Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
There is a Limit to a Man’s Patience
by Darius Dixon
“I told him that America was corrupt, the system was bad and that all whites hated any kind of colored people.”
This is how David Loeb Weiss begins his documentary film, No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968). The film takes its title from a statement attributed to Muhammad Ali when he was asked to sum up his reasons for refusing the draft, in 1966. Around the same time, 59 percent of Americans still supported the war in Vietnam, according to Gallup pollsters. It would also be another year before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. openly declared his own opposition to the war. Weiss and his compatriots wanted to contribute to the historical record. A time of contradictions.
Weiss, a devout Trotskyist, had an agenda when he partnered up with John Binder and Michael Wadley in making this film. He was trying to pick a fight. He wasn’t looking for a disconnected sample of public opinion; but rather, he and his all-white crew sought out the protest caged within the everyday people. And they chose to troll through Harlem.
Dr. King’s speech at Riverside Church in 1967 highlighted the disproportionate number of black Americans serving in the military and a similarly disproportionate number of them coming home in a coffin or not at all. So, Weiss’s film asks a simple question: Is the war in Vietnam worth anything to Black America? Everyone watching the film already knows what the answer is but it’s still satisfying to hear it said aloud.
No Vietnamese flips back and forth between an antiwar march about two weeks after Dr. King’s anti-Vietnam speech at Riverside, and a sit-down interview with three black Vietnam veterans the following year, about a month after King’s assassination. The antiwar march that the film shadows—New York City’s largest—is recorded in most newspapers of the time from the area surrounding the initial gathering point on the southern side of Central Park. It’s from here that the British weekly, The Observer, said the demonstration drew out “almost every nonconformist group in the eastern United States.” Fresh off his denunciation of the war, King and Dr. Benjamin Spock led this group of nonconformists from Central Park to the United Nations where they and others would speak to upwards of 400,000 people. On the day of the demonstration the AP reported that the general commanding American forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, said of the war, “I can’t see any end in sight.” The protest seemed amazingly well timed.
The media and the more conservative leadership in the civil rights movement thought King had done more harm than good in expressing his sentiments about the war. The feeling, in general, was that the civil rights movement was fracturing and that President Johnson might be the first and last president to give a sympathetic ear to the movement. Black Power was growing, nonviolent action was on the wane and the rest of America was loosing interest in civil rights issues. King had struck the centerpoint of this fracture in the movement, with a great hammer. The air was tense. Instead of covering the march at-large, at Central Park or at the UN, Weiss and the No Vietnamese crew followed the antiwar contingent coming out of Harlem. They interviewed demonstrators, onlookers and counter-protesters as they made their way downtown.
When Red Channels screened this film for the first time, last August at the Brecht Forum, it was paired up with The Negro Soldier, a 1944 Frank Capra propaganda film*, and the two films ran back-to-back under the heading “Buffalo Soldiers.” The Negro Soldier was shown first, clearly for dramatic effect. Capra’s film is an emotional high, leading the charge for war and patriotism as much as it rewrites American history. The Negro Soldier is a highly contrived “thank you” note to black soldiers and a last ditch effort to up enlistment where conscription wasn’t working. In fact, some of those notes are read aloud as part of the film’s script while montages of black and white soldiers train together even though the military wouldn’t be desegregated for another four years. All of this fantastical imagery, of course, spontaneously combusted almost as soon as No Vietnamese finished running its opening credits. Fake soldiers were replaced with real ones; the euphoria of patriotism was replaced with dissent and frustration.
John Binder and Michael Wadley started Paradigm Films—which produced No Vietnamese—not long after teaching production courses at NYU Film School in the mid-1960s, right around the time Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker and Jim McBride were getting their start. Binder and Wadley only taught for about a year or so right after graduating from the school themselves. But the idea to make a film like No Vietnamese, Binder said, came from David Loeb Weiss, his most peculiar student. When Weiss approached Paradigm, in 1967, with his idea of filming the antiwar demonstration, Binder and Wadley pulled in a few of their former students from NYU, divided them up in five or six teams, and set to work.
Weiss, who died in 2005 at the age of 94, was a labor organizer, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party, and 57 years old when he decided to take one of Binder’s classes. “He was the most pushy guy I ever met,” Binder said, but added that working with Weiss was central to his own political education, being a guy from small-town Pennsylvania. Binder now lives in Los Angeles, and said he’s still making films and that he viewed himself as left-liberal although not particularly radical. He wore his hair long in the 1960s though he didn’t think of himself as a hippie. Binder did a few projects for public television until Nixon was elected in 1968 and changed the board of directors of the network. He and Wadley ran Paradigm for about five years before going their separate ways.
No Vietnamese is barely over an hour long, but it doesn’t hold back. It’s a gritty mess, actually—the editing can be disorienting, and there’s no real sense of time, just an amorphous intensity—and the film is probably much better for it. Binder said the film was “crude,” at best. “What I loved about the film was that these people [on the street] would erupt into eloquent, beautiful statements.” Erupt is the operative term. Everyone shown in the film seemed as though they had been waiting years for someone to ask them the simple questions that the pollsters were asking over the phone. “Do you think American troops should be in Vietnam?” one interviewer would ask. “What do you think about the war?”
“I think it’s very unfair,” said a woman standing alone by a storefront window. “Why should American boys, white and black, go to Vietnam to fight when a quarter of the American population can’t even vote?”
“No, there’s no Klu Klux Klan over there,” said a middle-aged black man in a suit with a poster draped over him. “But they’re here.”
A few minutes earlier an interviewer approached a woman walking alone still wearing curlers in her hair. The woman wasn’t wearing any signs, carrying any posters or chanting “Hell No” with the people walking down the middle of Lenox Avenue. “What do you think of the expression of patriotism? That you should be patriotic and send your kids to fight over in Vietnam,” the interviewer asked.
“For what? What we got to be patriotic for? Whatcha gave us?”
“Soon,” said Akmed Lorentz, one of the veterans, “soon, I’ll be going back to where the rats and the roaches roam.”
A factor that helped to extract responses, Binder believes, was that Paradigm was using some of the latest camera technology. “On-the-street shooting was kind of new back then,” Binder said, and when faced with a portable camera and a microphone most people were more likely to answer because they thought it might be a live feed. What’s been lost on so many of us in the twenty-first century, Binder said, was that being able to carry around film and sound equipment was still particularly novel in the late sixties. Most film work back then involved a large crew and special lighting, while the camera had to be set up on tripod. Paradigm was able to keep its film crews in small three-person teams and fan out over the march much more effectively. The crew of No Vietnamese tapped into the tension, anger and frustration within the black community at a time when most Americans were either divided or openly supported the war in Vietnam. The war at home was escalating almost as furious as the one abroad.
“The best of the black youths are on the battlefields of Vietnam,” said James Haughton of the Harlem Unemployment Center, briefly interviewed in the film. “The best of the white youth are off in the colleges. [While] the best of the black youth are over there fighting another colored people.”
But not everyone in the film was opposed to the war in Vietnam. The crew managed to find a group of Five Percenters, a peculiar offshoot of the Nation of Islam whose members say to the camera: “The government is doing their job right and exact” and say that they’re told to “respect the government at all cost.” Muhammad Ali, after refusing to serve in Vietnam, openly resisting the war and building a friendship with Dr. King, was eventually shunned by the Nation of Islam, who decided to call him Cassius Clay.
“If it wasn’t for this flag, you wouldn’t have the right to assemble here today,” screamed one counter-protester being carried by his friends, waving the stars and stripes as he addressed his all-white crowd in what looks like Central Park. “Support the war in Vietnam,” yells a man off camera. “No one’s gonna burn this unless they burn me with it,” he continued, shaking the flag vigorously.
The portions of the film spent with the three Vietnam vets, all seemingly in their 20s, become increasingly dramatic each time the film flips back to them. And though you hope to find some emotional relief from the tension in the streets, this quiet room quickly fills with just as much frustration. As these veterans recount their experiences with racism in the military, the meaninglessness of the uniform, and what one them called “the Hitlerism of the [American] South,” the tension builds so much it feels as if any one of the men might suddenly explode on camera.
Each of the three black veterans discuss being shuffled into jobs below their qualifications, often ending up in infantry even though one of them, for example, is a trained air traffic controller. Each of them also expressed a connection with the Vietnamese people. “Me and you, same same,” recalled the traffic controller. White officers would tell the Vietnamese that black soldiers were shoeshine boys back in America; that they had tails and were, in fact, monkeys. A rapport built between the black soldiers and the Vietnamese who were both the targets of the same transplanted racism.
Not surprisingly, W.E.B du Bois reported similar happenings during the first World War. The French, du Bois wrote, were under a certain “mystification,” with regard to the American brand of discrimination. Black regiments fought and died to free French towns from German forces and thus were greeted as heroes by the locals, until white officers imposed a de facto segregation and branded black soldiers as rapists. Much was the same almost a half century later, according to the veterans in this film.
Oddly enough, for a march where both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Spock spoke and some three to four hundred thousand “nonconformists” gathered in Central Park, both of these events are conspicuously missing from the film. Binder says there are two reasons. One being that the crew was simply not prepared for an event of that magnitude; and two, Weiss was more interested in talking to a Trotskyist professor who showed up at the march.
A screening of the film at the New York Film Festival in 1968, much to Binder and Weiss’s surprise, left the largely white crowd in tears. Binder also said that his wife was able to sell 500 copies of the film to IBM for educational purposes, supposedly to help their employees understand issues of race; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture screened the film in 1996 for a program called the “Global Black Experience.” More recently, Red Channels conducted their second screening of the film, in January, at the Maysles Cinema on Malcolm X Blvd—aka Lenox Avenue—at 127th Street, the same Harlem thoroughfare that the demonstrators used 43 years ago.
A lot has changed and improved for the black community since the 1960s, and the tension so easily tapped in No Vietnamese has no doubt transformed into something more complex. Only now, with a sad sense of irony, we face the new reality of yet another colored people halfway around the world made to suffer under American bombs—and this time at the behest of a black man.
*The film The Negro Soldier was directed by Stuart Heisler, and produced by the United States Department of War, now known as the Department of Defense. [Editors]