American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (30 page)

And on May 14, 1970, just ten days after the shootings at Kent State, seventy Mississippi state troopers and local police fired into a crowd of black student protesters on the campus of Jackson State College. Two students were killed and twelve were wounded.

The college had been the scene of many violent attacks. For years, white motorists had sped through campus, sometimes throwing bottles, yelling racist epithets, and even firing weapons. Occasionally, neighborhood youth barricaded the main campus thoroughfare to demonstrate their anger at white racism, but until 1970 most Jackson State students avoided confrontational activism. The risk of expulsion was too great. Black administrators at the public school could easily be fired by the all-white state school board if they did not take a hard line against student rebels. Activism had therefore always been stronger at private black institutions like Tougaloo College, where students were frequently arrested for civil rights protests but were less likely to be expelled.

By the spring of 1970, however, a substantial number of the four thousand Jackson State students were ready to protest. Their opposition to the war in Indochina was inseparable from their struggle against persistent racism. Racial discrimination and exploitation remained deep-seated, mocking the great hopes raised by the civil rights revolution. Black poverty was extreme, and most white-owned businesses continued to deny decent jobs, training, or promotion to blacks. And in Mississippi all-white draft boards were sending African American soldiers to Vietnam in the name of freedom and democracy while continuing to treat them as second-class citizens at home.

On the night of May 13, a few hundred students along with some young black men from the neighborhood gathered along Lynch Street and began throwing rocks and bottles at passing cars. A Jackson police officer yelled into his squad-car radio: “
Better tell them security guards
out there they better get them niggers into them dormitories, or we fixin’ to have some trouble out here! These niggers [are] throwin’ them bottles and things over the fence out in the street.”

The next night was a virtual repeat of the previous night with one major exception—state troopers and local police confronted the crowd on Lynch Street directly with massive firepower, and they used it. Just after midnight the officers took positions in Lynch Street facing Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory. A crowd of a hundred-plus young men stood outside. They began to hurl insults at the officers in the street. “White pigs!” “Motherfuckers!” “Pigs go home!” The patrolmen aimed their twelve-gauge shotguns at the crowd. Vernon Weakley, one of the screaming students, saw a bottle looping toward the police. “
When that bottle hit
, they just started shooting, man.” Weakley tried to run but was hit in the leg. Students rushed toward the dormitory, falling on top of each other as they squirmed toward the entrances. Glass began to fall down on them from the shattered windows. Inside, Gloria Mayhorn had gone down the stairs and found herself at the front door just as the shooting began. Her first thought: “They’re shooting rice.” She scrambled back to the stairs but at the first step, on her hands and knees, she felt a pain in the back of her head: “Blood was pouring like from a faucet.” She and Weakley were among the twelve wounded.

Phillip Gibbs was a twenty-one-year-old junior at Jackson State, married with an eleven-month-old son. Growing up in the small town of Ripley, Mississippi, Gibbs was among the first to integrate Renfrow’s Café, the public swimming pool, and the Dixie Theatre. But at Jackson State, Gibbs had not been involved in political activism. On the night of May 14, he dropped off a friend at Alexander Hall just before the midnight curfew and encountered the crowd of students jeering the blue-helmeted state troopers. When the troopers began shooting, Gibbs tried to run. He was hit in the face and killed.

James Green was a high school student who ran track and worked almost every night from four to ten providing curb service for people stopping at a small grocery store called the Wag-A-Bag. When James was five his father had died of a stroke and James helped support an extended family of fourteen people, all of them crammed into a three-room shotgun house near Jackson State College. Late at night, when his job was done he would cut across campus to go home. On May 14 he was walking home through a park across the street from Alexander Hall. When the shooting began, some of the patrolmen fired into the park. James Green was shot in the chest and killed.

A delegation of civil rights activists, congressmen, and reporters flew in from Washington, DC, to attend Green’s funeral. Senator Edmund Muskie from Maine, then considered the top presidential prospect for the Democrats, was among them: “
From the facts at hand today
,” he said, “we seem to have yet another example of black lives not being valued.”

After the funeral, Green’s stepfather went back to his job at a grocery wholesaler, where he had received high praise for his seven years of work. His white foreman asked, “
Matt, was that your stepson
that got killed?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“You must feel pretty big with all those senators and reporters coming to the house.”

“No, I feel like just regular people.”

Later that day, Green’s stepfather was fired without explanation.

The Jackson State killings were quickly relegated to the status of historical footnote. And the killing of three Latinos that summer has received even less attention. Those shootings came in the aftermath of a Chicano antiwar demonstration in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. The rally was organized by the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, a group that led dozens of Latino antiwar protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The only
Time
magazine article about the moratorium came under the headline “Los Angeles: The Chicano Riot.”

“
It was supposed to be a quiet rally
of Mexican Americans against the war in Viet Nam,” the article began, “but it ended in violence and tragedy.”
Time
attributed the violence to a new and growing “hostile spirit” among “angry Mexican Americans.” The police are presented as blameless peacekeepers responding to rampaging rioters. Only one death is mentioned and no responsibility is assigned.
Time
says the police simply found a dead body in the Silver Dollar Café. It was Ruben Salazar, “a militant journalist.”

Salazar was, in fact,
one of the most distinguished
Latino journalists in the nation, and the only one writing for a major U.S. newspaper. He had been a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
since 1959, went to Vietnam in the mid-’60s to cover the war, and then was made bureau chief in Mexico City before coming back in 1969 to L.A., where he wrote a column for the
Times
while serving as a news director for a Spanish-language television station. He covered the growing Chicano labor, civil rights, and peace movements, and had just published some articles on police brutality in Latino neighborhoods of L.A. The city’s police chief had complained to the
L.A. Times
about Salazar’s articles and even sent two officers to warn Salazar about the “impact” of his work on “
the minds of barrio people
.” The night before the antiwar demonstration, Salazar told march organizers that his sources indicated that the police and FBI provocateurs were planning to incite violence.

The three-mile march was large and peaceful. As many as thirty thousand people participated. One demonstrator’s sign read “
Murdered in Vietnam
, Murdered at Home!
Ya Basta!
[Enough Is Enough!].” Another read “
Traiga a mis carnales ahora
[Bring my brothers home now].” Another: “
A mi me dieron una medalla y $10,000 por mi único hijo
[They gave me a medal and $10,000 for my only son].”

When the marchers arrived at Laguna Park (now named Ruben Salazar Park), about ten thousand remained to hear speeches and musical performances. There was a family atmosphere as people of all ages gathered around the stage. Participants remember the moment as festive, jubilant, and peaceful. Then, they recall, they were attacked by police. It was, from their perspective, a “police riot.” After authorities received reports that some beer had been stolen from a nearby liquor store and taken over to the park, scores of police and county sheriff’s deputies marched into the park. A group of march organizers approached the cops and were immediately clubbed. Then the police began firing tear gas. A helicopter soon hovered overhead and dropped more gas. Some of the crowd fought back with anything they could get their hands on—sticks, cans, bottles, rocks.

The police eventually drove everyone out of the park. Most were forced onto Whittier Boulevard. Enraged, some began to trash and burn. A liquor store theft had been used as a pretext for a massive show of police force that then produced a full-scale riot. Hundreds of people were arrested and dozens injured.
Two Chicanos died
in the melee—Angel Díaz and Lynn Ward.

Ruben Salazar had been covering the event. In late afternoon, he went to recover and have a beer at the Silver Dollar, blocks away from most of the turmoil. Sheriff’s deputies suddenly arrived at the tavern, claiming they had received a report of an armed man inside. Before allowing patrons to leave, a deputy fired a tear gas projectile directly through an open door of the crowded tavern. The weapon used was not a typical tear gas gun that shot cardboard-encased canisters, but a high-velocity gun that fired a ten-inch torpedo-shaped metal projectile with fins and a point designed to pierce through doors or walls to flush out barricaded suspects.
The projectile struck Salazar
in the temple and penetrated his skull. The deputy claimed it was an accident, that he had not targeted Salazar. Many in the community, then and now, believe he was assassinated. In any case, the police did not immediately search the bar. After clearing the bar of patrons, they sealed it for three hours. Only then did they go inside and find Salazar’s corpse.

President Nixon read the daily news accounts of home front strife as if they were dispatches from a war zone; for him, domestic turmoil was equivalent to war. He divided the nation between those who supported him and those who were his domestic “enemies.” And at the top of his list were those most vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam. He often told aides that his presidency depended on crushing his enemies—not just defeating them politically, but destroying their influence, smearing their reputations, locking them up if possible, and threatening worse. And from the start of his presidency in 1969, Nixon used the agencies of government, often illegally, to attack them. Wiretaps, tax audits, smear campaigns, spying, infiltration, provocation, threats, intimidation, and a bottomless bag of dirty tricks were employed. This was the real beginning of Watergate, not the 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters. That election-year crime and cover-up were only the tail end of a three-year abuse of power.

As the FBI, CIA, and White House operatives waged their secret war against dissenters, Nixon also understood the value of presenting a softer public face. Amid the turmoil of May 1970 he pushed his men to go forward with a plan to create a large Fourth of July pageant of patriotism to be called Honor America Day. Two of the official sponsors were comedian Bob Hope and evangelical preacher Billy Graham, but most of the direction and supervision came from the White House. As Jeb Magruder later wrote, “
To us, it was a political event
, one in which honoring America was closely intertwined with supporting Richard Nixon, and in particular with supporting his policy in Vietnam.”

Bob Hope and Billy Graham were particularly important political assets for Nixon. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s both men were enormously popular and widely regarded as essentially nonpartisan icons of Americanism. By the late 1960s, however, many people—especially young antiwar activists—viewed Hope and Graham as narrow, conservative mouthpieces for Nixon and the establishment.

With good reason. Bob Hope was particularly close friends with Spiro Agnew and Ohio governor James Rhodes. The wealthy comedian even paid his staff of eight writers to churn out jokes for the vice president. “
We hate writing for a repressive reactionary
like Agnew,” one of the writers told a journalist, “but when you work for Hope these days, that’s part of the job.” Hope was also a staunch defender of Nixon’s Vietnam policies. “
If we ever let the Communists win
this war,” he told the press, “we are in great danger of fighting for the rest of our lives and losing a million kids, not just the 40,000 we’ve already lost.”

Billy Graham was a frequent guest at the White House. On May 28, 1970, Graham returned the favor, inviting Nixon to appear with him at an enormous revival meeting in the University of Tennessee’s football stadium. Nixon accepted, hoping to prove that he could go to a college campus in the wake of nationwide student strikes. The conservative, evangelical crowd guaranteed a positive reception, but even they could not drown out a contingent of protesters who chanted “
Bullshit! Bullshit
! Bullshit!” after Nixon said that America was the “greatest nation in the world” that had “made progress as a nation
under God
.”

On the Fourth of July, 1970, Graham and Hope presided over
Honor America Day
. Graham led a prayer service at the Lincoln Memorial and Hope hosted the evening’s entertainment, televised by CBS. Though the entire event had been planned by the White House to build support for Nixon’s war policies, the controversial war was never mentioned explicitly. The plan was to support the president and his war by rallying around the flag. It was an evening of patriotic anthems, provided by a lineup that included Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, Dorothy Lamour, the New Christie Minstrels, the Young Americans, the CenturyMen, Glen Campbell, and Jeannie C. Riley singing Merle Haggard’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” The song takes on critics who are “Harpin’ on the wars we fight / An’ gripin’ ’bout the way things oughta be.”

When
they’re running down my country, man