Documents: Vietnam War Background

After World War II, Congress and the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations viewed anti-colonial liberation movements through a Cold War anti-communist lens. As a colonial power itself, the default U.S. position was to oppose all such movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Eisenhower provided political, economic, and military aid to France for its war to retain control of Indo-China colony (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). After France was lost their war in 1954, the U.S. government propped up undemocratic, authoritarian regimes in South Vietnam against increasingly strong opposition from the majority of Vietnamese.

By 1964, it was obvious to all that despite hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid and more than 15,000 American "advisors," the hated military junta in Saigon was soon going to be overthrown. That year, Johnson campaigned for re-election on repeated promises to, "Never send American boys to fight in Vietnam." But as the Pentagon Papers later revealed, he was already planning to do exactly that.

LBJ deployed American combat troops to Vietnam in March of 1965, with the first wave of U.S. Marines landing on the same day as "Bloody Sunday" in Selma Alabama. Eventually, more than two and a half million Americans fought in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to keep unpopular, pro-American governments in power. More than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed, and uncounted numbers injured, maimed, or orphaned.

Many Freedom Movement activists viewed the Vietnam War as a racist war of oppression against a non-white people — a white effort to maintain colonial-style domination over a non-white region.

Most of the Americans sent off to the war were draftees. But under the biased "Selective Service" system, Blacks and Latinos were far more likely to be drafted than whites, and they were more likely to be assigned to front-line combat units. The result was Black and Latino casualty rates proportionally far higher than that of whites.

Moreover, many southern draft boards used the draft as a political weapon to force male activists into the Army in an explicit effort weaken the Freedom Movement. Anger over these issues became summed up in the slogan "No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger!"

Issues of poverty and economic justice were also profoundly affected by the war. Just when the Movement was turning its focus towards those issues, the federal funds that might have been used for education, housing, college scholarships, job-training, literacy programs, public-works, improved medical care, and so on, were diverted to the Vietnam War. In the opinion of many Movement activists, the promises of the so-called "War on Poverty" died in the rice-paddy battlefields of Vietnam.

Between 1965 and 1967, SNCC, CORE, Dr. King and SCLC all came out in opposition to the Vietnam War. Their action was hugely controversial. To no one's surprise, white racists and right-wing conservatives who had long opposed the Freedom Movement accused those who took anti-war stands of being "un-American, Communist sympathizers." At the same time, Liberal supporters of the Civil Rights Movement were deeply split into anti-Communist/pro-war and anti-war/anti-poverty camps.

Most of the northern Democratic Party leaders who had supported civil-rights rallied around LBJ. They sharply criticized Black leaders who took an anti-war stand as "ungrateful," "unpatriotic," and "divisive." So too did the Urban League, national leadership of the NAACP, and other Black leaders who were closely allied with LBJ and northern Democratic Party.

By 1968, though, some of the pro-war politicians and civil rights leaders who had initially condemned the early war opponents began to shift to their own anti-war stands, but others remained committed to Johnson and Cold War anti-Communism. Bitter and divisive controversies over the Vietnam War continued within the movement, the general public, and the establishment elite for years into the 1970s.