Birds of a different feather: African American support for the Vietnam War in the Johnson years, 1965--1969.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

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 accounts of African Americans and the Vietnam War.<super>1</super> 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, obscuring a substantial base of African American support in the 1960s. This dissertation contends that this depiction of an African American community disproportionately united against the war in the Johnson years is overly simplistic and historically inaccurate.
African Americans, as a whole, were no less supportive of the Vietnam War in the Johnson years than they had been of any other U.S. military conflict. In fact at times, they were more supportive of the war than their white counterparts due to the pro-civil rights stance of the administration and the economic opportunities presented by a fully integrated military and a war time economy. Therefore, the support of moderate civil rights leaders for Johnson administration policies in Southeast Asia was the manifestation of a broad consensus in the larger African American community based on the administration's unprecedented support of civil rights and a shared vision of the Johnson presidency. This dissertation argues that previous depictions 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. Finally, it asserts that because African American opinion on the Vietnam conflict in the Johnson years was uniquely rooted in domestic concerns linked to the fight for socioeconomic justice and civil and political rights, it is difficult to fit the African Americans 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.&rdquo.
<super>1</super>Brenda Gayle Plummer, <italic>Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960</italic> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 35.