For today’s blog, we are highlighting a document that helps students intersect two of the most historically important elements of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. A part of our Cold War CDC volume, this statement by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) clearly and succinctly describes the Johnson administration’s perceived hypocrisy in fighting injustice abroad while tolerating it at home, and demands that Americans reprioritize the expansion and enforcement of democratic norms and institutions within the American south as opposed to southeast Asia.
Read the entire document, our scholarly introduction, and discussion questions here.
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 such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.
We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black 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. . . .
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. . . .
Read the entire document, our scholarly introduction, and discussion questions here. And visit our bookstore to get your copy of The Cold War today.
