Two great social causes held center stage in American politics in the
1960s: the civil rights movement and the antiwar groundswell in the face
of a deepening American military commitment in Vietnam. In Peace and
Freedom, Simon Hall explores two linked themes: the civil rights
movement's response to the war in Vietnam on the one hand and, on the
other, the relationship between the black groups that opposed the war
and the mainstream peace movement. Based on comprehensive archival
research, the book weaves together local and national stories to offer
an illuminating and judicious chronicle of these movements,
demonstrating how their increasingly radicalized components both found
common cause and provoked mutual antipathies.
Peace and Freedom shows how and why the civil rights movement
responded to the war in differing ways--explaining black militants'
hostility toward the war while also providing a sympathetic treatment of
those organizations and leaders reluctant to take a stand. And, while
Black Power, counterculturalism, and left-wing factionalism all made
interracial coalition-building more difficult, the book argues that it
was the peace movement's reluctance to link the struggle to end the war
with the fight against racism at home that ultimately prevented the two
movements from cooperating more fully. Considering the historical
relationship between the civil rights movement and foreign policy, Hall
also offers an in-depth look at the history of black America's links
with the American left and with pacifism.
With its keen insights into one of the most controversial decades in
American history, Peace and Freedom recaptures the immediacy and
importance of the time.
