Birds of a Different Feather

In 1996 diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer wrote that "black American opinion has rarely been univocal and particularly so in the realm of foreign affairs," yet this complexity has rarely appeared in accounts of African Americans and the Vietnam War. Since the early 1970s, U.S. scholars have enshrined an overly monolithic view of African Americans and the Vietnam War by focusing almost entirely on African American antiwar sentiment, obscuring a substantial base of African American support in the 1960s. This dissertation contends that this depiction of an African American community disproportionately united against the war in the Johnson years is overly simplistic and historically inaccurate.In reality, African Americans, as a whole, were no less supportive of the Vietnam War in the Johnson years than they had been of any other U.S. military conflict. In fact at various times, they were more supportive of the war than their white counterparts due to the pro-civil rights stance of the administration and the opportunities presented by a fully integrated military and a war time economy. Neither hawks nor doves, African American war supporters in the Johnson years seemed to be "birds of a different feather." This dissertation seeks to add much-needed balance to the narrative of blacks and the Vietnam War by exploring the reasons why a significant number of African Americans supported the war during the Johnson years and by assessing the consequences of that support. In doing so, it builds on the work of U.S. diplomatic historians like Plummer, Gerald Gill, and Jonathan Seth Rosenberg and British historians like Manfred Berg, Adam Fairclough, and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, who have all acknowledged that African American opinion on the Vietnam War during the Johnson years may have been more publicly, consciously, and sharply divided than during any other twentieth century conflict. By focusing on the NAACP and the Urban League to examine African American support for the war, this seeks to connect the Vietnam and civil rights historiographies by presenting the more complex portrait of an African American community caught between the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam. It argues that the support of moderate civil rights leaders was the manifestation of a broad consensus in the larger African American community regarding the administration's unprecedented support of civil rights and a shared vision of the Johnson presidency. And it contends that the depiction of civil rights leaders who supported the Vietnam War during this period as out-of-touch, sycophants to President Johnson obscures their connection to and their place within the broader African American community.The first three chapters of this six-chapter dissertation provide a basis for understanding the three that follow. The introduction presents the themes and assertions to be supported by the dissertation and place this study within the diplomatic history and civil rights historiographies. Chapter one surveys presidential relations with civil rights leaders and the African American response to U.S. military engagements in the period between World War II and the U.S. military escalation in Vietnam. Chapter two explores the organizational histories of the NAACP and the National Urban League, the personal and professional histories of their leadership, and their relationship with Lyndon Johnson prior to his presidency. It is the legacy of these interactions between the civil rights community, the federal government, and the African American community that formed the basis of African American support for Johnson administration policies in Vietnam once the military build-up began in 1965.The final three chapters focus exclusively on the Johnson presidency.