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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

Vietnam War Draft Resistance

A large part of the draft resistance movement was launched by students coming of age and who were eligible for the Vietnam War draft. Students burned draft cards and staged anti-war protests at hundreds of universities, Selective Service Centers, and public official spaces. As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began in 1957 during Kennedy’s administration but was exacerbated by Lyndon B Johnson’s time in office; the number of young men draft only kept rising. In each of the years of 1966, 67, and 68, the U.S. drafted 300,000 young men. Of all the young men drafted in the war, 80% had only a highschool education and came from poor or working class backgrounds. At the beginning of the war, deferments were available for college and graduate students. A large percentage of Black and Latino young men served in the war reflecting the ack of opportunities and resources available to them.

In 1969, the first lottery draft drawing since 1942 was held at the Selective Service National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to draft soldiers at random. In the lottery, a ball was drawn that contained a date and year between 1944 and 1950; those whose birthdate fell on that day would be required to join the service. This brought a new fear that anyone could be chosen and taken to serve in the Vietnam War. The lottery created anxiety among 15-19 year olds who were all at risk of being drafted through the lottery and contributed to a stronger anti-war stance on the part of youth.

Young men avoided the draft by fleeing to Canada and other countries through underground railroads, failing to show for induction, attempting to claim disability, and through various other legal and illegal tactics. The most common among these was the burning of draft cards. Draft cards were torn, burned, and or sent back to the Justice Department forcing the Johnson Administration to focus on the Antiwar Movement. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, there was also significant draft resistance and anti-war sentiment on the part of the Black Americans and Latinos who recognized the dissonance between their lived experience and the violence they were expected to enact on a community abroad that had never mistreated them.

Sources:
  Kindig, Jessie. “Vietnam War: Draft Resistance.” Antiwar and Radical History Project – Pacific Northwest, Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium / University of Washington, depts.washington.edu/antiwar/vietnam_draft.shtml. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.
  Varon, Jeremy. “Defying the Draft.” Reviews in American History, vol. 32, no. 4, 2004, pp. 573–79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30031449. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.
  Friedman, Jason. “Draft Card Mutilation Act of 1965.” The Free Speech Center, 6 Aug. 2023, firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/draft-card-mutilation-act-of-1965/.
  Foley, Michael Stewart, "Confronting the war machine: Draft resistance during the Vietnam War" (1999). Doctoral Dissertations. 2068. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2068

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On his last day of service in Vietnam in 1963, Harvey Pratt (Cheyenne and Arapaho) poses in Da Nang carrying his rappelling rope that he used to descend from helicopters to clear landing fields. Pratt is the designer of the National Native Americans Veterans Memorial. During the Vietnam War, more than 42,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives join the U.S. armed forces. Poor military record keeping may have undercounted the number. American Indians seek each other out and share dismay that stereotypes about Indians influence officers to send them out front during dangerous missions. The Vietnam Memorial lists 248 American Indians and Alaska Natives killed in action.
Protestors fill Motor Ave. as they start marching toward Century Plaza Hotel for an anti-Vietnam War protest. Ten thousand protesters turned out during speech by President Lyndon Johnson.(Ray Graham / Los Angeles Times) . Ten thousand marchers, by most estimates, were assembling across the street from the Century City hotel. Hundreds of nightstick-wielding police — using a parade permit and court order that restricted the marchers from stopping to demonstrate — forcibly dispersed them. The bloody, panicked clash that ensued left an indelible mark on politics, protests and police relations. It marked a turning point for Los Angeles, a city not known for drawing demonstrators to marches in sizable numbers. The significance of the evening lay not simply in the 51 people who were arrested and the scores injured when 500 of the 1,300 police on the scene pushed the demonstrators into, and then beyond, a vacant lot that is now the site of the ABC Entertainment Center. Far more powerfully, the Century Plaza confrontation foreshadowed the explosive growth of the national antiwar movement and its inevitable confrontations with police. It shaped the movement’s rising militancy, particularly among the sizable number of middle-class protesters who expected to do nothing more than chant against Johnson outside the $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraising dinner and were outraged by the LAPD’s hard-line tactics. Johnson rarely campaigned in public again, except for appearances at safe places like military bases. Within nine months, opposition to the war grew so strong that he shelved his reelection campaign. White liberals in Los Angeles, meanwhile, began to complain about excessive force by the LAPD, a subject traditionally raised only by black and Latino residents. By the next summer, when Chicago police beat demonstrators in the street outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the country was at war with itself. In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. …
Politicized by War For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World.