policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
C. THE VIETNAM WAR AND AMERICAN SOCIETY
1. Blacks
In 1960, American blacks were generally excluded from the
benefits of the technolovical society. Tneir struggle to change their
pol-itical and economic position began in the 1950s and reached a peak in
the late 1960s. Many black leaders, even conservative black leaders,
feared that escalation of US
involvement in Vietnam signaled a decline in
the economic resources that could be allocated to meeting the needs of
America's poor blacks.
They began to associate their movements with the
antiwar movement, and they called for an end to American participation in
the war in Southeast Asia. Examination of the black struggle is important
because it constitutes a principal social trend in US
it contributed in several important ways to the antiwar movement:
society and because
(1) The civil rights movement contributed a distinct style of civil
disobedience, with mass demonstrations that became a part of the
antiwar movement
(2) The civil rights movement contributed substance to the antiwar
movement by introducing the theme that the American system,
represented by the local and state governments and its actions,
is unjust and immoral
(3) The violence which dominated the later part of the black struggle
contributed directly to the loss of national confidence that many
Americans experienced in the late 1960s and e;rly 1970s.
The civil rights movement was divided into two phases distinguished
by time and geography.13/
The early phase was centered in the
South under the leadership of men like Martin Luther King, Jr. Blacks
sought to gain a role in Southern political life, a role that had been
denied them since the end of reconstruction. The second phase began in the
North in 1965.
Concentrated in urban ghettos in the central cities of the
nation, blacks acted violently to assert their presence in Northern political
and economic life.
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