How Vietnam shaped the civil rights movement

‘The New York Times war correspondent David Halberstam caught the pulse of his era when he observed, in 1964, that there were parallels between America’s misbegotten adventure in Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights in the murderous, Klan-infested state of Mississippi.

- BRENT STAPLES

In the first years of the war, it was more than coincidental that the front-line fighters were disproportionately Black. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara —and the other federal officials whom Halberstam derisively called “the best and the brightest” — had contrived to capture thousands of souls for the ill-fated war on Communism by lowering testing standards and allowing the courts to drop criminal charges against young men who agreed to enlist.

‘The scheme, known as Project 100,000, protected the white middle class by preserving college deferments. Nearly half of those brought in by the project were Black, though African Americans made up little more than 10 per cent of the population, and nearly all were poor.

‘The journalist Wil Haygood leverages this scenario to excellent effect in his clarifying and richly insightful Vietnam-era history, The War Within a War. As Haygood notes, Project 100,000 was cynically billed as part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But behind closed doors, the famously salty president slipped into his neo-Confederate drawl, praising the project as a means of cleaning up “all these Nigra boys that are now rejects.”