“Onward to the World Revolution”: Black Feminists against the War in Vietnam

In September 1968 a collective that defined themselves only as “Poor Black Women of Mount Vernon” penned an open letter in to Vietnamese women finding common cause in their struggles against male oppression, imperialism and capitalism. This political missive, reprinted in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman, demonstrated the intersections between the Black feminism consciousness and anti-imperialist and anti-war politics. This treatise was not an anomaly. Black feminists like Patricia Robinson, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Vida Gaynor, Colia Clark, Gwendolyn “Zohara” Simmons and Gwen Patton organized against the Vietnam war in organizations like African Americans Against the Vietnam War, Black Women Enraged, Poor Women Against the Vietnam War, the Atlanta Project of SNCC and the National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union. This paper traces the routes that Black feminists took as they moved from consciousness to action around the question of Vietnamese independence and argues that anti-Vietnam activism was a bridge that linked organizations and people across various movements, geographies and chronologies.