List of protests against the Vietnam War

Protests against the Vietnam War took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The protests were part of a movement in opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. The majority of the protests were in the United States, but some took place around the world.

Protest against the Vietnam War in Amsterdam in April 1968

List of protests

1945

1954
  • American Quakers began protesting via the media. For example, in May, "just after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the Service Committee bought a page in The New York Times to protest what seemed to be the tendency of the USA to step into Indo-China as France stepped out. We expressed our fear that in so doing, America would back into a war."[2]

1960
  • November. Amid rising U.S. involvement in Vietnam, 1,100 Quakers undertook a silent protest vigil—the group "ringed the Pentagon for parts of two days".[2]

1963

1964

1965
  • February 2 –March. Protests at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas organized by the RA Student Peace Union.[9]
  • February 12–16. Anti-U.S. demonstrations in various cities in the world, "including a break-in at the U.S. embassy in Budapest, Hungary, by some 200 Asian and African students."[10]
  • March 15. A debate organized by the Inter-University Committee for a Public Hearing on Vietnam is held in Washington, D.C. Radio and television coverage.
  • March 16. An 82-year-old Detroit woman named Alice Herz self-immolated to make a statement against the horrors of the war. She died ten days later.[11]
  • March 24. First SDS organized teach-in, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. 3,000 students attend and the idea spreads fast.
  • March. Berkeley, California: Jerry Rubin and Stephen Smale's Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) organize a huge protest of 35,000.
  • April. Oklahoma college students sent out hundreds of thousands of pamphlets with pictures of dead babies in a combat zone on them to portray a message about battles taking place in Vietnam.
  • April 17. The SDS-organized March Against the Vietnam War onto Washington, D.C. was the largest anti-war demonstration in the U.S. to date with 15,000 to 20,000 people attending. Paul Potter demands a radical change of society.
  • May 5. Several hundred people carrying a black coffin marched to the Berkeley, California draft board, and 40 men burned their draft cards.[12]
  • May 21–23. Vietnam Day Committee organized large teach-in at UC Berkeley. 10–30,000 attend.
  • May 22. The Berkeley draft board was visited again, with 19 men burning their cards. President Lyndon B. Johnson was hung in effigy.[12]
  • Summer. Young blacks in McComb, Mississippi learn one of their classmates was killed in Vietnam and distribute a leaflet saying "No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White man's freedom".[7]
  • June. Richard Steinke, a West Point graduate in Vietnam, refused to board an aircraft taking him to a remote Vietnamese village, stating the war "is not worth a single American life".[7]
  • June 27. End Your Silence, an open letter in the New York Times by the group Artists and Writers Protest against the War in Vietnam.[13]
  • July. The Vietnam Day Committee organized militant protest in Oakland, California ends in inglorious debacle, when the organizers end the march from Oakland to Berkeley to avoid a confrontation with police.
  • July. A Women Strike for Peace- delegation led by Cora Weiss meets its North Vietnamese and Vietcong counterpart in Jakarta, Indonesia.
  • July 30. A man from the Catholic Worker Movement is photographed burning his draft card on Whitehall Street in Manhattan in front of the Armed Forces Induction Center. His photograph appears in Life magazine in August.[14]
  • October 15. David J. Miller burned his draft card at a rally again held near the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall Street. The 24-year-old pacifist, member of the Catholic Worker Movement, became the first man arrested and convicted under the 1965 amendment to the Selective Service Act of 1948.[15]
  • Europe, October 15–16. First "International Days of Protest". Anti-U.S. demonstrations in London, Rome, Brussels, Copenhagen and Stockholm.
  • October 16. Tens of thousands march down New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest the war, in a parade organized by the NY Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee.
  • October 20. Stephen Lynn Smith, a student at the University of Iowa, spoke to a rally at the Memorial Union in Iowa City, Iowa, and burned his draft card. He was arrested, found guilty and put on three years probation.[16]
  • October 30. Pro-Vietnam War march in New York City brings 25,000.
  • November 2. In front of the Pentagon in Washington, as thousands of employees were streaming out of the building in the late afternoon, Norman Morrison, a thirty-two-year-old pacifist, father of three, stood below the third-floor windows of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, doused himself with kerosene, and set himself afire, giving up his life in protest against the war.[7]
  • November 6. Thomas C. Cornell, Marc Paul Edelman, Roy Lisker, David McReynolds and James Wilson burned their draft cards at a public rally organized by the Committee for Non-Violent Action in Union Square, New York City.[17]
  • November 27. SANE-sponsored March on Washington in 1965. 15,000 to 20,000 demonstrators.
  • December 16–17. High school students in Des Moines, Iowa, are suspended for wearing black armbands to "mourn the deaths on both sides" and in support of Robert F. Kennedy's call for a Christmas truce. The students sued the Des Moines School District, resulting in the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the students, Tinker v. Des Moines.

1966

1967
Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to an anti-Vietnam war rally at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on April 27, 1967
A protest against the Vietnam War in Helsinki in December 1967
  • January 29 – February 5. Angry Arts Week by the Artists Protest group.
  • April 4. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at Riverside church in New York City about the Vietnam War: "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". King stated that, "somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."[7]
  • April 15. At Sheep Meadow in Central Park in New York City, some 60 young men including a few Cornell University students came together to burn their draft cards in a Maxwell House coffee can.[20] More join them, including uniformed Green Beret Army Reservist Gary Rader. As many as 158 cards are burned.[21]
  • April 15. Spring Mobe protests in New York City (300,000 meet in Central Park and march to the United Nations) and in San Francisco.
  • May 20–21. 700 activists at the Spring Mobilization Conference in Washington, D.C. The Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam becomes the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe).
  • Stockholm (May) and Roskilde, Denmark (November_. International War Crimes Tribunal, known as the Russell Tribunal, unanimously finds the U.S. government and its armed forces "guilty of the deliberate, systematic and large-scale bombardment of civilian targets, including civilian populations, dwellings, villages, dams, dikes, medical establishments, leper colonies, schools, churches, pagodas, historical and cultural monuments".
  • June 1. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War is formed. Veteran Jan Barry Crumb participated in a protest on April 7 called the "Fifth Avenue Peace Parade" in New York City. On May 30, Crumb and ten like-minded men attended a peace demonstration in Washington, D.C.
  • June 23. The Bond, the first G.I. underground paper established.[22]
  • June 23. 1,300 police attack 10,000 peace marchers at The Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, where President Lyndon B. Johnson was being honored.
  • In the summer of 1967, Neil Armstrong and various other NASA officials began a tour of South America to raise awareness for space travel. According to First Man, a biography of Armstrong's life, during the tour several South American college students protested the astronaut, and shouted such phrases as "Murderers get out of Vietnam!" and other anti-Vietnam War messages.
  • October 16. A day of widespread war protest organized by The Mobe in 30 cities across the U.S., with some 1,400 draft cards burned.[23]
  • October 18. "Dow Day" at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin, the first university Vietnam War protest to turn violent as thousands of students protest Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm, during the company's campus recruitment visit. Nineteen police officers and about 50 students were treated for injuries at hospitals.[24][25]
  • October 20. Resist leaders present draft cards to the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
  • October 21–23. National Mobe organized the March on the Pentagon to "Confront the War Makers". 100,000 are at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C., 35,000 to 50,000 go on to The Pentagon, some to engage in acts of civil disobedience. Norman Mailer's later authors The Armies of the Night, which describes the march and protest.
  • October 27. Father Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest and World War II veteran, led a group now known as the Baltimore Four who went to a draft board in Baltimore, drenched the draft records with blood, and waited to be arrested.[7]
  • December 4. National draft card turn-in. At the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco, some 500 protesters witness 88 draft cards collected and burned.[12]
  • December 4–8. During "Stop the Draft Week" demonstrations in New York City, 585 are arrested, including Benjamin Spock.
  • Sweden, December 20. Seventh Year of the Viet Cong, the Front National de Libération du Vietnam du Sud, or FNL, is celebrated with violent clashes in Stockholm and 40 Swedish towns.

1968
West German students protest against the Vietnam War in 1968

1969

1970

1971

1972
  • April 15–20. May. New waves of protests across the country.
  • April 17. Militant anti-ROTC demonstration at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, as 800 National Guardsmen are ordered onto the campus.
  • April 22. Mass anti-war demonstrations sponsored by National Peace Action Coalition, People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, and other organizations attracted an estimated 100,000 people in New York City, 12,000 in Los Angeles, 25,000 in San Francisco, and other cities around the U.S. and world.[43][44][45]
  • Frankfurt am Main, Germany, May 11. Headquarters of the V Corps of the U.S. Army at the IG Farben Building: The Commando Petra Schelm of the Rote Armee Fraktion killed U.S. Officer Paul Bloomquist and wounded thirteen in a bombing attack.[46]
  • May 21. "Emergency March" in Washington, D.C., organized by the National Peace Action Coalition and the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice. 8,000 to 15,000 protest in Washington, D.C. against the increased bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbors.
  • May 24. In Heidelberg, Germany, the Red Army Faction detonates two car bombs at the European Headquarters of the U.S. Army, killing three.[47]
  • June 22. "Ring around Congress" demonstration in Washington, D.C.
  • In July. Jane Fonda visits North Vietnam and speaks on Hanoi Radio, earning herself the nickname "Hanoi Jane".
  • August 22. 3,000 protest against the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, including Ron Kovic, a wheelchair-using Vietnam veteran, who leads fellow veterans into the Convention Hall, wheels down the aisles, and, as Richard Nixon begins his acceptance speech, shouts, "Stop the bombing! Stop the war!"[7]
  • October 14. The "Peace March to End the Vietnam War" in San Francisco. This "silent-march" demonstration began at City Hall and moved down Fulton Street to Golden Gate Park, where speeches were given. Over 2,000 were in attendance. Numerous groups, including many veterans, march to support the so-called "7-Point" plan to peace. George McGovern gives a speech at the Cow Palace the night before, which energizes the Saturday morning event.[48]
  • November 7. On general election day, U.S. President Richard Nixon defeats George McGovern in a landslide victory with 60.7% popular votes and 520 electoral votes.
  • December. Protests against U.S. bombings on Hanoi and Haiphong.

1973

Common slogans and chants

There are many pro- and anti-war slogans and chants. Those who used the anti-war slogans were commonly called "doves"; those who supported the war were known as "hawks"

Anti-war
  • "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" was chanted during Lyndon B. Johnson's tenure as president and almost anytime he appeared publicly.[7][49]

Pro-war
  • "Love our country", "America, love it or leave it", and "No glory like old glory" are examples of pro-war slogans.

See also

References
  1. Franklin, Bruce H. (20 October 2000). "The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed to Forget". chronicle.com. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on 10 February 2009. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
  2. Colin W. Bell (1973). Where Service Begins. Wider Quaker Fellowship, 152-A North 15th Street, Philadelphia 19102. p. 12 and 14.
  3. WRL News, Nov-Dec 1963, p. 1.
  4. The Power of the People (1987), Robert Cooney & Helen Michaelowski, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, p. 182.
  5. Flynn, George Q. (1993). The Draft, 1940–1973. Modern war studies. University Press of Kansas. p. 175. ISBN 0-7006-0586-X.
  6. Gottlieb, Sherry Gershon (1991). Hell no, we won't go!: resisting the draft during the Vietnam War. Viking. p. xix. ISBN 0-670-83935-3. 1964: May 12 – Twelve students at a New York rally burn their draft cards...
  7. Zinn, Howard (2003). A People's History of the United States. HarperCollins Publishers. pp. 483–501. ISBN 0061965588.
  8. The Power of the People (1987), Robert Cooney & Helen Michaelowski, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, p. 183.
  9. Robbie Lieberman: Prairie Power. University of Missouri Press, 2004.
  10. James H. Willbanks: Vietnam War Almanac, p. 106
  11. Coburn, Jon (January 2018). ""I Have Chosen the Flaming Death": The Forgotten Self-Immolation of Alice Herz". Peace and Change. 43 (1): 32–60. doi:10.1111/pech.12273.
  12. "Anti-War Political Activism". Pacifica Radio. UC Berkeley. Retrieved March 13, 2011.
  13. Julie Ault: Alternative Art, New York, 1965–1985. P. 17ff. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
  14. Bailey, Beth L. (2009). America's Army: making the all-volunteer force. Harvard University Press. pp. 18–21. ISBN 978-0-674-03536-2.
  15. Perlstein, Rick (2008). Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Simon and Schuster. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-7432-4302-5.
  16. "368 F.2d 529 – Stephen Lynn Smith v. United States". Public Resource. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
  17. "384 F. 2d 115 – United States v. Edelman". Open Jurist. 1967. p. 115. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
  18. "Muhammad Ali". www.aavw.org.
  19. "1966: Arrests in London after Vietnam rally". 3 July 1966 – via news.bbc.co.uk.
  20. Maier, Thomas (2003). Dr. Spock. Basic Books. pp. 278–279. ISBN 0-465-04315-1.
  21. Jezer, Martin (May 1967). "In Response To: We Won't Go". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
  22. James Lewes: Protest and Survive: Underground G.I. Newspapers during the Vietnam War. Greenwood Publ., 2003, p. 154.
  23. Elmer, Jerry (2005). Felon for peace: the memoir of a Vietnam-era draft resister. Vanderbilt University Press. pp. 61–62. ISBN 0-8265-1495-2.
  24. University of Wisconsin–Madison (2017). "A Turning Point". Retrieved 26 Oct 2017.
  25. Worland, Gayle (8 Oct 2017). "50 years ago, 'Dow Day' left its mark on Madison". Wisconsin State Journal. Madison, WI: John Humenik. Retrieved 26 Oct 2017.
  26. Miller, Danny (27 December 2008). "Eartha Kitt, CIA Target". HuffPost.
  27. "3rd Rome Riot Over Viet". The San Francisco Examiner. April 28, 1968. p. 18. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
  28. "Thousands In Antiwar S.F. Rally". The San Francisco Examiner. 1968-04-28. p. 1. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
  29. "Thousands In Antiwar S.F. Rally". The San Francisco Examiner. 1968-04-28. p. 19. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
  30. "51 Jailed, 15 Hurt in Chicago". The San Francisco Examiner. April 28, 1968. p. 18. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
  31. "Marches Vie in New York, April 27, 1968". The San Francisco Examiner. 1968-04-27. p. 1. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
  32. "Marches Vie in New York, April 27, 1968". The San Francisco Examiner. 1968-04-27. p. 3. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
  33. Blackwell, Thomas (Oct 4, 2008). "What happened at SIUC's Old Main?". The Southern.
  34. Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam
  35. "For 50 år siden parterede han en hest og puttede den i glas: 'Det har opnået kultstatus'". DR (in Danish). 2020-01-30. Retrieved 2022-09-15.
  36. "Draft Resistance 1965–1972 – Mapping American Social Movements". depts.washington.edu. Retrieved 2021-05-18.
  37. Bozeman, Barry (May 30, 2010). "Protest & Activism at UT – 40 Years On". Knoxville 22 blog. Retrieved September 22, 2019.
  38. Chávez, John R. (1998). "The Chicano Movement on the Eastside". Eastside Landmark: A History of the East Los Angeles Community Union, 1968–1993. Stanford University Press. pp. 71–76. ISBN 0804733333. Retrieved 14 Sep 2013.
  39. Scates, Bob (2022-10-10). "Draftmen Go Free: A History of the Anti-Conscription Movement in Australia". The Commons Social Change Library. Retrieved 2022-11-02.
  40. "Vietnam Veterans Against the War demonstrate – History.com This Day in History – 4/19/1971". History.com. Retrieved 10 May 2014.
  41. Washington Area Spark, Largest Anti-Viet War Protest: 1971, https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/albums/72157655257718310
  42. Zinn Education Project, April 24, 1971: Anti-War Protests in D.C. and San Francisco, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/anti-war-protests-dc-sf/
  43. Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 23, 1972, page 1, https://www.newspapers.com/image/385547617/
  44. "1972 Vietnam War protest – Framework". 6 April 2016.
  45. The Militant, May 5, 1972, pp. 12–015, https://www.themilitant.com/1972/3617/MIL3617.pdf
  46. Aust, Stefan (2017). Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex (1. Auflage der Neuausgabe, erweiterte und aktualisierte Ausgabe ed.). Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag. pp. 383–385. ISBN 978-3-455-00033-7.
  47. Aust, p. 388-390
  48. "October 14, 1972, San Francisco Peace March – Estuary Press".
  49. Britannica Online, Ronald H. Spector, "Vietnam War", retrieved 18/05/14. "Vietnam War | Facts, Summary, Years, Timeline, Casualties, Combatants, & Facts". Archived from the original on 2014-05-18. Retrieved 2014-05-18.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)

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