Pushback to War Protests in broome county

When looking at voting trends in Broome County over the past 20 years, it is evident that this area does not have a uniform ideology. Interestingly, when looking back in history, we can see this has long been true. Even back in the 1960s and 70s, there were ranging opinions on the day's critical issues. One such issue was the Vietnam War. While many students at Binghamton University and individuals in the community were vehemently anti-war, there was also a contingency of people who were aggressively at odds with those people.

The 1960s-1970s were decades marked by tumult, with a generation of young protestors who genuinely believed they could change their unjust world. The anti-war protesters certainly grabbed a lot of attention for their actions. Binghamton University (then called Harpur College) was established just a few decades before the war. In 1965, Harpur College held the first teach-in on the Vietnam war at the university. Over the span of the next decade or so, many students came out in opposition to the war, and they even received national attention for it in some cases. As a result, it can sometimes be easy to view our campus community, and the community in general, as a monolith, but that would be wrong.

At this time, the current congressperson elected to represent the district that the university was located in was a Goldwater Republican who favored escalating the war further. Obviously, this suggests that there was no universal opinion regarding the war in the area, and if anything, the region at large may have been more in favor of the war than opposed to it. A prominent example of people holding this opinion occurred on June 26 in Binghamton, New York, when a "Victory March" was held. The march was a subsidiary of a more significant movement of demonstrations all across the country. The biggest took place in Washington D.C. and was covered by local Binghamton papers. According to organizers, the march scheduled in Binghamton was composed of "decent patriots full of patriotism and Christian people." The organizers went on to say that at their protests, there would be "no hippies, yippies, nor obscenities," showing clearly that this was a conservative protest through and through. The Binghamton area clearly had a conservative group of individuals who favored the war.

Pro-war or at least anti-anti-Vietnam protesters were also present on Binghamton's campus. While their voices are certainly slightly more challenging to come by than their anti-war counterparts, Colonial news (whose name changed to the more familiar "Pipedream" during this era) did its best to include the critical voices of the protesters. Surprisingly, some of the criticism came from the left. Mainly aimed at how white the protests were and how they garnered so much attention, at least partly because the protesters were white. A Colonial News issue dated May 15, 1970, featured an opinion piece by the Black Student Union that was incredibly illuminating on this issue; they said in part, "How many of you "liberals," excuse me, "radicals" realize that the Black community of Augusta, Georgia have been cordoned off by 1000 National Guardsmen and that to date six Blacks have been killed… yet you dare to what I think of the "atrocity" at Kent State." The tensions around race coincided with the pressures around Vietnam, and they did not necessarily create two neat camps.

Like most issues that come to this area, there were many opinions on what to do regarding the Vietnam war. It would be a disservice to the story of what occurred during that time not to include all sides of the argument. Many disagreed and stood in opposition to all of the bluster that was the anti-Vietnam war protest movement in Binghamton and Broome County