The African American Experience in Vietnam PDF Download

Author: James E. Westheider
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742545328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In this book James E. Westheider explores the social and professional paradoxes facing African-American soldiers in Vietnam. Service in the military started as a demonstration of the merits of integration as blacks competed with whites on a near equal basis for the first time. Yet as the war in Vietnam progressed, many black recruits felt isolated and threatened in an institution controlled almost totally by whites. Consequently, many blacks no longer viewed the military as a professional opportunity, but an undue burden on the black community.

Author: James E. Westheider
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081479324X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
In this dramatic history of race relations during the Vietnam War, James E. Westheider illustrates how American soldiers in Vietnam grappled with many of the same racial conflicts that were roiling their homeland thousands of miles away. Over seven years in the making, Fighting on Two Fronts draws on interviews with dozens of Vietnam veterans - black and white - and official Pentagon documents to paint the first complete picture of the African American experience in Vietnam.

Author: Lawrence Allen Eldridge
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826272592
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
During the Vietnam War, young African Americans fought to protect the freedoms of Southeast Asians and died in disproportionate numbers compared to their white counterparts. Despite their sacrifices, black Americans were unable to secure equal rights at home, and because the importance of the war overshadowed the civil rights movement in the minds of politicians and the public, it seemed that further progress might never come. For many African Americans, the bloodshed, loss, and disappointment of war became just another chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. Lawrence Allen Eldridge explores this two-front war, showing how the African American press grappled with the Vietnam War and its impact on the struggle for civil rights. Written in a clear narrative style, Chronicles of a Two-Front War is the first book to examine coverage of the Vietnam War by black news publications, from the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 to the final withdrawal of American ground forces in the spring of 1973 and the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975. Eldridge reveals how the black press not only reported the war but also weighed its significance in the context of the civil rights movement. The author researched seventeen African American newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the New Courier, and two magazines, Jet and Ebony. He augmented the study with a rich array of primary sources—including interviews with black journalists and editors, oral history collections, the personal papers of key figures in the black press, and government documents, including those from the presidential libraries of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—to trace the ups and downs of U.S. domestic and wartime policy especially as it related to the impact of the war on civil rights. Eldridge examines not only the role of reporters during the war, but also those of editors, commentators, and cartoonists. Especially enlightening is the research drawn from extensive oral histories by prominent journalist Ethel Payne, the first African American woman to receive the title of war correspondent. She described a widespread practice in black papers of reworking material from major white papers without providing proper credit, as the demand for news swamped the small budgets and limited staffs of African American papers. The author analyzes both the strengths of the black print media and the weaknesses in their coverage. The black press ultimately viewed the Vietnam War through the lens of African American experience, blaming the war for crippling LBJ’s Great Society and the War on Poverty. Despite its waning hopes for an improved life, the black press soldiered on.

Author: Samuel W. Black
Publisher: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Even as African American men and women headed to Vietnam to fight for their country and show their patriotism, they faced racism in the ranks as did their families on the home front. This stunning book, which accompanies the exhibition, Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, looks at black life through the eyes of veterans during the civil rights era by bring together critical and cultural analysis, photography, memoir and oral histories that recall the horrors of war, the complexities of race and the duality of African American life in the 1960s and ơ70s. With a foreword by Albert French, author of the goundbreaking memoir Patches of Fire, this book captures the spirit of the African American experience, highlighting the literary expression of Vietnam Vets and the groundswell of black culture and consciousness in this tumultuous time.

Author: Wallace Terry
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0345311973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The national bestseller that tells the truth about the Vietnam War from the black soldiers’ perspective. An oral history unlike any other, Bloods features twenty black men who tell the story of how members of their race were sent off to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, and of the special test of patriotism they faced. Told in voices no reader will soon forget, Bloods is a must-read for anyone who wants to put the Vietnam experience in historical, cultural, and political perspective. Praise for Bloods “Superb . . . a portrait not just of warfare and warriors but of beleaguered patriotism and pride. The violence recalled in Bloods is chilling. . . . On most of its pages hope prevails. Some of these men have witnessed the very worst that people can inflict on one another. . . . Their experience finally transcends race; their dramatic monologues bear witness to humanity.”—Time “[Wallace] Terry’s oral history captures the very essence of war, at both its best and worst. . . . [He] has done a great service for all Americans with Bloods. Future historians will find his case studies extremely useful, and they will be hard pressed to ignore the role of blacks, as too often has been the case in past wars.”—The Washington Post Book World “Terry set out to write an oral history of American blacks who fought for their country in Vietnam, but he did better than that. He wrote a compelling portrait of Americans in combat, and used his words so that the reader—black or white—knows the soldiers as men and Americans, their race overshadowed by the larger humanity Terry conveys. . . . This is not light reading, but it is literature with the ring of truth that shows the reader worlds through the eyes of others. You can’t ask much more from a book than that.”—Associated Press “Bloods is a major contribution to the literature of this war. For the first time a book has detailed the inequities blacks faced at home and on the battlefield. Their war stories involve not only Vietnam, but Harlem, Watts, Washington D.C. and small-town America.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution “I wish Bloods were longer, and I hope it makes the start of a comprehensive oral and analytic history of blacks in Vietnam. . . . They see their experiences as Americans, and as blacks who live in, but are sometimes at odds with, America. The results are sometimes stirring, sometimes appalling, but this three-tiered perspective heightens and shadows every tale.”—The Village Voice “Terry was in Vietnam from 1967 through 1969. . . . In this book he has backtracked, Studs Terkel–like, and found twenty black veterans of the Vietnam War and let them spill their guts. And they do; oh, how they do. The language is raw, naked, a brick through a window on a still night. At the height of tension a sweet story, a soft story, drops into view. The veterans talk about fighting two wars: Vietnam and racism. They talk about fighting alongside the Ku Klux Klan.”—The Boston Globe

Author: Shirley A. James Hanshaw
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
ISBN: 9781611863710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first book-length critical study of the black experience in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, this text interrogates the meaning of heroism based on models from African and African American expressive culture. It focuses on four novels: Captain Blackman (1972) by John A. Williams, Tragic Magic (1978) by Wesley Brown, Coming Home (1971) by George Davis, and De Mojo Blues (1985) by A. R. Flowers. Discussions of the novels are framed within the historical context of all wars prior to Vietnam in which Black Americans fought. The success or failure of the hero on his identity quest is predicated upon the extent to which he can reconnect with African or African American cultural memory. He is engaged therefore in “re-membering,” a term laden with the specificity of race that implies a cultural history comprised of African retentions and an interdependent relationship with the community for survival. The reader will find that a common history of racism and exploitation that African Americans and Vietnamese share sometimes results in the hero’s empathy with and compassion for the so-called enemy, a unique contribution of the black novelist to American war literature.

Author: Daniel S. Lucks
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813145090
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In Selma to Saigon Daniel S. Lucks explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the national civil rights movement. Through detailed research and a powerful narrative, Lucks illuminates the effects of the Vietnam War on leaders such as Whitney Young Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as lesser-known Americans in the movement who faced the threat of the military draft as well as racial discrimination and violence.

Author: Johnathan Sutherland
Publisher: Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP
ISBN: 9780836857726
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Provides a look at the experiences of African Americans in the Vietnam War, describing the discrimination they faced, the casualties they suffered, the courage with which they fought, and the ways the conflict changed their lives.

Author: Herman Graham (III)
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813031907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
OC Clearly focused on exploring the alternative notions of racial manhood which African American servicemen developed during the Black Power era, The BrothersOCO Vietnam War is a welcome addition to the surprisingly small body of scholarly literature on the black experience in Vietnam."

Author: Ed Emanuel
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0891418172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
LRRPs had to be the best. Anything less meant certain death. When Ed Emanuel was handpicked for the first African American special operations LRRP team in Vietnam, he knew his six-man team couldn’t have asked for a tougher proving ground than Cu Chi in the summer of 196868. Home to the largest Viet cong tunnel complex in Vietnam, Cu Chi was the deadly heart of the enemy’s stronghold in Tay Ninh Province. Team 2/6 of Company F, 51st Infantry, was quickly dubbed the Soul Patrol, a gimmicky label that belied the true depth of their courage. Stark and compelling, Emanuel’s account provides an unforgettable look at the horror and the heroism that became the daily fare of LRRPs in Vietnam. Every mission was a tightrope walk between life and death as Emanuel’s team penetrated NVA bases, sidestepped lethal booby traps, or found themselves ambushed and forced to fight their way back to the LZ to survive. Emanuel’s gripping memoir is an enduring testament to the valor of all American LRRPs, who courageously risked their lives so that others might be free.