His grandparents and mother were born in Selma, Alabama, the site of the violence of the 1965 civil rights march that led to the Voting Rights Act. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where within 30 yards of his house six Black active-duty soldiers went off to Vietnam, including one of his childhood heroes — a young man who one day quietly slipped off to war. He went to college in Oxford, Ohio, where eight years earlier the legendary civil rights figure John Lewis had trained the Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights volunteers, three of whom were murdered.
For Wil Haygood, the Black struggle in America and the Vietnam War long have had a strong pull. Indeed, the two had been swirling around him since he was a child.
Haygood was born to be a writer but, what is more, he was born to be one of poets laureate of the Black experience in America. He has written biographies of Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. This week his “The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home” will be released.
It is, in its way, another biography, this time a biography of a time that changed America, American Blacks and American whites in ways that are being recognized only now.
It’s well known who went into Vietnam: a disproportionate number of Black soldiers. It’s well known what happened to them: a disproportionate number sent to the front in the early years of combat, producing a death rate higher than that of whites and a higher rate of military punishment.
It is less well known what came out of Vietnam, which Haygood characterizes as “America’s first fully integrated war”: the first time Blacks and whites fought together in battalions that were not segregated following the disbandment of the Army’s last all-Black units; the emergence of a class of Black officers; and the recognition of Black soldiers’ need for Black-oriented hair-care products, for example, and for copies of Ebony and Jet magazines in military commissaries.
Also this, in Haygood’s poignant phrase: “Black America’s love for America.”
I rang up Haygood, whose career at The Boston Globe and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette matched my own passage in journalism, to explore this notion further.
“To me, the big lesson of Blacks in Vietnam is their undying determination to be thought of as full Americans,” he told me. “All the Black kids who came out of the USA were coming out of the hard, savage shadow of Jim Crow and legal segregation. The civil rights laws were still being passed, and even with their backs against the wall, as all soldiers’ were, Black soldiers wanted to prove their mettle. They wanted to prove that they were just as much a part of America as white Americans.”
But there was a strain of Black Americans’ sentiment that persisted throughout the war, a strain that had antecedents in World War II.
Black Americans who fought from 1941 to 1945 battled for freedoms in Europe that they did not possess in North America. That prompted The Pittsburgh Courier, perhaps the greatest Black newspaper, to undertake what it called the Double-V Campaign, an effort to match the struggle to win freedom abroad with a complementary struggle, for freedom at home.
The Vietnam War was different — and the same.
“In Vietnam,” Haygood said in our conversation, “Black couldn’t survive without white and white couldn’t survive without Black. It was the first example of soldiers forming some kind of a bond.”
The American commitment to Vietnam grew at the very same time that the American movement for civil rights was growing. Detroit and Hanoi may have been separated by 7,800 miles, but the two were burning at much the same time. The siege in Khe Sanh occurred roughly as American cities were under siege. “Vietnam,” Haygood writes, “was but a tentacle of Black America’s ongoing war.”
It also was part of Black America’s entry into mainstream American culture.
The brother of Martha, the lead figure in Motown’s Martha Reeves and the Vandellas group, served in Vietnam. So did Marvin Gaye’s brother. In his book, Haygood argues that all nine tracks of Gaye’s 1971 “What’s Going On” album, which eventually climbed to the top of Billboard’s Soul Chart, “flowed from a Vietnam veteran’s sojourn looking around and assessing America, from abroad and at home.”
Thus, the opening of the album’s title song:
Mother, mother,
There’s too many of you crying;
Brother, brother, brother,
There’s far too many of you dying.
Haygood’s book is a set of portraits — small, detailed descriptions that art curators would call “miniatures” — of Black Americans and their experiences in Vietnam.
One of them was Fred Cherry, a prisoner of war for seven years, of whom Haygood wrote: “Fred Cherry kept dreaming. Dreaming that he and his fellow POWs might be released. Dreaming that some fierce American soldiers were out there, right now, cutting through the tall grass to free all of them.”
For freedom is what the architects of the Vietnam War said was the goal of the conflict, and freedom was what the missionaries of the civil rights movement said was the goal of their travails.
Cherry’s ordeal was examined in depth by Wallace Terry, the Washington Post and Time magazine writer whom Haygood includes in his volume. It was Terry, who died in 2003, who described the Black experience in Vietnam as the “war within a war,” prompting Haygood to borrow the phrase for the title of his book. And it was the fact that Terry’s 1984 “Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans” was pretty much the only volume to address Blacks in the war that prompted Haygood to undertake his own pilgrimage into an era a half-century in the past — to write, he said, “a book that would matter.” Vietnam may have been a Black war, but Vietnam literature was white.
To fix that, Haygood embarked on a journey, into the time of his childhood and across the country.
“My big regret was that there was nary a Black soldier who at the end of our talk didn’t have tears streaming down their faces,” he told me. “They each told me that for years they’d been waiting for my knock at the door.”
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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