The Price for Principles

While things got more intense at the war front for the United States in Vietnam, tensions at home also increased for the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973). There were many individuals, informal groups and official organizations, all housed in an overarching concept called the civil rights movement, which opted for the full elimination of racist laws and practices – along the lines of the ‘Separate but Equal’ doctrine, dating from the end of the 19th century – in the United States. Although they greatly differed in means, goals and backgrounds, all members of the civil rights movement raised their voices to reach a common goal: reducing the social, economic and legal inequalities between blacks and whites in the country in which, according to its Declaration of Independence, ‘all men were created equal’. In spite of Johnson’s ambitions to eradicate racism and poverty through his Great Society Project, many poor African-Americans still suffered from unequal rights in the field of voting, education, job opportunities and police protection. An important contributor to this persisting inequality was the growing American presence in Vietnam. The enormous amount of money that was needed to finance the Vietnam War choked off Johnson’s ambitions to narrow the gap between black and white in the USA, as the president himself would later admit. ‘That bitch of a war,’ Johnson recalled toward the end of his life, ‘killed the lady I really loved – the Great Society.' This thesis focuses on the connection between civil rights, the war in Vietnam and the Johnson Administration (1963-1969). Since the civil rights organizations – of which the most influential five will be discussed in this research – were partially dependent on the federal government for reaching progress, a compelling question comes to mind: how did the Johnson Administration, which governed the United States for a period of over five years, handle the complex intertwinements between its actions in Southeast-Asia and the groups that were preoccupied with the nation’s most pressing domestic issue? How were the opinions on the conflict in Vietnam and the treatment of the Big Five of civil rights organizations related? Through a chronological, qualitative analysis of these groups and their relationship with LBJ, this thesis aims to answer these questions.