1964 Civil Rights Act bill signing
of the Army’ s fatalities. Throughout the Vietnam War, the percentage of Blacks drafted into the military was significantly higher than the percentage of Blacks in the general population. After draft boards were required to adjust their biased selection methods, the number of Black combat deaths decreased.
“ Many of the best Negro warriors are former civil rights demonstrators, men who marched on lunch counters and Washington itself to win equal rights for their race,” Time magazine said of these Black servicemen and women in a May 26, 1967, cover story titled“ The Negro in Viet Nam.”
Still, the disproportionate number of Black deaths in that conflict moved Martin Luther King, Jr., to call Vietnam“ a White man’ s war, a Black man’ s fight.”
The lingering fight at home for racial justice and equality took its biggest casualty when an assassin’ s bullet tore into the neck of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968. His assassination sparked a wave of urban riots and questioning of the nonviolent movement that he led. And though it hardly needed any motivation, the FBI stepped up its surveillance of Black groups and individuals that it perceived as subversive.
It threw a wide net.
Among the groups targeted by the FBI were the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The list of Black individuals the FBI put on its watchlist included Muhammad Ali, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The surveillance program, called“ COINTELPRO,” sought to“ expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these Black organizations and individuals, a congressional investigation revealed. Some of the FBI’ s actions created a climate of violence that took the lives of several members of the Black Panther Party.
The program was shut down in 1971 after activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and discovered records of its abuses.
A year later, the discovery of another break-in produced an abrupt ending.
On the night of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a Black security guard, was making his rounds at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D. C., when he noticed a strip of tape covering a door lock. Suspecting a crime was in progress, Wills summoned police who arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The burglars were working for the Republican Party.
Their arrest led to the resignation of President Nixon, who had launched his 1968 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of one of the civil rights movement’ s most heinous crimes – the Ku Klux Klan’ s 1964 murders of three civil rights workers who were working to register Black voters.
Frank Wills Nixon’ s 1968 campaign embraced a“ Southern strategy” that made coded – but easily decipherable – appeals to white voters who were angered by the passage of the 1960s civil rights acts and efforts of Blacks to gain the unalienable rights of“ life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” this nation’ s Founding Fathers claimed for White men in the Declaration of Independence. n
Benjamin A. Davis is professor and chair of the Department of Multimedia Journalism, at Morgan State University. He is a three-time winner of the Alfred I. DuPont Award.
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