E45: The movement against the Vietnam War, part 3

Working Class History

Society & Culture, Education, History

5.0 • 813 Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2020

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Third of our four-part miniseries on opposition to the Vietnam war in the US, in conversation with five former participants in the movement. This week we look at the intersection between the Black liberation movement and the anti-war movement, hear the experiences of a draft resistor, and learn more about the increasing state repression.
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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi and welcome back to part three of our podcast mini-series about US opposition to the Vietnam War.
0:05.2	If you haven't listened to Parts 1 and 2 yet, I would go back and listen to those first.
0:15.9	At the conclusion of our last episode, Vivian Rothstein and Cora Weiss spoke about the importance of
0:20.6	autonomous women's organising, both in Vietnam and in the US. Similarly, for a Mali
0:25.6	Yeshatella, black people in the US had to fight to have their demands heated by the predominantly
0:30.0	white-led movement. The mostly liberal-leaning whites also in many cases failed to make connections
0:35.3	between colonialism in Asia and the history and legacy
0:38.3	of colonialism in the United States itself, it being founded on the one hand on the genocide
0:43.3	of Native Americans, and on the other hand, the abduction and enslavement of African people.
0:48.3	It was an anti-colonial movement, but I think around the same period, time frame, I think it was of this moratorium,
0:58.0	anti-war moratorium, I think it might have been, where white leftists in the state of Florida
1:04.3	were pulling together a statewide action against the Vietnam War. And it was really important to us because at the same time,
1:15.4	they were having this demonstration. We could never get them to pay attention to the war that
1:19.7	was being made against black people. We had all these political prisoners all over the state of
1:23.2	Florida, and they wanted to have a march and a rally, and the basic thing was bring the boys
1:29.4	home, and they didn't want to raise any other question at all. And we said, no, you can't do that.
1:35.3	You've got to talk about these black political prisoners that's happening right now. You've got to
1:40.2	talk about that. That's got to be addressed. So we persuaded them to talk about that,
1:45.9	but we also knew that they had no understanding of the state. They had no understanding of the
1:52.0	state. They would play with the cops. They would, you know, be on this roses carrying, you know,
1:58.1	thing where you stick the rose in the barrel of the gun. They had no understanding of
2:02.6	the state. But we did. And we knew what the possibilities were. In fact, especially when the police
	...

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