Some thirty-five years later, Zimmerman disagreed with his warning against taking an antiwar position. It was, he said, “cowardly,” “timid,” and “wrong.”35 Zimmerman’s caution in the autumn of 1965, however, was not borne of personal doubts about the immorality of the war. As early as December 1965, activists in the Arkansas project, including Zimmerman, were attacking America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. William Hansen, a white field secretary from Cincinnati who had been active in SNCC since 1961, and who had arrived in Arkansas in the fall of 1962, wrote to the Arkansas Gazette condemning American foreign policy. In a letter that was published on December 1, Hansen denounced America’s policies in Rhodesia, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. The civil rights leader charged that U.S. foreign policy was predicated on race and that America defined its “sphere of influence” on the basis of skin color.36 A few days later Zimmerman attacked the Vietnam War and linked the conflict to the black freedom struggle. He complained that those who had the power to change things in the South were concentrating their efforts elsewhere—“like protecting the ‘freedom’ of the Vietnamese peasants to have their villages destroyed by napalm. No price is too high for us to inflict it upon the Vietnamese to prevent them from rejecting the American Way of Life—nor is any opportunity sufficiently costless for us to protect the rights of Negro Americans.”37
Following the controversy generated by SNCC’s antiwar statement, Hansen offered an explanation to the Arkansas Democrat. He asserted that the antiwar pronouncement was “general” and “not intended to dictate a position for all [SNCC] members.” But he went on to say that African Americans were beginning to realize the effect of the war on them, which led to questions and protests. The newspaper article noted that three Arkansas SNCC members had registered as conscientious objectors.38
One of the COs was Vincent O’Connor, a devout Catholic and committed pacifist from San Francisco. Although he initially registered with the Selective Service as a CO, O’Connor later withdrew from cooperation with the system.39 After leaving SNCC in the summer of 1966, he became active in local efforts to mobilize Vietnam dissent and worked with Arkansans for Peace in Vietnam.40 In January 1966, though, O’Connor was opposed to SNCC using its limited resources to aid the peace movement—especially a peace movement that could be too easily tarred with the twin evils of leftist sectarianism and counterculturalism.
On January 12, 1966, the Pine Bluff Commercial carried a story about a planned antiwar demonstration, to be held in Pine Bluff on February 12. The action had been called by the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCC) during a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The date, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, was chosen to “symbolize the freedom movement.” Jon Jacobs, director of the Southern Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SCC) explained that Pine Bluff had been chosen because of the SNCC presence there—“SNCC’s activities lead us to believe that the people of Pine Bluff are open to such a movement.”41 O’Connor fired off a response to Jacobs in which he stated that while he might participate in an antiwar demonstration he would not engage in organizing activity around the war—“I am not in Pine Bluff to organize peace demonstrations.”
O’Connor explained that as a pacifist he was opposed to all wars, and that he did not care for “leftist revolutionary factions” (at a press conference Jacobs had worn a Du Bois Club badge). He also pointed out that, in the South, association with countercultural forms of expression would serve only to hinder the forces of progress. O’Connor explained that “many people who’ve come South to work for freedom have shaved off beards & done other things to make it less easy for people to reject them—not what they say—as “Beat” or “Red” or whatever.” He expressed hope that “in future those who work for peace … would refrain, knowing the mind of the South, from wearing buttons that might tend to turn people off.” O’Connor suggested Little Rock as a more appropriate location for an antiwar demonstration and implied that there would be little support in Pine Bluff for peace activity. O’Connor again emphasized that SNCC’s purpose was not to organize peace demonstrations, which, he said, would be a full-time task.42
Despite such objections, there were a small number of antiwar activities in Arkansas during February 1966 in which SNCC had a visible presence. A teach-in on the war was held at Little Rock University, at which Mitchell Zimmerman joined with Chris Hobson of SDS to present the antiwar case.43 The SNCC activist recalled that a crowd of around 800, a quarter black, had been supportive.44 Then, in Little Rock on February 12, a tiny crowd of 19 protesters demonstrated against the war. The action was supported by six people with links to SNCC, including William Hansen and Jim Jones (a black student at the University of Arkansas and former SNCC activist).45
During late 1965 and early 1966 civil rights workers with SNCC’s Arkansas Project were struggling with how to deal with the war in Vietnam. It is clear that, at the very least, the activists felt discomfort over it. However, antiwar sentiment was tempered by concerns about harming the local civil rights movement—as evinced by the comments made both by Hansen during the furor caused by SNCC’s January statement and by O’Connor over the planned NCC action in Pine Bluff. This is a good example of how the “national” affected the “local.” In January 1966, not all SNCC activists were enthusiastically embracing radical positions or emphasizing internationalism. Those in Arkansas, for example, were trying to focus on local grassroots organizing. The story of the Virginia Students’ Civil Rights Committee (VSCRC) also reveals how local and national concerns often conflicted.
The VSCRC’s founding in December 1964 illustrates the inter-related nature of much of the progressive activism of the 1960s. Howard Romaine, a veteran of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, enrolled at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1964, where he met David Nolan, who was active in the University Young Democratic Club. At one YDC meeting, Archie Allen, campus traveler with the Southern Students Organizing Committee (a Nashville-based student group founded in 1964 that sought to bring progressive change to the South) spoke.46 He persuaded some of the students to attend an organizing conference in Atlanta. When the delegates returned, they gave a talk to the Virginia Council on Human Relations (VCHR), during the time when the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was headline news. Howard Romaine, who had met Mario Savio during Mississippi Freedom Summer, urged that a sympathy demonstration be staged at the University of Virginia campus. The consensus within the VCHR was that a new group would be needed for non-civil rights movement activities, and the Students for Social Action (SSA) was formed, with Romaine as its chair. At a subsequent SSA meeting it was announced that a civil rights conference, sponsored by SNCC, was being held at Hampton Institute in December 1964.
Several people who would play important roles in the VSCRC (including Nan Grogan, Bill Towe, Betty Cummings, and Nolan) attended the conference, where they heard a number of SNCC activists recall their experiences as civil rights workers and pass on some of their expertise. Indeed, although many scholars have emphasized SNCC’s retreat from the laborious and exhausting work of nurturing local projects in the aftermath of Freedom Summer and Atlantic City, it is clear that the group did not simply give up on organizing. According to David Nolan, “there was a missionary zeal in the air, and the rather clear desire to bring the Mississippi experience to bear on the Virginia Black Belt.” James Forman told the conference that “you don’t have to go to Mississippi to find these conditions.”47 At an evening party during the conference hosted by Virginius Thornton, a history teacher at Hampton, “people kept talking about the need to have a summer project in Virginia.” On the final morning of the conference, a continuations committee was set up to carry out research on race relations in the Virginia black belt and to plan future conferences. The committee chose the name Virginia Students’ Civil Rights Committee.
The organization’s purpose was to attack “the roots … of poverty, deprivation, and segregation” in the Old Dominion. The group’s former chairman, Ben Montgomery, recalled that they “decided we didn’t need to go to Mississippi