Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam WarDaniel S.Lucks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Abstract

Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War Daniel S. Lucks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.According to historian Daniel S. Lucks, the death toll of the Vietnam War was more than the millions of Vietnamese and fifty-plus thousand American troops. To the list of casualties we can add the Civil Rights Movement. In Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, Lucks argues that the war not only extinguished the movement as a pressing national issue, it also spurred an internal fracturing of the Civil Rights coalition along generational and ideological lines.The relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War has been explored before, most notably in Simon Hall's Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s. Lucks extends this scholarship by anchoring his analysis in a Cold War context. critical move elucidates how the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s created a political terrain that demarcated the fault lines for the Civil Rights coalition's eventual three-way split into moderates (NAACP and National Urban League) wedded to LBJ's anticommunist foreign policy, radicals (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and Congress of Racial Equality [CORE]) critical of America's colonial character, and hesitant critics of Vietnam (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).Lucks begins by examining the effects of the postWorld War II Red Scare on African American intellectuals and organizations. Many of these early Civil Rights leaders viewed their racial oppression in Jim Crow America through an internationalist prism wherein racism was tied to colonialism and imperialism perpetrated by white oppressors against people of color. Their anticolonial critiques against American foreign policy, however, led to political persecution in the age of McCarthyism. Lucks argues convincingly that, in order to avoid being red-baited, prominent African American organizations like the NAACP and National Urban League quietly conformed to Cold War ideology, sealing a decades-long allegiance to liberal anticommunism, which set them at odds with others in the Civil Rights coalition.However, the Cold War orthodoxy that ensnared an older generation of Civil Rights activists didn't affect younger, more radical members of the coalition. As the war in Vietnam began to escalate in 1964 and 1965, African American activists and organizers within SNCC and CORE resurrected the racialized anti-colonial critique against American foreign policy that had been obliterated during the Red Scare, a position summed up most poignantly by SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael: This Vietnam War ain't nothing but white sending black to kill brown men, to defend, so they claim, a country they stole from red men (122). …