On Thursday, July 17, there will be hundreds of rallies and other events across the USA to mark the anniversary of the death five years ago of John Lewis, civil rights leader, congressman, and all-around humanitarian. The events will take place under the banner of “Making Good Trouble,” a phrase by which Lewis is remembered.
The event closest to me, in Yonkers, NY, states in part: “Good Trouble Lives On is a national day of nonviolent action to respond to the attacks posed on our civil and human rights by the Trump administration and to remind them that in America, the power lies with the people. … From voter suppression bills like the SAVE Act to the criminalization of protest, the Trump administration is launching a full-scale attack on our civil and human rights. But we know the truth: in America, the power lies with the people, and we’re rising to prove it. This is more than a protest; it’s a moral reckoning. A continuation of the movement Lewis helped lead, and a new front in the struggle for freedom.”
An important part of John Lewis’s life and legacy that is seldom mentioned is his role as chairman of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee when it denounced the Vietnam War. SNCC did so at the beginning of 1966, several months after the US escalated the war, calling up tens of thousands of newly conscripted soldiers to fight in Vietnam. I think remembering Lewis as an antiwar leader, as well as a civil rights worker, is important; not only to “set the record straight,” but also to try to pry open the door that now excludes antiwar action from the broad-based reform and anti-Trump movements that are sweeping our country.
The Southern Student Movement
Like many of the students who built the southern freedom struggle in the early 1960s, Lewis was motivated by a focus on racial justice and nonviolence. Born into an Alabama share-cropper family in 1940, he described his early life in his autobiography, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, detailing many instances of experiencing racial discrimination. As a teenager he was inspired by the messages of Martin Luther King, Jr., and studied at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. After graduating he was ordained as a minister and then enrolled in Fisk University, also in Nashville. And so when the Greensboro, NC sit-ins ignited the southern student movement in February 1960, Lewis was 20 years old. He became very active in the Nashville Student Movement, perhaps the most militant of the college student organizations at that time.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Two months after the Greensboro sit-ins, 128 students from dozens of sit-in centers and colleges (north and south) met for a conference at Shaw University in North Carolina. Out of this meeting came the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Lewis joined SNCC, which organized sit-ins and boycotts, and in 1961 he joined the first Freedom Ride, an attempt by an integrated group (sponsored by the Congress on Racial Equality) to take a bus from Washington, DC to New Orleans. (The bus was attacked in Anniston, Alabama, and Lewis was badly beaten.) Attempts at voter registration followed, succeeded by work in Mississippi (1962), the March on Washington (1963), “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi (1964), the unsuccessful efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the National Democratic Convention (1964), and the march to Selma, Alabama (“Bloody Sunday,” 1965). In all of these (and many more) events, Lewis learned and practiced what non-violence could and could not do. He learned it could not overcome the violence of white southerners, and it could not overcome the elitism and racism of the Democratic Party. In 1963, in this chaotic and contentious environment, John Lewis was elected chairman of SNCC.
The Vietnam War
In 1963 John Lewis was 23 years old and no longer a college student. At that time, full-time students were usually exempted from conscription or “The Draft.” But once no longer a student, young men were “eligible” for the draft. As Lewis was not only deeply religious, but also an ordained minister, he considered and then pursued having his draft status changed to Conscientious Objector (CO), meaning that he would not be required to fight. At that time, CO status was usually reserved for members of historically pacifist churches, such as Quakers or Mennonites, but not Baptists. (Lewis was eventually granted CO status [the first Black man in Mississippi to do so, I believe], but after SNCC came out against the Vietnan war in 1966 he was reclassified 4-F – “morally unfit to serve.”)
Safely re-elected in the fall of 1964, Lyndon John chose a North Vietnamese attack on a US air base in February 1965 to begin a massive buildup of US forces in Vietnam and an expansion of the bombing of North and South Vietnam. Draft calls escalated in the summer; and this affected SNCC directly, in that most of their male staff were or were about to be 1-A, not having a student deferment. Also, as Lewis writes in his autobiography, quite a few SNCC staffers had already been drafted, and some of them had been killed. Lewis also notes that it was clear by 1965 that Black soldiers were dying at a higher rate than other soldiers, and serving at a much higher rate on “the front lines.” Discussion within SNCC about the war grew. A SNCC leader spoke at an SDS-sponsored national antiwar rally in April, and Lewis was among the civil rights leaders who signed the “Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam” circulated about the same time.
In his autobiography, Lewis described his views on the war at that time. His primary ground for opposing the war was his commitment to the philosophy of nonviolence. Also, “it seemed extremely contradictory to me for President Johnson to be sending tens of thousands of troops to fight the war in Vietnam to ‘protect the rights’ of the people n South Vietnam at the same time as the rights of black people across the nation continued to be violated without protection.” (371) Lewis also refused to accept the idea of a “just war,” saying instead that the US actions in Vietnam were “illegal, immoral, and criminal.” These themes were part of the many speeches Lewis gave as he traveled around the US in the fall of 1965.
In November 1965, SNCC convened a meeting in Atlanta to make some decisions about the Vietnam War. Usually a “moderator” and listener in his role as chairman, on this occasion Lewis took an active role in the discussion. “I felt very strongly that we should come out publicly against the war. I felt we had a moral obligation here, a mandate, that we couldn’t talk about what was going on in Mississippi and Alabama and south Georgia and not relate to and identify with the people who were being sent over to Vietnam, as well as the people, American and Vietnamese alike, who were being destroyed there.” (371-72.) Out of this meeting, came the SNCC statement on the Vietnam War, drafted by Lewis and two other leaders. The statement itself war read at a press conference on January 6, 1966, the day after a SNCC activist (Sammy Yonge) was buried, killed by a white racist in Tuskegee. This is what the statement said:
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has a right and a responsibility to dissent with United States foreign policy on any issue when it sees fit. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee now states its opposition to the United States’ involvement in Vietnam on these grounds:
We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people in other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.
We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black peoples’ struggle for liberation and self-determination in this country for the past five years. Our work, particularly in the South, has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders.
We ourselves have often been victims of violence and confinement executed by United States governmental officials. We recall the numerous persons who have been murdered in the South because of their efforts to secure their civil and human rights, and whose murderers have been allowed to escape penalty for their crimes.
The murder of Samuel Young in Tuskegee, Alabama, is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths.
Samuel Young was murdered because United States law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. The United States is no respecter of persons or law when such persons or laws run counter to its needs or desires.
We recall the indifference, suspicion and outright hostility with which our reports of violence have been met in the past by government officials.
We know that for the most part, elections in this country, in the North as well as the South, are not free. We have seen that the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act have not yet been implemented with full federal power and sincerity.
We question, then, the ability and even the desire of the United States government to guarantee free elections abroad. We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask, behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United States cold war policies.
We are in sympathy with, and support, the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to a military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam in the name of the “freedom” we find so false in this country.
We recoil with horror at the inconsistency of a supposedly “free” society where responsibility to freedom is equated with the responsibility to lend oneself to military aggression. We take note of the fact that 16% of the draftees from this country are Negroes called on to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a “democracy” which does not exist for them at home.
We ask, where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?
We therefore encourage those Americans who prefer to use their energy in building democratic forms within this country. We believe that work in the civil rights movement and with other human relations organizations is a valid alternative to the draft. We urge all Americans to seek this alternative, knowing full well that it may cost them their lives–as painfully as in Vietnam.
Needless to say, SNCC’s statement attacking the Vietnam War outraged the Johnson administration, the mainstream media (NYTimes, etc.), and the major civil rights organizations. MLK refused to join in condemning SNCC, but neither did he endorse their statement. A year later, however, in his magnificent speech at NY’s Riverside Church, “Beyond Vietnam,” he aligned himself with the antiwar movement,
John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. have in common that their antiwar leadership has been largely forgotten – or suppressed. Much of white America is comfortable with the MLK of “I Have a Dream,” and with his activism in the South. When King moved to the North, around the time of the 1965 Watts Riot, his focus on radical economic reform and creating an inter-racial working class movement was no longer welcome. In Hastings, Westchester, where for many years there was an annual MLK Memorial Breakfast, no mention of his stand against the Vietnam War passed the speakers’ lips. The MLK of “I Have a Dream” was remembered and honored; his “Beyond Vietnam” speech might not have happened.
In light of tomorrow’s “Make Good Trouble” rallies in honor of John Lewis, are we seeing the same pattern? As Lewis and SNCC bravely spoke out against the war, courting the wrath of not only the repressive forces of the state but also the civil rights leaders with whom they were supposedly working together, when will we see leaders of Indivisible, Move On, or similar large reform organizations demand an end to the gigantic “defense” budgets, or speak out against the illegal attack on Iran, or against US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians?
SOME USEFUL READING
“SNCC’s Unruly Internationalism,” by Dan Beger, Boston Review [November 16, 2021] [Link].
