Unforgettable Change: 1960s: Protest Marches Grow Into The Antiwar Movement

The anti-war movement held protest marches all over the country from 1965 through 1972. Draft card burnings, begun in Boston protests in 1964, gained national prominence by 1967 as popular forms of protests. In 1965 there were 380 prosecutions for draft resisters. By 1968 the number reached 3,305.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, for the first time "linked the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement and Johnson's war on poverty to his war against Vietnam," according to Marilyn Young in The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990.

In California, Stop the Draft Week organizers led 3000 marchers to the Oakland Induction Center on October 16, 1967. When marchers refused police orders to leave, police attacked them with nightsticks, injuring 20. On the second day, demonstrators returned to the Induction Center, and this time 97 were arrested. On the third day, 10,000 protesters arrived, this time retreating in orderly fashion but also successfully blocking streets as they departed.

Alternative media, like California's The Los Angeles Free Press and The Berkeley Barb, supported opposition to the war by announcing demonstrations, reporting on them, and becoming forums for lively political debate.

The Chicano Moratorium, the largest anti-war protest in southern California reflected a growing involvement of ethnic minorities, influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, to protest the war. The Black Panthers, founded in Oakland in 1966, had a large membership of returning Black Vietnam Vets, who were angry at having fought for Vietnamese civil rights while being denied their own back home. Additionally, they knew that a disproportionate number of their Black brothers were being drafted and dying in an unjust war.