,967 to 1,809.50

Student actions at the Universities of Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Virginia were less restrained. As had been the case during the October 1969 Moratorium, the largest number of southern students protested at the University of Texas (UT). Even before the invasion of Cambodia, 8,000 antiwar protestors marched through downtown Austin on March 18, 1970. Their failure to secure a permit from the city council resulted in thirteen arrests. In response to Cambodia and the deaths at Kent State, 2,500 to 3,000 students marched from the campus to the federal building, where they threw rocks and smoke bombs at police, who responded with tear gas and billy clubs and made five arrests. Five thousand students rallied the next day, and the UT president agreed to two days of forums, but not to the official suspension of classes. Although the university Board of Regents unanimously rejected the forums and called for “business as usual,” most students honored the strike. The week of protests ended peacefully on May 8 with a massive march of 15,000 to 20,000 through downtown Austin. The Austin city council again denied a permit for the demonstration, but federal judge Jack Roberts approved the march, which was comprised of students 25 abreast stretching for twelve city blocks.51

Essentially quiescent before May 1970, University of Kentucky students also responded vigorously to Cambodia, Kent State, and the stationing of state police and National Guards on their campus. Five hundred students (out of more than fifteen thousand) gathered on May 1 and endorsed the impeachment of President Nixon. On May 5, in the wake of the deaths at Kent State, a like number protested in front of the university’s eighteen-floor office tower, and thirty of those students forced their way into a Board of Trustees meeting, where they demanded the condemnation of events in Cambodia and at Kent State, a campus moratorium to protest these actions, and the disarming of campus police.52

That evening a memorial march swelled to one thousand despite verbal abuse and thrown bottles from football players and fraternity men. Tensions later rose appreciably when approximately five hundred marchers confronted one hundred riot-equipped police summoned to campus by university security authorities. The standoff ended when both police and students ran several blocks to the air force ROTC building, which burned to the ground. There followed three additional anxiety-filled days as groups of students ranging from eight hundred to fifteen hundred faced off against state police and National Guard troops (the latter brandishing fixed bayonets), who had been dispatched to the campus by Governor Louis B. Nunn after he declared a state of emergency. Although some students threw rocks and the police and guards used tear gas and billy clubs and made forty-five arrests, no serious incidents ensued in what were decidedly peaceful protests. At the end of the week, Nunn withdrew the state police and the National Guard, and the prowar Lexington Herald Leader ultimately conceded, “The campus was a lot more peaceful than anyone wanted to think it was.”53

Governor Robert E. McNair also declared a state of emergency and dispatched the National Guard to the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Protests began there on May 5 when 300 students marched around the campus carrying four large black crosses inscribed with the names of the students killed at Kent State. Two days later, 150 students occupied the student center, and 37 of them were arrested after they refused to leave. When a crowd of 2,000 threatened the police escorting the arrested students, the National Guard was called to the campus, but no violence occurred. The guards returned to the campus the following Monday after students took over the principal administration building, where they broke windows, destroyed official files, and scrawled obscenities on the walls. In the process of evacuating the building, the National Guard clashed with a throng of 1,000 students; more rocks and bottles were hurled at the guards, and the students, 85 of whom were arrested, became the targets of tear gas and clubs. This clash resulted in the stationing of 600 National Guard troops, 145 state police and State Law Enforcement Division agents, and numerous local police on the campus and the imposition of a 9 P.M. to 6 A.M. campus curfew. On Tuesday, May 13, additional clashes took place between the students and the authorities and resulted in another 20 arrests.54

In the midst of this unprecedented student unrest at USC, Jane Fonda spoke to an audience of fifteen hundred at a park adjoining the campus. While explaining the US involvement in Vietnam as the product of American corporate economic interests and damning President Nixon, she implored South Carolina students to study events in Southeast Asia and to protest actively rather than just “go to Myrtle Beach and drink beer,” but she also urged them to do so peacefully. She advocated draft resistance and specifically cited a regulation requiring draft boards to file all materials sent to them. Young men, she instructed, should employ their “imagination” and present their draft boards with items such as “surfboards, garbage cans, [and] water melons.” Although Fonda’s call for peaceful dissent was hardly the cause, USC protests subsided after her talk on May 14.55

Although not so rowdy or tense as in Kentucky or South Carolina or marked by as many participants as in Texas, student protests at the University of Virginia were revealing. The student strike stretched over a week; two attempts (albeit minor ones) were made to burn ROTC facilities; student activists sought to attach broad-ranging additional demands to the ones directly associated with Cambodia and Kent State; and President Edgar F. Shannon assumed a particularly active, sympathetic, and ultimately decisive role in the course of events. News of the deaths at Kent State spurred a largely spontaneous demonstration of 1,200 students in front of the Rotunda on May 3. From the Rotunda, the students marched to Shannon’s home, where he began a dialogue with the protestors that extended over the next ten days. When 250 of the students subsequently occupied Maury Hall, which housed the navy ROTC, Shannon secured an injunction, and the students peacefully departed the next morning. On May 5, 900 to 1,000 students attended a series of lectures by faculty and students and listened to public pronouncements from a Strike Committee. The committee presented Shannon with a series of “demands” also endorsed by the Student Council. These demands called for an end to the injunction against occupying public buildings, the disarming of university police and the banning of outside police from the campus, the separation of ROTC and the JAG school from the university, the termination of all defense-related research, and Shannon’s endorsement of a letter condemning the invasion of Cambodia. Employing a tactic often adopted by student protestors, the committee added demands that Shannon endorse the right of university employees to bargain collectively and strike and that the university establish and pursue a goal of 20 percent of the student body becoming African American.56

Matters continued to escalate on May 6 when three thousand students gathered for a noontime rally; and nine thousand listened to fiery speeches from William Kunstler and Jerry Rubin, both of whom had been scheduled to speak at University Hall, the basketball arena, long before the provocative events in Cambodia or at Kent State. Following the speeches, many students returned to Shannon’s home to press him on the demands, and two thousand protestors again descended on Maury Hall, where approximately two hundred occupied the building in defiance of the injunction. With police en route, the students once more peacefully evacuated the building, but not before a mattress fire was discovered in the basement. In the second attempted arson of the evening, a fire was also set in the army ROTC storage facilities in another building.57

Although President Shannon did not accept any of the student demands and emphasized that the university was officially open despite the strike, he arranged for student leaders to speak with Virginia’s US senators, Harry F. Byrd Jr. and William B. Spong. He also released his letter to the senators in which he declared his grave concerns over the “continued alienation of our young men and women owing largely” to the war and his “firm conviction that student views and questions on this matter” needed to be heard by policymakers. Shannon’s plea for nonviolence and moderation was echoed by the editors of the Cavalier Daily and by several key faculty members, such as William Harbaugh from the History Department, whom students recognized as sympathetic and passionately opposed to the war. Indeed, moderate students asserted a decisive influence as the week ended by securing a student referendum on a slightly amended set of strike demands for Monday, May 11.58

Not even the arrest of fifty demonstrators and onlookers over the weekend altered the moderate tone and direction that had evolved. The arrests, which involved county and city police chasing students well onto the university grounds, came on Saturday night after the third night of students obstructing traffic and urging motorists to honk for peace. On Sunday, May 10, Shannon addressed another crowd of approximately 4,000, and on Monday, 4,909 of the students voting, or 68 percent (more than half of the student body), voted to continue the strike. The students also voted to prohibit university police from being armed, to bar outside police from the university, to treat women equally in terms of admission, and to pursue the goal of a student body composed of 20 percent African Americans. Significantly, students rejected steps to sever university ties with ROTC and the JAG school.59

As classes ended the week of May 11, so did the strike, but not before drawing the ire of conservative Virginians. The Richmond Times Dispatch criticized President Shannon for negotiating with “irresponsible activists” and for allegedly praising the protestors who attempted to burn Maury Hall. Republican governor Linwood Holton defended Nixon’s Vietnam policies and declared that Virginia “taxpayers” were “mad” and “ready to cut off funds to state supported schools.” It was “time now to get back to the books—back to classes.” Shannon quickly released a statement emphasizing that the university had never been closed, that events in Charlottesville had remained peaceful, and that the letter he and five thousand members of the university community had signed and sent to President Nixon had asserted only two key points—that the president’s announcement of the Cambodian invasion had been used for “personal public relations purposes” and that the Senate had not been consulted. Worried that Shannon’s presidency was in jeopardy, the Cavalier Daily editorialized “In Defense of Shannon” and proclaimed that since he had “sided with the students at a crucial moment,” the students also had “an obligation to support him.” “Richmond” should “expect a fight” if the governor or legislature attempted to remove him. Neither sought to do so.60

In the midst of this unprecedented student revolt, President Nixon asked Alexander Heard, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, to serve as a special advisor to the president. Heard was charged with keeping Nixon “fully and currently informed on the thinking of the academic community and especially the young” and with recommending ways the president could stay “better advised on campus affairs.” Working with James E. Cheek, the president of Howard University, who accepted a similar assignment, Heard formally agreed to serve until the end of June and submitted a final, forty-page “Heard Report” on July 16. Over this two-month period, Heard spent eleven hours in sessions with Nixon; arranged for a Harris poll of student opinion and a separate survey of May events on nearly two hundred campuses; met with numerous university officials, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and several cabinet members; and produced fifty single-spaced pages of memoranda for the president.61

Perhaps Nixon and his staff anticipated a set of face-saving, proadministration suggestions from the Georgia-born Heard, who had earned his BA and PhD degrees in political science from the University of North Carolina and had headed up private and conservative Vanderbilt since 1963. If so, they were decidedly disappointed. In his sessions with Nixon and the written materials, Heard emphasized that the administration faced a “national crisis,” rather than an “aberrational outburst by the young—or simply a ‘student crisis.’” The Vanderbilt chancellor admitted that before the invasion of Cambodia he and most other university administrators had deemed “only a small minority of students” deeply disaffected. His revised assessment held that Cambodia and Kent State had “triggered a vast pre-existing charge of pent up frustration and dissatisfaction.” This dissatisfaction, according to the head of the Republican Ripon Society, focused not just on the war but also on “fears . . . of repression” by government; a sense that the administration was unresponsive and inattentive to domestic problems; and, perhaps most damning, a basic questioning of the validity of “the political system itself.” Heard asserted that students were emerging as a separate, self-conscious “class in society,” comparable to farmers, organized labor, or war veterans. As such, they warranted specific attention. Moreover, it was wrong to impugn their motives; although “often emotional and egocentric,” students acted from genuine “idealism”—from “humane concern for victims of racial discrimination, for those who suffer in the urban ghettos, for the poor in Appalachia, and for those who die—under whatever flag—in Southeast Asia.” Therefore, “the young may be trying to tell us things we ought to hear.”62

Heard, and particularly Cheek, stressed that black students, the majority of whom matriculated in the South, harbored an even greater sense of alienation, repression, and suspicion. Their “frustration, anger, outrage, fears and anxieties” represented the “feelings and emotions” of a large segment of the African American community. Southern black students and faculty had come to expect “broken promises” from politicians and unfair “treatment” from “law enforcement agencies.” Ironically, higher education heightened black young peoples’ “intellectual grasp of the current inequities” and “how deeply embedded” they were in the “fabric of American life.” To be sure, the war intensified these feelings of alienation, but an immediate end to the conflict and the draft “would not significantly reduce . . . cynicism and distrust among black college youth.”63

Heard and Cheek recommended that President Nixon establish a far more effective “liaison with higher education” by meeting at regular intervals with broadly representative groups of students, faculty, and university presidents; by specifying a “high-level White House staff member” to focus on higher education; by employing relevant federal agencies, such as Health, Education, and Welfare, to keep a finger on the higher-education pulse; by scheduling a meeting “devoted exclusively to black students”; and by increasing his “exposure to representatives of the black community and other racial minorities.” But the two university leaders warned that improved communications alone would not “soften tensions and dissipate alienation and disaffection.” Only withdrawing from Vietnam and “more effectively” addressing “home difficulties” would restore student faith in the system and the administration.64

Nixon and his advisors responded negatively to virtually all of Heard’s and Cheek’s assessments and recommendations. H. R. Haldeman dismissed overtures to the “politicized” universities as futile; seeking to “appease the tribe” was bad policy. Even the “appearance of allowing students to rule this country would be a predictable disaster for our claim to moral leadership at home and abroad.” Daniel P. Moynihan objected particularly to the premise that only revised foreign and domestic policies would yield more quiescent campuses. Such assertions were “a breathtaking form of political blackmail.”65

Agreeing wholeheartedly with his staffers, Nixon released the Heard Report to the press, after which the president and his aides savaged the document. Most fundamentally, Nixon refused to accept any responsibility for student disaffection or campus disorder: “Responsibility for disruption” of university campuses resided “squarely on the shoulders of the disrupters” and “their elders in the faculty and the larger community who encourage or condone” their actions. College administrators and faculty needed “to face up” to their obligations to maintain order. The president also rejected the “cliché” that solving the nation’s “social problems” would alleviate “the moral and spiritual crisis” affecting American universities. Even as his aides worked politically with many campus groups of Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom, Nixon reiterated the “truth” that colleges and universities needed to be “centers of teaching and learning, research and scholarship—not political instrumentalities.” His aides contended that students were being heard and that there was no need for special mechanisms to gauge their opinions. Nor should students be viewed as a specific class or constituency. After all, according to Douglas L. Hallett, a Yale senior whom the aides quoted approvingly, university students were “frighteningly ignorant of the problems the country faces and the efforts . . . made to solve them.”66

Heard responded to these criticisms with a July 25 news conference and a July 31 press release. He expressed surprise that Nixon had chosen to publish what he considered “private documents,” and he stood by their contents. He applauded the “concern with public affairs manifested on campuses,” asserted that he and President Cheek had fulfilled their charge to keep the president fully informed on the perspectives of the academic community, and declared that they had offered “concrete and precise” suggestions on how the White House could improve its “understanding of campus attitudes.” When asked if he was “disappointed” by the administration’s criticism, Heard deftly replied, “When one accepts an invitation to walk in the political forest, he must be prepared to be snagged by a few brambles.”67

The unprecedented demonstrations in May 1970 marked the high point of both national and southern student opposition to the war. Despite Nixon’s refusal to make any overtures to students, two of his Vietnam-related programs helped to defuse campus activism. Vietnamization, which ostensibly turned the war over to the South Vietnamese, steadily reduced the number of Americans serving and dying in Vietnam. Introduced in December 1969, the draft lottery made young men subject to the draft for only one year and purportedly ended favoritism based on income, education, or race. The downturn in the economy in the early 1970s reinforced the impact of these war-related influences by focusing students’ attention on finding jobs and starting careers.

Exhausted and disillusioned, many student activists concluded by the early 1970s that they could not influence President Nixon or his policies. A frustrated Steve Maxner, who had been wounded in Vietnam and returned home and advocated antiwar positions at North Texas State University, captured the campus mood: the war was “winding down and the fervor and the passion just wasn’t there.” Over the years following Cambodia and Kent State, students contemplated the “Failure of Student Activism” and the “Current Apathy.” Editorial writers at the University of Virginia and the University of Georgia concluded that “marching down the street in a black armband isn’t necessarily going to end the war or racism.” The Moratorium had been a “nice thing,” but it had not “convinced people of different persuasions.” In arguing against another student strike in January 1971, the Cavalier Daily warned that stopping classes would be “an empty form of protest, likely to be ignored by those to whom it is aimed and misunderstood” by officials in Richmond. Indeed, as more Americans questioned the war, they were learning the “lessons that students learned months ago”—that the nation was “engaged in a seemingly limitless war with no way to get out” that would satisfy Nixon and that “no amount of outrage” could alter this situation.68

This perception explained why students had become more apathetic, more “apolitical.” According to Tom Crawford in Athens, University of Georgia students “just don’t give a damn. Instead of marching against injustices, they go back to their rooms and listen to Neil Young while drinking Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.” From Charlottesville, Ted Jordan lamented, “The fighting continues there. The marching continues here, and both bring no results.” To break this senseless stalemate, Americans needed to “withdraw ourselves,” to follow the advice of Ken Kesey, who had decided “the only way to help end the war was to say ‘Fuck it’ and walk away.” University of Virginia students should “do the same.”69

Large numbers of southern protestors followed this advice. On May 4, 1971, a peace vigil at Louisiana State attracted only 200 participants; 250 marched to the state capitol the next day; and only 629 of more than 14,000 LSU students bothered to vote in a referendum on the war. The next May a meager 150 students congregated to decry President Nixon’s decision to mine Haiphong harbor. This pattern was repeated across Dixie. In February 1971 no more than 200 marched at the University of South Carolina to protest the US-sponsored South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, and later that month fewer than 20 attended a Student Mobilization Committee meeting. The campus climate had also changed dramatically in Athens and Charlottesville. At the University of Georgia 600 turned out for a Kent State memorial in May 1971, and a subdued group of 270 rallied against US policies in May 1972. At the University of Virginia, a paltry 140 participated in a candlelight peace march in April 1971, and the next month 63 percent of the students voting rejected a spring moratorium against the war. In decided contrast, 2,500 students protested against expanding the student body in October 1971, and former secretary of state Dean Rusk received a standing ovation following his address in December 1972.70

Only the University of Florida and the University of Texas witnessed post-1970 demonstrations remotely comparable to the responses to Cambodia, Kent State, and Jackson State. On May 9, 1972, 1,200 to 1,400 Florida protestors hurled rocks and bottles at campus, city, and state police, who responded with an armored car, fire hoses, clubs, and tear gas. The following day authorities controlled a crowd of 3,000 and added 200 arrests to the 170 from the previous day. In late April 1972, University of Texas protestors broke windows in the ROTC building, occupied two floors of the primary administrative building, and turned out between 2,000 and 3,000 to denounce President Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong.71

Ironically, as the student protests subsided, “such activism was no longer necessary. The call for peace, which a majority considered unpatriotic as late as 1968,” had become “patriotic” by 1971. The nation ultimately accepted the antiwar students’ message to leave the war, but public polling demonstrated that student dissidents were exceedingly “unpopular messengers.” In a June 1970 Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans consulted disapproved of “college students going on strike as a way to protest the way things are run in this country.” Some contemporary students perceptively understood the negative responses to protestors. As early as 1965, a farsighted LSU editorial writer opined that antiwar demonstrations were “having much the same effect on the Viet Nam War that southern race bigotry has had on the civil rights movement—they are rallying the great majority of the people in favor of it.” In 1970 a University of Virginia undergraduate noted astutely, “Campus activists are producing fear and outrage and reaction. They are pushing the public in the opposite political, philosophical, and social direction.”72

Given the nation’s ultimate adoption of the antiwar students’ message that the United States should leave the war while simultaneously loathing the messengers, how is the influence of young protestors best explained nationally and more particularly in the South? Students have been correctly termed the “foot soldiers” of the antiwar movement: “far more college students” both nationally and in Dixie “actively protested the war than any other single group.” Their sheer numbers were critical to demonstrations on and off campuses; and these demonstrations kept the war in the public eye, challenged the morality and practicality of US intervention and actions, and heightened “a general perception of national malaise and crisis that made ending the war even more urgent.” Despite their denials, both Presidents Johnson and Nixon were deeply troubled by the student opposition, which together with the broader antiwar movement constituted an ongoing restraint on executive freedom of action. Although Dixie’s student demonstrations were far less extensive that those in other regions, southern dissenters contributed to the antiwar movement’s restraint of the presidents, helped keep the war at the forefront of public attention, and promoted the growing belief among key national policymakers and the public beyond the South that only ending the war could restore domestic tranquility and equilibrium. Indeed, the extent of student discontent in the conservative, prowar South during 1969–1970 could only have served to intensify these beliefs. The American public and the Nixon administration had come to expect student protests in Berkeley, Madison, and New York City, but not pitched battles in Columbia, South Carolina, twenty thousand marchers in Austin, or a weeklong strike in Charlottesville.73

Student protests contributed to US withdrawal from Vietnam. They also helped spawn the “backlash politics” that aided Richard Nixon’s election as president in 1968 and 1972 and helped defeat antiwar southerners such as J. William Fulbright, Albert Gore Sr., and Ralph W. Yarborough in their bids for reelection to the US Senate. In the wake of three years of student demonstrations and urban rioting, respondents to a Gallup poll in early 1968 cited “crime and lawlessness” as the principal domestic problem and just behind Vietnam as the nation’s most troubling issue.74

Coincidentally, two southerners, both conservatives and supporters of President Nixon and the Cambodian operation, sat down on May 11 to express their frustrations and war weariness—a fatigue, ironically, that would not only help to reelect Nixon in 1972 but also move even the South to accept a Vietnam outcome far short of a US victory the following year. From New Orleans, a Kentuckian studying law at Tulane University informed Senator Cooper he was “sick and tired” of the US government’s “leftist direction,” of “long haired bums . . . tearing our campuses and . . . our country apart,” of a “world-wide communist movement” that was leading “thousands of innocent young people . . . astray,” and of a US government that failed to “deal appropriately” with “those who seek to destroy” America. A Nashville woman pursued precisely the same themes in her letter to Senator Gore. This “tired American” was “tired of the discrimination against the South,” of the communists who had “infiltrated” and created “unrest and riots” in American universities, of the media presenting “biased view points and facts,” of “those who march for individual rights but have no tolerance for the rights” of their opponents, of the “lawlessness and crime in our country,” and of the “members in Congress who are dividing our country instead of working to bring us together.”75

This unintended aid for antiwar students’ arch foe, President Nixon, illustrated the complexity of the protests’ impact both nationally and in the South. While recognizing this complexity, it should be remembered that the Vietnam War provoked the most massive student protests in American and southern history. Although always a minority on college and university campuses and the proponents of a decidedly unpopular message that often elicited ridicule or outright physical attacks by prowar students and conservative political figures, these young people summoned the courage to challenge their elders and to question America’s most tragic Cold War military intervention abroad. Doing so in the South, the nation’s most conservative and prowar region, required particular personal resolution since it could lead to social isolation on campus, alienation from one’s family and community, and even suspension or expulsion from school.

These hardy southern protestors added to the momentum to end the war, but their influence on opinion and policy had a primarily national, rather than southern application. The South remained the region most supportive of the war, least inclined to believe that intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake, and most convinced that the war had been winnable. George C. Herring, the foremost historian of American involvement in Vietnam, has sagely observed, “The conventional wisdom in the military is that the United States won every battle but lost the war. It could be said of the antiwar movement that it lost every battle but eventually won the war—the war for America’s minds and especially for its soul.” Herring’s observation applies nationally, but in Dixie, antiwar students lost all the battles and the war for majority southern opinion regarding Vietnam.76