Louisville was home not only to [Boxing champion Muhammad] Ali, the nation's best-known dissident, but also to social justice proponents, civil rights advocates, and a growing peace community. Anne and Carl Braden, Dr. George Edwards, and Suzy Post, in particular, addressed the issues of race and class that Ali represented, and, through coalitions and networks that linked young radicals and middle-aged activists, they fashioned an antiwar movement in Louisville that adds depth to historians' understanding of the southern response to the Vietnam War. Middle aged, middle class, well educated, and white, like other southern activist leaders such as Tennessee minister Will Campbell, the dissenters in Louisville joined other teachers, clerics, homemakers, and lawyers to become a vocal minority in cities all across the South. In Atlanta, Austin, Chapel Hill, Columbia, El Paso, Houston, Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, and Tallahassee, they provided counsel and often afforded a degree of protection from the legal system that the younger generation of soldiers and protesters could have received nowhere else. More than sympathizers and boosters, the older men and women often set the agenda for reform as they mentored and sheltered soldiers, draft evaders, peaceniks, and other young people who opposed the American presence in Vietnam. (my emphasis)

Southern hostility toward war resisters frequently provoked confrontations. In Tallahassee, for example, conservative Florida State University fraternity brothers and "jocks" pelted activists with rocks and tossed them in the student union fountain. In Texas the Ku Klux Klan harassed a woman after the local newspaper revealed that her son-in-law was an exile in Canada. Her complaints about a break-in, shattered windows, slashed tires, and crank calls failed to alarm local police, who advised her to move since the local "organization" did not "take kindly to draft dodgers."

In 1967 Austin antiwar leader George Vizard died of gunshot wounds in what police termed a grocery holdup. Texas peace organizations disagreed and called his death a "political murder." Three years later a coalition of Houston activists, including the John Brown Revolutionary League, the Houston Committee to End the War, Communications for Peace, and the University of Houston Student Mobilization Committee, accused the city's police of "protecting" Klan members who perpetrated bombings, shootings, and arson.

Edwards, Post, and the Bradens risked criminal prosecution for operating a kind of Underground Railroad that assisted young Kentuckians as they sought to avoid military service in the jungles of Vietnam. Throughout the South, like-minded "conductors" did the same. Kevin Vrieze, a draft evader from Texas, found help from "Houston to Austin to Tulsa to St. Louis to Detroit, and finally to Windsor in Canada." Clerics, teachers, homemakers, and pacifists formed the core of the network. As Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop noted, "the more middle-class and middle-aged the better," because such individuals did not draw the attention of federal and local authorities with the same regularity as did their younger, more radical counterparts.

Individuals and organizations throughout the South assisted, to varying degrees, dissident soldiers. For example, the Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, hosted weekly meetings for a Fort Bragg organization named GIs United Against the War in Vietnam. The Bradens went a step further. They had a printing press in the basement that soldiers used for an underground GI newspaper called FTA and subtitled Fun, Travel, Adventure, drawing from a military recruitment slogan. One of the first newspapers edited exclusively by GIs, "It was called FTA," noted Anne, and "What it really stood for was 'Fuck the Army." Despite nearly constant federal surveillance, the Bradens' home in the city's West End served as SCEF headquarters and became a "second home" for some of the soldiers from Fort Knox.

[A]n estimated three hundred GI underground newspapers appeared during the Vietnam era, but most lasted a year or less. Dissidents at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, published at least half a dozen, including Flag-In-Action, Napalm, EM 16, In Formation, Spread Eagle, and People's Press. Perhaps the two most famous GI newspapers, both FTA and Fort Jackson's Short Times ran fairly regularly from 1968 through 1972...

Like many of the GI coffeehouses, the one in Muldraugh proved extremely controversial, enjoyed a relatively brief life span, and thus on the surface could be judged a failure. Coffeehouses, however, served a significant purpose. They became way stations for young draftees and deserters on the Underground Railroad to Canada and fueled the growing GI movement by bringing civilian and military activists together.

Like [famous pediatrician and antiwar activist Benjamin] Spock, Post believed in solidarity among the various groups that opposed the war even as they took on other social justice causes, and she faced the same challenges that he did in getting the antiwar organizations to work side by side with civil rights activists already radicalized by the struggle. Ironically, black war protesters encountered the same dilemma as they weighed coming out against Vietnam and thus possibly alienating their grassroots supporters. Both sets of dissidents risked antagonizing the government and being tarred with the brush of communism. Respectability was important, especially to middle-aged activists who recalled the spectacle of McCarthyism. They too risked losing everything if they went too far. Suzy Post enjoyed a certain level of respectability because of her socioeconomic status. "I came out of the great white Jewish middle class," Post noted. "My husband was a very successful trial lawyer so I could operate within that community with a kind of authority and legitimacy." Post described her work and the antiwar stance of her colleagues, including the Bradens and Edwards, in ethical terms. "It was a moral issue and it grew in the churches. Most of the people with whom I worked really didn't have a political perspective," she recalled, "they had a moral perspective." This absence of political perspective divided "traditional" antiwar women like Post from the younger generation of "radicals" who criticized the older women for their "false consciousness" and urged them to abandon the roles of mother and wife and demand instead to be treated equally by the government as citizens. (my emphasis)

The King anniversary also sparked a demonstration in Louisville. To honor him and support the so-called Black Six (six African Americans who at the time faced trial over their alleged involvement in riots in Louisville in May 1968), about two hundred civil rights advocates, most of them blacks, started marching from Louisville's West End toward the county courthouse, the site of a scheduled memorial service. Coming from the other direction, down Broadway, 130 LPC demonstrators, primarily whites, marched to acknowledge King's antiwar contributions. The streets were full of people. According to Anne Braden, neither group had secured a permit to march, and neither was aware of the other's plans. "It was pure coincidence," Braden recalled, and no one had "enough sense on either side to call up and make some contacts." By chance, both groups hit Fourth and Broadway at the same moment and "overflowed" into the street. The police, probably fearing a recurrence of the May 1968 disorders, "quickly blocked the street to vehicles while the marchers clapped, sang and chanted their way" to the courthouse. At first, the blacks shouted, "Freedom, Freedom!" and the whites shouted, "Peace, Peace!" as they walked. Soon, however, they shouted both slogans in unison and raised a black flag. In a 1999 interview, Braden mused over what the movements could accomplish when they came together. "You took over Fourth Street," she asserted, "nobody could have stopped them, and nobody tried." Before the demonstration ended, Braden ran into George Edwards on the street. The two had at times disagreed over the Black Power movement because its supporters' advocacy of racial separation disturbed him. As their paths converged, Braden asked, "What do you think about that Black Power now? He just laughed," she recalled.

Anne Braden's brainchild, the SSOC, a predominantly white group meant to complement SNCC, enjoyed some early success fighting for civil rights and other social justice causes, but it derailed on the Vietnam War. Organized in 1964 by delegates from fifteen southern colleges, the SSOC spread throughout the region and even reached into the Deep South. For example, in a Jackson, Mississippi, apartment, five SSOC activists calling themselves "The Army" produced an underground newspaper titled KUDZU and, with the help of Millsaps College students, distributed the publication at local high schools and at Mississippi State University. Headquartered in Nashville, just several hours from Louisville, the SSOC collaborated with the SCEF to set the agenda for the southern antiwar movement. The SCEF occasionally met in Nashville and lent cars to SSOC members, who in turn promoted the Louisville-based organization. The two groups worked together to create a new organization, the Southern Committee Against Repression (SCAR), and they initiated the Southern Movement News Service, a clearinghouse for coordinating the region's underground papers and movement newsletters. (my emphasis)

The SSOC, backed by the SCEF and other groups, reached its peak in early 1969. Although an internal crisis soon splintered the group, it organized a four-day southern protest of the Nixon inauguration in Washington, D.C. The protesters chose a site near the White House at the statue of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, whose scorched-earth tactics during the Civil War sought to break the South's spirit. The site symbolized "Yankee Imperialism and the colonial status of the South," claimed the young activists, who co-opted historical memory to allege that northern capitalists victimized southerners and Vietnamese alike.

The group's antiwar philosophy centered on "southern distinctiveness," which inspired some members and offended others. Some SSOC leaders admired the work of historian C. Vann Woodward and invited him to address the group. They also lionized southern progressives like Braden and began to emphasize white Confederates' "positive" traits of "bravery, loyalty, and devotion." "Not for slavery," they claimed, but for dedication to their families and homes. As one activist observed, "no revolution is gonna happen" without whites, and to recruit them the SSOC must examine "those very things that make Southerners what they are and build on them--using the symbols and peculiarities by which they have been taught to identify themselves." The Confederate flag reemerged as an important symbol, and rebel yells broke out at antiwar demonstrations where the SSOC "call[ed] for southerners to 'secede' from the war."

In June 1969 the southern identity issue imploded at a meeting near Edwards, Mississippi. SCEF representative Carl Braden attended, along with a number of SDS activists. Weakened by internal power struggles and eager to garner support in the South, SDS targeted SSOC members who rejected the Confederate symbolism, a move that, to the dismay of the Bradens, hastened the SSOC's self-destruction. (my emphasis)

Some pro-war demonstrations occurred in Louisville. A rally in October 1967 produced a seemingly improbable combination: the Concerned Citizens Committee, the Total Effort for America Committee, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Committee for the Continuation of War for the Sake of Love and the Preservation of Peace. A year later the school board denied Edwards's request to speak at a meeting on behalf of the Louisville Peace Council. Edwards wanted to propose that peace advocates receive "equal time with military recruiters" in the high schools. Following the meeting, a parents' group, numbering about thirty, heckled Edwards while the press interviewed him. Some yelled "traitor," and many wore campaign paraphernalia promoting the 1968 presidential bid of George Wallace. In December 1969 a handful of individuals picketed outside the Atherton High School auditorium as Dr. Spock spoke. Their signs read "Free speech or treason?" "Dr. Spock--leader of loud-mouthed minority," and "Enter Hanoi Annex." Many of the city's residents, intensely anticommunist, held traditional southern values and strong religious convictions that supported the notion of duty and service to one's country, and as late as 1970, even if they were not willing to take to the streets to support the war, approximately two hundred parishioners walked out on an antiwar sermon at Fifth Street's Cathedral of the Assumption. (my emphasis)

The divergence of opinion over the war extended to politics and created some heated discussion among the state's leading Republicans. U.S. senator Thruston B. Morton, a native of the city, joined his influential counterpart, Senator John Sherman Cooper, early on in advocating American withdrawal from Vietnam, a position the former mayor of Louisville, U.S. representative William O. Cowger, severely criticized. Cowger accused Morton, a moderate Republican, of flip-flopping due to a growing "shift of public sentiment against the war." Analysts agreed, and Morton's 1967 turnaround became national news. Congressional colleagues considered the old national Republican Party chair (1959-1961) a "weathervane," a political professional, and a potential vice presidential candidate for the 1968 election. Gene Snyder, Louisville's other member of the House of Representatives, also became dovish, asserting in 1969 that America "ought to pack up and come home." (my emphasis)

With Vietnam, however, "history," in C. Vann Woodward's words, had "begun to catch up with Americans," and the war would not go away. As Woodward noted, the South's defeat in the Civil War created a unique southern experience, making the region emblematic of the entire nation as Vietnam stripped away the country's sense of innocence and "invincibility." Perhaps the entire nation came to grips with the idea of the Lost Cause and, as the U.S. sought national meaning and redemption, came to better understand why southerners, in an effort to exorcise their old demons, proudly sent more than their share to Southeast Asia. While Vietnam may have helped the nation understand the South's commitment to militarism, the conflict also stimulated the work of modern social justice activists like the Bradens, George Edwards, and Suzy Post. Though advocates of peace and progressive causes had always been a small minority in the South, this generation of activists was a vocal one, and a modern giant, Muhammad Ali, served as a symbol of its significance. (my emphasis)