Stokely Carmichael changed the way that many viewed the term “black power. In May 1966, he became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and a month later he gave his famous “Black Power” speech at UC Berkeley in front of a predominantly white audience. In Stokely Carmichael’s speech, “Black Power,” he brings up this term to describe how the civil rights movement should change the way that it approaches the racial injustice in America. The nonviolent approach that is associated with Martin Luther King Jr. was simply not working according to Carmichael, so a new approach needed to be taken. Carmichael’s main purpose of this speech was to educate white America on racial issues that they simply did not see, and in one of his examples, he begins to talk about the Vietnam War. Towards the middle of his speech, he refers to the Vietnam War as an “illegal and immoral” war, and discusses how they had become a big movement to fight for human rights against the war (Carmichael, 319). By following his call for “black power,” Carmichael became a vocal antiwar activist through increasing protesting the war (Joseph). The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement were two major events that occurred during the 1960s. In history classes we were always taught about these events, but we were always taught that they had occurred separately even though they had occurred at the same time. By looking at how Carmichael talks about the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement for the war in Vietnam, we are able to see that these two events crossed paths which most people do not know; this is important because our country had unintentionally become hypocrites, and both movements were ultimately fighting for the same cause. 

The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement did not really cross paths until Freedom Summer of 1964. During this time, African Americans were making big progress, and the foreign policy regarding the war began to change (Lucks, 57). Up until President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, America’s people had not really paid the war much attention, and to most African Americans who were handling racial issues, they were paying even less attention. Johnson had assumed presidency at a very hard time and had inherited the war in Vietnam, and he tried to carry out Kennedy’s policy (Lucks, 58). However, this became very difficult. The crisis in Vietnam grew, so Johnson planned a major expansion of involvement overseas. Johnson had wanted to be remembered as a president that helped to improve the lives of African Americans, but most Americans know him as the Vietnam War president (Risen). When Johnson realized there was no chance for him to win reelection in 1968, he decided to withdrawal. By doing this he believed that he could help his legacy, but Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated just a few days later (Risen). He began to focus on more domestic issues and promoted a fair-housing bill which would become the first civil rights bill to challenge discrimination outside of the south (Risen). Johnson did much to try and improve the lives of black Americans such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty, but with his changing policy of involvement in Vietnam, he ended up hurting the African American population and gained more enemies (Risen). 

Johnson had promised in his campaign that he would avoid excessive involvement in Vietnam, but after assuming presidency, he was afraid that if Vietnam fell so would his presidency (Lucks). However, his foreign policy hurt his presidency because he went against what he had originally promised. If he would not have promised to stay out of the war, then this would not have been a problem. In January of 1965, only 23,000 troops were stationed in Vietnam, but later this year, Johnson said this number would reach half a million within the next three years (Berman). Johnson’s steps towards war angered groups like SDS, SNCC, and CORE, and just weeks after the election, the Vietnam War rose to become a bigger problem than the Civil Rights movement (Lucks). In order for this quota to be met, monthly increases in draft calls would have to be made (Berman). The way that our draft system worked was that boys and men who were receiving their education were not sent overseas, but in order to go to college, you had to have money. This meant most of the men who were in the draft were poor. African Americans during this time were poor and uneducated because our society as a whole was against them, so the draft system during this war pulled in a disproportionate number of black Americans for service in Vietnam than it did white men (Mack, 320). Therefore, African Americans were more susceptible to injury or death. Black Americans were forced to participate in the draft when they could not vote without being discriminated back home (Lucks). A year later, Stokely Carmichael gave his famous speech, Black Power, and openly criticized the United States on their failure to solve domestic issues and their over involvement in Vietnam. Towards the middle of his speech he criticizes how black Americans are treated unfairly when coming to the draft. Carmichael compares these black Americans to mercenaries in his speech because they are sent overseas to fight for a country that does not give them their basic human rights. They were fighting to restore a democracy that was broken back in the United States. He also refers to our nation as “a nation of thieves” because we were taking people’s freedom and life away from them to make them fight in a war that we did not fully understand to help implement democracy (Carmichael, 320). Ultimately, the Vietnam War fed into the racism that was occurring in the United States during the 1960s. 

Many people would view these as separate events, but if consideration the purposes for both the war and the movement is taken to account, it is cleat to see that they coincided more than what people think. After researching the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war, my own view is that by civil rights activists joining the antiwar movement, they were able to achieve what they were originally fighting for. Though I concede that the Vietnam War became the main concern of the United States during this time, I still maintain that by civil rights activists fighting against the war, they were able to show America that what they were trying to fight for in Vietnam was exactly what they had been missing for so long. Carmichael says in his speech that they (SNCC) had become “the most militant organization [for] peace or civil rights or human rights against the war,” and this just shows that both the war and civil rights activists were simply attempting to achieve civil rights (320). African Americans were able to use this movement to highlight and amplify the goals of their own movement. For example, civil rights activist Parris said that America’s reasoning for involvement in Vietnam is the exact same as the “white South” opposing the civil rights movement because the South believed they were being attacked by “outsiders” just as the people of Vietnam believed (Lucks). However, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the time, Roy Wilkins, gave President Johnson a lot of support because of all that he had tried to do to help the lives of African Americans (Ingram).  Some African Americans believed that by participating in the war, they would be able to prove to America and the government their “manhood” that had been shut down all of the years previously (Ingram). Although some African Americans and civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, believed that by joining the antiwar movement, they would have no benefit or hinder their progress, I would reply that their intervention had the opposite effect. By objecting to the war, they were able to face the country and stand up to a peace issue that correlated to their own. The issue is important because the reasons that people opposed the war in Vietnam were the same reasons that civil rights activists were fighting for domestic justice. People were able to better understand why African Americans had changed course in their fight for freedom. The democracy that was being fought for overseas was the same democracy that they were seeking at home through a nonviolent campaign.

Stokely Carmichael was chairman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966, and in 1967 he became the Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party (Joseph). After Carmichael delivered his “Black Power” speech, he changed the way that many people viewed the phrase black power. He believed that black power represented a political unity, so all black people of our country needed to unite so that they could demand the needs they wanted to have (Joseph). This outcry for black power led him to become one of the most vocal antiwar activists during 1966. His protests were against the government forcing African Americans with no civil rights at home to fight for those rights in Southeast Asia (Joseph). He said that they should say “Hell no” to the draft (Carmichael, 319). The draft was wrong to everyone because our government was taking men, training them to kill, and basically taking over their life for the years they were forced to serve (Carmichael, 320). We needed to question the governments reasoning in involvement because no one really understood why we were there. Not even the government fully understood our reasoning for helping Vietnam other than Johnson believing that it would hurt his presidency. Another good point that Carmichael brings up in his speech is that the Peace Movement for the war had taken place on college campuses where most of these people were not going to get drafted. This brought up the question of how is this movement going to spread if it cannot move away from the “white ghettos of this country” (Carmichael, 319). People who were actually being affected by the war and draft needed to articulate their opinions in order for progress to be made. 

 Other than Stokely Carmichael, many other civil rights activists during this era objected to the United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam. One of them was Reverend James Luther Bevel. Bevel was a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who worked to bring these two movements together (Mack, 108). He first joined this joint movement because he saw little differences amongst the goals that they both were trying to obtain. He set forth a new set of goals to help with racial inequality which helped with the ending of United States involvement in the Vietnam War (Mack, 108). He thought that with the passage of Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Civil Rights Movement had ended, and Johnson “signed the Civil Rights Movement out of existence” (Mack, 113). Little did Johnson know, his foreign policy for Vietnam only strengthened it. Once this act had been passed, there was an increase in people who opposed involvement in the war. One way that Bevel connects these two movements is he parallels the “hollowness and wickedness” of what is going on in Vietnam to what we had done to American Indians and African Americans for years (Mack, 115). He sees little difference and sees no reason for the two movements to work separately because they are ultimately “rooted in the same two historical realities:” our country as a whole has always disregarded the humanity of nonwhite or colored people and believed that killing is a way to solve most of our problems (Mack,119).

Many individuals agreeing with Bevel’s beliefs opposed the war, but many groups also began to criticize the war’s purpose. Along with Bevel and Carmichael, SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) criticized the racist character of the war. These people believed that the United States’ Vietnam policy was not something to separate from race and racism (Mack, 116). For example, the war targeted African Americans in the draft because many could not exempt like white Americans because most white people could afford to go to college while black people could not because of discrimination. CORE had generally been a pacifist group and stayed away from Communist intrusions, so their opposition to the war was very predictable (Lucks). When three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was also going on. In one of the newspapers the headline was “LBJ Says Shoot to Kill the Gulf of Tonkin,” and this made some civil rights activists furious because we were more concerned with a cause overseas that had nothing to do with us instead of worrying about domestic issues (Lucks). Amongst the madness of this event, a civil rights activist named Bob Moses stated that the Civil Rights Movement was trying to get rid of “the idea whoever disagrees with us, must be killed” (Lucks). People in both movements were both trying to fight for social justice and peace. Members of the antiwar movement separately argued that the issue in Vietnam was closely related to the domestic problems of racism and poverty (Mack, 119). The Mobilization Committee said that domestic issues were “increasingly and intimately connected to the war situation,” meaning that equality for black Americans, attacking of slums, and debasement of morality during this war were all issues that were connected amongst these two movements (Mack, 119). 

The connections between these two movements are very visible when examining what both of them were fighting against. African Americans had been fighting for their equality at home while the United States was trying to fight for this same equality for another country. Social justice was trying to be achieved in both countries, but our country just did not realize that they were oppressing the same justice they were fighting for.  We had become hypocrites in this war and had lost sight of what was going on in our own country. Johnson told America that they were fighting to give democracy to people in Vietnam which Carmichael refers to as a lie in his speech (320).  People like Bevel objected to the war because they believed it was “linked inextricably to domestic racism” (Mack, 115). Civil Rights activists joined the antiwar effort because it had posed a bigger threat at the time and were fighting to restore a democracy that they did not have. Without the intersection of these two movements, they both would not have had the success that they did. They fed off of each other, and because of this, the Civil Rights Movement was able to advance in their progress while fighting against the same problem in another country. Goals for both the war and the Civil Rights Movement were to fight for democracy, but the war had covered up the challenges African Americans were facing. Joining in with the antiwar movement allowed for these two movements to become equal so that the Vietnam war did not overpower the movement that had been working so hard for so long. Our country needed to first achieve the “democracy” that we had before we tried to implement or restore a democracy in another country.
