Vietnam and Civil Rights: The Great Diversion, 1965
Vietnam and Civil Rights: The Great Diversion, 1965
Chapter 3 focuses on the simultaneity of the Johnson administration's escalation of the war in Vietnam and passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, marking the end of de jure segregation. While the African American public and the mainstream civil rights movement were delighted with the end of segregation, the war in Vietnam gripped SNCC and other militants from the beginning. They were struck by the administration's hypocrisy: it was willing to send troops to faraway Vietnam but reluctant to send federal marshals to protect civil rights workers in the Deep South. For a brief moment in early 1965, the civil rights and antiwar movements overlapped at the SDS march on Washington. By the end of the year, the passions unleashed by the Vietnam War were displacing civil rights as the nation's most pressing problem. As Johnson militarized the war, the riots in Watts erupted, antiwar dissent grew, and SNCC debated whether to formally take a stand against the war. The war in Vietnam diverted attention from the civil rights movement, and dissent and debate over the war aggravated preexisting generational and ideological schisms in the movement. It was a harbinger of future strife.
Keywords: Vietnam War, civil rights movement, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), United States history, 1961–1969, Lyndon B. Johnson, New Left, Voting Right Act of 1965
Kentucky Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
