Black Liberation and the Vietnam War (2024)

FAQs

What was the role of blacks in the Vietnam War? ›

Approximately 300,000 African Americans served in the Vietnam War. In 1965, African Americans filled 31% of the ground combat battalions in Vietnam, while the percentage of African Americans as a minority in the general population was 12%. In 1965, African Americans suffered 24% of the U.S. Army's fatal casualties.

African Americans certainly had good reasons to oppose the war in Vietnam. Many wondered why they should fight abroad for a nation that still denied them basic human rights. SNCC activists also resented the draft for the threat it presented to its male staff.

Government persecution initially contributed to the party's growth among African Americans and the political left, who both valued the party as a powerful force against de facto segregation and the US military draft during the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War had a major impact on the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The war helped to split the struggle for social justice at the very time that it was achieving its greatest successes. The factionalism over whether or not to support the war decimated the crusade for human equality.

By 1945, however, troop losses virtually forced the military to begin placing more African American troops into positions as infantrymen, pilots, tankers, medics, and officers in increasing numbers. In all positions and ranks, they served with as much honor, distinction, and courage as any American soldier did.

More than 300,000 Black Americans served in Vietnam. Though only about 12% of the U.S. population, Black servicemembers were 16.3% of the armed forces, and up to 25% of enlisted men in the Army, but only 2% of officers across all branches.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a controversial sermon opposing the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, then helped lead a large antiwar march from Central Park to the United Nations later that month.

Soon, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became prominent opponents of the Vietnam War, and Bevel became the director of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

The strongest and most militant resisters were black GIs. Of all the soldiers of the Vietnam era, black and other minority GIs were consistently the most active in their opposition to the war and military injustice. Blacks faced greater oppression that whites, and they fought back with greater detennination and anger.

The FBI viewed the Black Panther Party as an enemy of the U.S. government and sought to dismantle the party. To this end, its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) used agent provocateurs, sabotage, misinformation, and lethal force.

Why did the NAACP support the Vietnam War? ›

Viewed over the short run, NAACP support for the role of African-American soldiers in the Vietnam War was beneficial, given that many young African-American men from 1963 to 1967 volunteered in large numbers, believing they were improving their economic conditions.

Referred to as “Bui Doi”, which is Vietnamese for “dust of life”, they were treated like dirt by local Vietnamese society and often by their American side as well. Often, their mothers abandoned them at orphanages with some even leaving them at a local dustbin.

By the following year, Black soldiers made up 16.3% of those drafted and 23% of Vietnam combat troops, despite accounting for only roughly 11% of the civilian population. These new draftees often had little understanding of the war's purpose and were increasingly disenchanted by their role in it.

Answering press questions after addressing a Howard University audience on 2 March 1965, King asserted that the war in Vietnam was “accomplishing nothing” and called for a negotiated settlement (Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence”).

The main cause of the war was the political and ideological struggle between the communist North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, and the anti-communist South Vietnam, led by President Ngo Dinh Diem. The war was triggered by several factors, but one of the most significant was Ngo Dinh Diem's refusal to hold elections.

Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause.

African-Americans have fought for the United States throughout its history, defending and serving a country that in turn denied them their basic rights as citizens. Despite policies of racial segregation and discrimination, African-American soldiers played a significant role from the colonial period to the Korean War.