the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism shaped the politics of many members of the organization. The war, and the compulsory draft of civilian men, had drawn hundreds of thousands of young people into the anti-war movement. For some, avoiding military service was simply a matter of self-preservation. Others began to see the war as part of a larger system of oppression that reinforced white supremacy, capitalism, and U.S. militarism. This analysis saw Black, Indigenous, and Latino people59 living within the United States as internally colonized communities, and imperialism as the main target for radical organizing. The people who came to the Committee were addressing the same questions that were first asked of them in their student years: What is the role of white people in dismantling white supremacy? Is racism a permanent feature of the U.S. American experience? How does fascism harness racism in the United States? How can both be abolished?
These questions remerged as part of the unfinished business of the 1960s, particularly the factional fights that rippled through the U.S. left, and that ultimately ended the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Many of the original members of the Committee had been members of SDS. Emerging in 1959 from the remains of the progressive Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, the organization started with great optimism about the redeemability of U.S. institutions. Its inaugural “Port Huron Statement,” written in 1962, identified racism, militarism, and nationalism as the key evils holding back progress. Foreshadowing a later cultural turn towards anti-imperialism, it critiqued exploitation of Third World countries by Western capitalists. Working in projects such as “Friends of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” members regularly delivered white volunteers to support voter registration, nonviolent direct action, and Freedom Schools in the South. Some actions drew the connections to many concerns of the era. The 1968 student occupation of Columbia University, for example, linked military research and the college’s gentrification of Harlem.60
White students’ complicated relationship with the Black Freedom movement mirrored the larger one between the era’s white and Black radicals. Throughout the 1960s, questions of when violence and insurrection might be called for were always under discussion. These questions became more urgent as thousands of young people drafted to fight in Vietnam were killed in battle, injured, tortured, or held as prisoners of war. It seemed that “the system” would, as John F. Kennedy warned, “make peaceful revolution impossible and make violent revolution inevitable.”61
The Black Freedom movement began to demand more of its white supporters. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked white activists to leave the group and to focus on organizing against racism in their communities.62 In fits and starts, the “organize your own” experiment had already begun a few years earlier. Attempts at doing this created the Economic Research and Action Projects of the Students for a Democratic Society, which experimented with community organizing in impoverished communities. It was an attempt to build an “interracial movement of the poor.” Ironically, only one such project, Jobs or Income Now Community Union, gained traction, situated itself in a low-income white community, and made an honest go of heading off reactionary politics there. The rest fell short. Other New Left groups, such as the Sojourner Truth Organization, embraced workplace organizing and sent organizers into factories to address the politics of white privilege within the working class.63
Protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago placed the violence of a Northern city in the national spotlight and peeled back illusions that the Democratic Party could be easily reformed. Multiple factional fights within its ranks ultimately ended the group. The faction that formed the Weather Underground was based on the idea that white youth could challenge the oppressor nation and align with the revolution of Black people. This set of politics abandoned the left’s traditional emphasis on class struggle and promoted the idea that national liberation movements would be the vehicle for revolution in their time. Central to this understanding was the idea that colonies existed internally and externally. For example, Black people living within the United States were colonized as surely as those living under European rule in Africa. SDS was anti-imperialist and committed to organizing through militancy. The murder of Fred Hampton was an important turning point for the Weather Underground organization, eventually leading it to embrace a path of underground armed struggle. Inspired by the writings of Che Guevara and a cornucopia of successful anti-colonial uprisings overseas, the Weather Underground embraced Foco theory—strategies for armed insurgency and guerrilla warfare.
Their particular interpretation held that clandestine group structures taking “exemplary action” could replace mass organizations, and that acts of militancy and property damage against symbols of oppression could incite mass rebellion. Over the next five years, the group claimed responsibility for dozens of bombings. The Weather Underground’s template for action was to target a symbol of U.S. power and to publicly associate the act as a counterattack against government repression. Among their targets were the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the U.S. Justice Department, a Long Island Courthouse, the New York Police Department, banks, and police cars. The only human casualties of their operations were three of their own members: Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Teddy Gold were killed when a bomb they were constructing in a New York townhouse accidentally detonated.
From 1969 to 1975, the Weather Underground published communiqués, a volume of revolutionary women’s poetry titled Sing a Battle Song, and a detailed exposition of their political ideology titled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The group’s statements warmly embraced revolutionary movements across the globe and upheld them as the basis of change. They were pessimistic about building a strategy around economic class, especially one that relied on participation from its white section. Weather Underground members saw revolutionary potential in “Third World peoples in the U.S., and also women, youth and members of the armed forces.” It was an outlook that would be adopted by many organizations long after the Weather Underground’s eventual demise.64
The United States was in a position of overwhelming power after World War II, and in post-war restructuring, the U.S. supported imperial European forces in regaining access to their previous colonies, such as France’s rule over Vietnam. The United States also fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming an independent state capable of influencing other Asian countries, including Japan and Indonesia, and thus restructuring the balance of regional power.65 When John F. Kennedy escalated the war, it became clear that Vietnam would not be an obedient colony.
The standard liberal account of the Vietnam War has been that the United States tried to save South Vietnam from the threat of communism, and despite a valiant effort, was not able to see it through, and thus retreated. A right-wing account, on the other hand, has been that the U.S. military was stabbed in the back by American society and politicians, and if there had been more time and resources, the United States would have won. Polls conducted in 1975 by the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs indicated that two-thirds of the U.S. population believed the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, and not a mistake the U.S. government happened to make. Television played a significant role in popular disproval, bringing the violence of the U.S. government into the homes of average Americans. Within this vast tilt toward condemnation, many in the radical left saw the Vietnamese resistance, led by a diplomat turned revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, as a living model for fighting imperial powers such as France and the United States. In fact, the struggle of Vietnam seemed to indicate that it was, at least in some ways, possible for a small country to pull out of the transnational economic system.
Decolonization efforts in developing countries provided both inspiration and a road map for action. European countries were being shown the door from occupied territories on an annual basis. In the year 1960 alone, more than a dozen African nations—including Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Congo/Kinshasa, Congo/Brazzaville, Somalia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Gabon, Chad, Nigeria, Mauritania—gained independence from European empires. In 1962, the same year the Port Huron Statement was signed, many young people in the United States were gaining political consciousness through the Civil Rights movement. The Algerian struggle for self-determination successfully liberated the country from France. In 1974, Angola and Mozambique won independence from Portuguese rule. The following year, the Portuguese were ejected from Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. In Latin America, revolutions by socialist and national liberation forces,