Anti-Vietnam War Activism within the African American Movement

Editorial Note: The following is the transcript of a presentation given at a conference in Detroit in September 2025.

My comments will focus on the ideological references and the daily work of SNCC organizers that led to the writing and release of our statement against the Vietnam war. It was the first such statement to be issued publicly by a social justice organization.

In 1965, as the U.S. government deployed troops to escalate the war against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, I was hired by Silas Norman, then head of Alabama SNCC, to work in the Lowndes County SNCC project. Our daily work consisted of canvassing among sharecropping families, urging everyone to register to vote, teaching people to read and write, agitating for various forms of federal support that had been denied, and most important, building the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent political party that would prepare the people to assume governance of the county in which they were the 90 percent majority. It was necessary to establish an independent party to run African American candidates for office because the Democratic Party of Alabama was whites-only. Their logo was a white rooster atop a banner that read “white supremacy.” A SNCC artist created a pouncing black panther for the logo of the Lowndes independent party—the logo that was later adopted by the Black Panther Party.

In the evenings, at staff meetings, over meals, SNCC folks spent a lot of time thinking and talking about how to move the work forward. We talked civil rights strategy, of course, but we were also processing revolutionary principles that had direct bearing on the work we were doing in local projects. The Lowndes staff was part of the faction within SNCC that espoused a strong international orientation. When we talked about self-determination for oppressed nations around the world, we included our own nation of thirty million black people in the United States. We were seeing ourselves as freedom fighters in the world, not simply within the political confines of the United States. This new direction was growing out of our deepening understanding of our history as a people and our identification with liberation movements of the period in Asia, South America, and Africa. Travel abroad also contributed to the heightening internationalism among SNCC staff. My consciousness of Third World liberation struggles had been awakened during a stay in Paris in 1961.There I had met brothers who were connected to independence movements in their home countries. Extended conversations with these friends made the workings of imperialism and anti-colonial resistance real to me, not just something that I had studied at UC Berkeley. Further, this was a period when the Algerians were mounting protests in Paris in support of their independence fight at home. Witnessing the commitment of these African freedom fighters, I began to view U.S. foreign policy from a different vantage point, and with a great deal more discernment.

Our work in SNCC’s projects throughout the South coincided with these Third World struggles. We were beginning to see ourselves as a significant flank of this global uprising of oppressed peoples, with many of us viewing our movements as a national liberation struggle. We also began to think of ourselves as constituting an internal colony of the United States.

All over the United States, our people’s social, political and economic conditions paralleled those of Third World peoples, making it very easy for us to identify with them. Our communities were occupied by hostile police forces. We did not own property or businesses in many of our neighborhoods. The schools and other essential institutions were not under our control. We faced disabling discriminatory policies in our search for work and decent housing. In Lowndes County, and in most of the South, our people were living in dire conditions, most of them as sharecroppers, many of them in homes without water and basic plumbing infrastructure.

A reign a terror had been in effect in Lowndes for a century before we SNCC organizers arrived, with only a handful of educated Black citizens able to breakthrough the various forms of intimidation established to keep them from voting. In Slavery by Another Name, Douglas A. Blackmon documents the especially murderous repression that had characterized life in Lowndes County, with Black men subjected to arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and peonage, many never to return to their families.

By 1965, as whites in Lowndes felt increasingly threatened by the freedom movement, they stepped up their violence. We had to be watchful at night, as whites would drive by, shooting at our freedom house and at the tent community we set up for families that had been evicted from their sharecropping homes. In the few miles that circumscribed our daily work, we passed one site of murder and martyrdom after another. On U.S Route 80 in Lowndes, Mrs. Viola Luizzo, a civil right volunteer from Detroit had been murdered by Klansmen (3/25/65). On the sidewalk outside the Selma restaurant where we went for hamburgers, 38-year-old Rev. James Reeb from Boston was beaten to death by white segregationists (3/11/65). In Marion, Ala, 26-year-old civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson had been beaten and shot to death by State Troopers (2/18/65). In August of the same year, Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Jackson and Father Richard Morrisroe were gunned down at close range, Jonathan fatally wounded., just after we all were released from jail. In the following year, young college student Sammy Younge was killed at the gas station we frequented in Tuskegee. Add to these murders, the relentless beatings, church burnings, drive-by shootings, unwarranted arrests, and other forms of harassment that characterized whites’ response to the freedom struggle. This terrain was a war zone.

SNCC's statement against the war, which I drafted, reflects the thoughts and arguments that were articulated primarily by the nationalist factions within SNCC, the Atlanta project, the Lowndes County project, and others, during a national staff meeting in November 1965. Whether we should issue a public statement was debated heatedly and finally agreed upon. But the statement remained on a desk in the Atlanta SNCC office where I typed it and left it before returning to Lowndes County. The only opposition to release of a statement was from those who correctly foresaw that it would mean loss of support from the Northern liberal establishment.

Sammy Younge’s murder in January 1966 prompted the press release. A Tuskegee student activist and resident, who worked closely with SNCC to register voters both in Alabama and Mississippi, Sammy was killed by a white gas station attendant for attempting to use a whites-only restroom. Sammy was a veteran of the U.S. Navy. Outraged and heartbroken by Sammy’s death, we added the following comment to the statement:

Samuel Younge was murdered because U.S. law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are being murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. The U.S. is no respecter of persons or law when such persons or laws run counter to its needs and desires. We recall the indifference, suspicion and outright hostility with which our reports of violence have been met in the past by government officials.

Throughout the statement, we pointed out this country’s hypocrisy in its stated dedication to freedom and democracy, connecting the United States’ actions abroad to our experiences as civil rights workers at home. We stated:

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 the colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia and in the United States itself…. [SNCC's] work, particularly in the South, 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 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 ended our statement by urging opposition to the draft, writing:

We are in sympathy with and support the men in this county who are unwilling to respond to the military draft, which would compel them to contribute their lives to U.S. aggression in the name of freedom we find so false in this country…. We ask where is the draft for the Freedom fight in this country?... We believe that work in the civil rights movement and 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.

Some SNCC members did resist the draft, some facing prison, some going into exile. In sum, our statement expressed the following:

• Our right as activists to dissent with U.S. government policies that violated human rights and international law
• Our alignment and solidarity with Third World countries that were engaged in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist independence struggles
• Our determination to expose the rule of terror and oppression against African Americans in the U.S.
• Our determination to expose the U.S. government’s hypocrisy and lies concerning democracy and free elections

Our stance against the war differed significantly from calls made by peace activists, even from the call made by Dr. King. Our statement was not rooted in pacifism, and rejection of all war, nor was it a patriotic call to get the U.S. government to live up to democratic values. It was an alignment against the U.S. government in support of an oppressed nation. The radical ideological grounding of our statement, particularly our urging men to resist the draft, was decried as treasonous by both reactionaries and liberals alike. When Julian Bond issued the statement as SNCC communications officer, the Georgia State Legislature barred him from taking the seat he had won a few months earlier.

The issue of race was front and center in the anti-war movement—as expressed in the popular slogan of the time, “No Vietnamese ever called me n****r!” Disproportionate representation of Blacks among troops sent to Vietnam prompted protests in Black communities throughout the country, as well as the reported disparity in assignment of Black troops to the frontlines. There was also the resulting disproportionate number of African American casualties. We, Africans in the United States, were expressing solidarity with the colored peoples of the world, colonized and oppressed by Euro-American imperialism. This same anti-colonialist perspective would motivate SNCC’s public support of the Palestinian struggle in 1967.When we released the anti-war statement, we SNCC workers were aligning our freedom movement with the worldwide community to which we belonged. In many ways, we were furthering the work that Garvey, Du Bois, Padmore, C.L.R. James, Robeson, and Malcolm had begun. Gratitude to the ancestors! Ashe!

Gloria Aneb House is a poet, activist, and professor emerita at University of Michigan–Dearborn and associate professor emerita in African American studies. She worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She later cofounded the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and the Justice for Cuba Coalition.