During the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. Of those, 16.3 percent were Black. Of Vietnam combat troops, 23 percent were Black. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Former WRL staffer and longtime pacifist activist Wendy Schwartz reflects on the People's Blockade of the Earle Naval Ammunitions Depot in spring 1972, the arrests of protestors, and her father's work to bail out jailed protestors.
With the slogan “If the government won’t stop the war [in Vietnam], we’ll stop the government,” the largest mass arrests in U.S. history – 13,500 – occurred in May 1971 as hundreds of autonomous affinity groups from around the country converged on Washington, DC.
