1. Birds of a Different Feather:
African American Support for the Vietnam War
in the Johnson Years, 1965–1969
Elisse Wright, JD, PhD
In 1996 diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer wrote that “black American opinion has
rarely been univocal and particularly so in the realm of foreign affairs,” yet this complexity has
rarely appeared in historical accounts of African Americans and the Vietnam War.1
Since the
early 1970s, U.S. scholars have enshrined an overly monolithic view of African Americans and
the Vietnam War by focusing almost entirely on African American antiwar sentiment, which
obscured a substantial base of African American support for the war in the 1960s. This
dissertation contends that this depiction of an African American community disproportionately
united against the Vietnam War, particularly in the Johnson years, is overly simplistic and
historically inaccurate.
In reality, African Americans, as a whole, were no less supportive of the Vietnam War in the
Johnson years than they had been of any other post-Civil War U.S. military conflict. In fact at
various times, they were more supportive of the Vietnam War than their white counterparts
due to the pro-civil rights stance of the Johnson administration and the perceived opportunities
for education and advancement presented by a fully integrated military and a wartime
economy. Because African American opinion on the Vietnam conflict in the Johnson years was
uniquely rooted in landmark domestic progress toward socioeconomic justice and civil and
political rights, it is difficult to fit African American opinion during this period into the
traditional categories of hawks and doves. Neither hawks nor doves, African American war
supporters in the Johnson years seemed to be “birds of a different feather.”
This dissertation seeks to add balance to the narrative by exploring the reasons why a
significant number of African Americans supported the war during the Johnson years and
assessing the consequences of that support. In doing so, it builds on the work of U.S. diplomatic
historians like Plummer, Gerald Gill, and Jonathan Seth Rosenberg as well as British historians
like Manfred Berg, Adam Fairclough, and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, who have all acknowledged that
African American opinion on the Vietnam War during the Johnson years may have been more
publicly, consciously, and sharply divided than during any other twentieth century conflict.
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2. By focusing on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
and the National Urban League to examine African American support for the war, this
manuscript seeks to connect the Vietnam War and Civil Rights historiographies by presenting a
more complex portrait of an African American community caught between the War on Poverty
and the War in Vietnam. It argues that the support of moderate civil rights leaders was a
manifestation of a broader consensus in the larger African American community regarding the
administration’s unprecedented support of civil rights and a shared vision of the Johnson
presidency. And it contends that the depiction of civil rights leaders who supported the
Vietnam War during this period as out-of-touch, sycophants to President Johnson obscures
their connection to and their place within the broader African American community.
The first three chapters of this six chapter manuscript provide a basis for understanding the
final three that follow. The introduction presents the themes and assertions to be supported by
the remaining chapters and place the study within the diplomatic history and civil rights
historiographies. Chapter one surveys presidential relations with civil rights leaders and the
African American response to U.S. military engagements in the period between World War II
and the U.S. military escalation in Vietnam. Chapter two explores the organizational histories of
the NAACP and the National Urban League, the personal and professional histories of their
leadership, and their relationship with Lyndon Johnson prior to his presidency. It is the legacy of
these interactions between the civil rights community, the federal government, and the African
American community that formed the basis of African American support for Johnson
administration policies in Vietnam once the military buildup began in 1965.
The final three chapters focus exclusively on the Johnson presidency. Chapter three
explores the relationship between the mainstream civil rights community, the African American
community, and the Johnson White House from November 1963 to early 1967 when Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s decision to join the antiwar movement altered their relationship to each other
and to the antiwar movement. Paradoxically, these years represented an era of unprecedented
legislative progress and collaboration between the White House and civil rights leaders and
irreparable fragmentation within the civil rights movement. They marked the end of the
legislative phase of the civil rights movement and the beginning of the military buildup in
Southeast Asia in 1965, the de-escalation of the War on Poverty and the rise of black
nationalism in 1966, and set the framework for the African American response to the Vietnam
War in the remaining years of the Johnson presidency. Chapter four explores the first
manifestations of significant black antiwar protest and examines the consequences of a pro-
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3. administration stance for the NAACP and the Urban League with the civil rights community, the
broader African American community, and the White House in the wake of the events leading
up to the 1968 presidential race.
Finally, the concluding chapter draws on the preceding chapters to answer the following
questions: Were the positions taken by the NAACP and Urban League on the Vietnam War
indicative of a leadership so out-of-touch with mainstream African American opinion on the
war that their support was merely an expression of their own self-interests or the result of
White House manipulation? Or were they reflections of a significant strain of African American
sentiment regarding the war and the Johnson presidency? To what degree did the Johnson
White House orchestrate African American support for the Vietnam War? Were specific
benefits or rewards anticipated by or promised to civil rights leaders that supported U.S. policy
in Southeast Asia? If so, were these benefits shared with the broader African American
community? Finally, were African Americans right to stick with the Johnson administration on
the Vietnam War?
1
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 35.
3