Chronicles of a Two-Front War: Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American Press - Hardcover

Eldridge, Lawerence Allen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082621939X ISBN 13: 9780826219398

Verlag: University of Missouri Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

During the Vietnam War, young African Americans fought to protect the freedoms of Southeast Asians and died in disproportionate numbers compared to their white counterparts. Despite their sacrifices, black Americans were unable to secure equal rights at home, and because the importance of the war overshadowed the civil rights movement in the minds of politicians and the public, it seemed that further progress might never come.  For many African Americans, the bloodshed, loss, and disappointment of war became just another chapter in the history of the civil rights movement.  Lawrence Allen Eldridge explores this two-front war, showing how the African American press grappled with the Vietnam War and its impact on the struggle for civil rights.

Written in a clear narrative style, Chronicles of a Two-Front War is the first book to examine coverage of the Vietnam War by black news publications, from the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 to the final withdrawal of American ground forces in the spring of 1973 and the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975.

Eldridge reveals how the black press not only reported the war but also weighed its significance in the context of the civil rights movement.

The author researched seventeen African American newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the New Courier, and two magazines, Jet and Ebony.  He augmented the study with a rich array of primary sources—including interviews with black journalists and editors, oral history collections, the personal papers of key figures in the black press, and government documents, including those from the presidential libraries of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—to trace the ups and downs of U.S. domestic and wartime policy especially as it related to the impact of the war on civil rights.

Eldridge examines not only the role of reporters during the war, but also those of editors, commentators, and cartoonists. Especially enlightening is the research drawn from extensive oral histories by prominent journalist Ethel Payne, the first African American woman to receive the title of war correspondent. She described a widespread practice in black papers of reworking material from major white papers without providing proper credit, as the demand for news swamped the small budgets and limited staffs of African American papers.  The author analyzes both the strengths of the black print media and the weaknesses in their coverage.

The black press ultimately viewed the Vietnam War through the lens of African American experience, blaming the war for crippling LBJ’s Great Society and the War on Poverty.  Despite its waning hopes for an improved life, the black press soldiered on.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lawrence Allen Eldridge is a freelance writer and author of The Gospel Text of Epiphanius of Salamis. He lives near Atlanta.

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Chronicles of a Two-Front War

Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American PressBy Lawrence Allen Eldridge

University of Missouri Press

Copyright © 2011 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1939-8

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................ixIntroduction.........................................................................11. Bringing the News Home............................................................82. Vietnam and the Great Society: The Two-Front War..................................183. Fueling the Anger: The Draft and Black Casualties.................................454. African American Opposition to the War in Vietnam.................................735. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Globalization of Black Protest.....................946. "We're with You, Chief ": The Black Press and LBJ.................................1257. The Black Press and Vietnam in the Nixon Years....................................1568. Race Relations in an Integrated Military..........................................1869. The Black Press and the Vietnam War...............................................206Notes................................................................................215Bibliography.........................................................................251Index................................................................................277

Chapter One

Bringing the News Home

There is an important need for documenting the Negro soldier ... in the light of the civil rights struggle back home.—Ethel Payne to U.S. official in Vietnam, December 28, 1966

Vietnam swarmed with reporters. Newspaper correspondents began filing stories from the combat zone early in the war. A few, like David Halberstam of the New York Times, became journalistic superstars who wrote compelling pieces that began to define the Vietnam story for millions of readers and to deepen hostility toward the media within the Johnson administration. After the Tet Offensive became big news in early 1968, the number of journalists in the country swelled to more than six hundred from all over the world. Although no military censors systematically restricted the flow of information from the war zone to news outlets, as was the case in World War II, U.S. officials in Vietnam sought to manage and control the news that was reported. Public information officers representing the U.S. command in Saigon tried ceaselessly to shape the story of the war. Their daily briefings were so disconnected from reality that they came to be known among reporters as the "Five O'Clock Follies."

Among the horde of U.S. correspondents in Vietnam, few were African Americans. Despite more hiring of African Americans during the sixties, by 1970 only 5 percent of all reporters and photographers in the mainstream U.S. media were black. None of the black publications could afford to keep permanent news staffs in South Vietnam. To fill the gap various African American news publications sent reporters on temporary assignment to Vietnam to observe the war and file stories chronicling their impressions.

Ethel Payne, a prominent journalist at the Chicago Defender, arrived in Saigon on her first temporary assignment in Vietnam on Christmas Day 1966. Three days later she wrote a memo to Barry Zorthian, chief information officer at the U.S. embassy, to say what she intended to do in Vietnam and to elicit official cooperation. Her statement was an apt description of what other black journalists on assignment from African American news publications went to the war theater to do. She told Zorthian that her first purpose was "to try and give an adequate picture of why we are involved in Vietnam," particularly to inform "Negro communities." Payne's second stated goal was "to tell the full role of Negro soldiers in this conflict," focusing especially on "the extent of integration in the services."

She noted that other African American journalists who had visited Vietnam to report on the war were "in agreement" that they needed "more material and cooperation" from U.S. officers in the war zone, particularly in ferreting out information about individual blacks in the battle zone that would reveal their "assignments, acts of heroism[,]" and "overall performance." She lamented the absence of clear official documentation of the war-zone performance of black service people that had been reported by "other Negro correspondents." The requests of these war correspondents for detailed information about African Americans' service had often been fruitless, Payne reported, because military officials claimed racial statistics were not available from personnel records.

Payne later acknowledged that, although black service personnel hinted at their "nagging doubts about the legitimacy and morality of the war," she failed to focus on that aspect of the story. She even confessed that "maybe I was a little brainwashed myself" because she did not concentrate on elements of the Vietnam story that might have reflected badly on the official Washington line. "I've always regretted to this day that I didn't do what I felt was an adequate job in reporting on the immorality of the war," she told an interviewer in 1987. Her statement was a remarkably honest expression of what she regarded as a personal failure. It also sheds light on the pressures that at least one journalist felt, to emphasize the positive elements in the story of African American members of the U.S. military in Vietnam. Some of this restraint may have reflected her innate caution or may have been influenced by the editorial moderation that was typical of some black newspapers, including Payne's own Chicago Defender, when complete candor might have meant criticizing Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy even as he championed civil rights programs beneficial to African Americans.

Another African American journalist who traveled to Vietnam on temporary assignment for a black paper was Mike Davis of the Baltimore Afro-American. During his four-month hitch in the second half of 1967, Davis produced a staggering volume of material, often filling several pages in a given issue of his paper. The Afro-American further enriched its war coverage by securing the services of Conrad Clark, an experienced black newspaperman who was in Vietnam as a GI in the Fourth Infantry Division and serving out the balance of his military commitment. The beauty of the arrangement for the paper was that it got a steady stream of stories from Clark while the U.S. Army picked up the tab.

Payne's colleague at the Defender, Donald Mosby, also went to Vietnam on special assignment. He was sent to write a series on black soldiers in the war zone, after the newspaper received complaints from African American soldiers and some parents about the racist treatment of black GI's. Mosby's first report from Vietnam was published on May 6, 1968, barely a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It was a time of tumult in the United States and of rising racial tensions among the troops in Vietnam. Mosby's lead article was followed by a series of pieces that provided a frequently raw, acerbic perspective on the experiences of blacks in the military during the war.

Sometimes a chain of newspapers would send a correspondent to Vietnam to file stories that would be picked up by more than one paper in the group. Payne's articles which appeared frequently in the Chicago Defender also were picked up by...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Missouri Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 082621939X
• ISBN 13: 9780826219398
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 285
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar