The People: The Dilemma of Dissent

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Bayard Rustin, who organized the successful March on Washington, voiced a disappointment felt by many Negroes. "There is not going to be a tremendous rush of Negroes into the peace movement," said Rustin. In fact, many Negroes have found service in Viet Nam valuable in proving their courage—a quantity whose fierce abundance has never before been tapped in American armed combat quite so effectively.

Long the nation's most respected advocate of Negro advancement, King—a Nobel Peace Prizewinner—had held himself aloof from such demagogic "Black Power" advocates as S.N.C.C.'s Stokely Carmichael and CORE's Floyd McKissick. Indeed, King once vowed never to stand on the same platform with Carmichael as long as he spouted an anti-white line. By joining the Spring Mobilization, King reneged on that vow —and possibly on the entire cause of nonviolent Negro advancement.

At the U.N., King admitted that 10 million Americans at most "explicitly oppose the war," but said that they included many of "our deepest thinkers in the academic and intellectual communi ty." Building to a sonorous peroration, he cried: "Let us save our national honor—stop the bombing. Let us save American lives and Vietnamese lives-stop the bombing. Let us take a single instantaneous step to the peace table—stop the bombing. Let our voices ring out across the land to say the American people are not vainglorious conquerors —stop the bombing." Through it all ran the theme that America, "which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world," is now "an arch counter-revolutionary nation."

The phrases that really rocked the U.N. Plaza were those of Stokely Carmichael: "There is a higher law than the law of Racist McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of the fool Dean Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of the buffoon Lyndon Baines Johnson." Though Stokely never defined it, his law was demagoguery, pitched to all authority haters.

For Love, Not War. Many left-wing Americans—including Senior Socialist Norman Thomas—refused to throw in with King, Carmichael & Co. Because the pitch of their protest made it seem that Hanoi was innocent of any aggressive role in the war, even the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy refused to take part, though SANE Co-Chairman Dr. Benjamin Spock spoke at the New York demonstration.

None of the non-participants challenged the right of dissent—simply the fact that this particular protest seemed based on a double standard that assumed Washington's guilt and Hanoi's innocence. Despite the marchers' pacific plea—"Make War on Poverty, Not People"—the sad fact of the "Spring Mobilization" was that it might only serve to prolong the war in Viet Nam. The ultimate accomplishment of the marchers who so gaily painted one another with psychedelic designs and marched down Madison Avenue in the cause of "love, not war," may be to encourage Hanoi in the belief that the country is divided and therefore to reject some future U.S. peace initiative. For those who oppose the Viet Nam war, that is the dilemma of dissent in the U.S. today.