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March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam (April 17, 1965)
March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam (April 17, 1965)
Why Protest in the Streets?
In December 1964, angered and disillusioned by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and Johnson’s escalation of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, Students for a Democratic Society began planning a national demonstration to be held in Washington, D.C.
“We were outraged” at the president’s betrayal and by Cold War liberalism more generally, SDS President Todd Gitlin, a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan, recalled in his 1987 memoir. Gitlin and Paul Booth, the co-leaders of SDS’s Peace Research and Education Project, considered launching a campaign of resistance against the military draft. Ultimately they decided on a resolution that demanded “American withdrawal from South Vietnam.”
After extensive debate, SDS members approved a three-pronged manifesto: “SDS advocates that the U.S. get out of Vietnam for the following reasons: (a) the war hurts the Vietnamese people; (b) the war hurts the American people; (c) SDS is concerned about the Vietnamese and American people.”
The student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held its first anti-Vietnam War protest rally in Washington, DC. It was co-sponsored by Women's Strike for Peace. 25,000 attended, including Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Phil Ochs. The host was I. F. Stone who began by proclaiming "Welcome to Washington."
Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, a World War I veteran and one of the two Senators who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that gave credence to the direct combat role of the U.S. in the Vietnam War and allowed bombing of Vietnam without prior Congressional approval, spoke.
After the speeches and music the crowd started to move toward the Capitol, down the National Mall from the Washington Monument. Baez and others intercepted the impromptu march.
From Teen Vogue:
Consider, for example, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the group, founded in 1959, started working in the Civil Rights Movement and would evolve into a major force in the anti-war movement before it split into factions in the late ‘60s. But it was an April 1965 march on Washington that solidified SDS’s place in history. Estimates on crowd size range between 15,000 and 25,000 people; it’s widely regarded as the largest peach march in American history up to that point.
“What kind of system is it that allows good men to make those kinds of decisions?” asked SDS founding member and president Paul Potter, then a University of Michigan grad student, in a famous speech called “Naming the System” at the march. “We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it. For it is only when that system is changed and brought under control that there can be any hope for stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam today or a murder in the South tomorrow or all the incalculable, innumerable more subtle atrocities that are worked on people all over — all the time.”
According to a 1965 article from The New York Times (which noted that the SDS was “left-leaning but non-communist”), the group picketed the White House and prepared a petition to present to Congress to stop the war.
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