Discuss Student Activism During Either the Civil Rights Movements

Student Activism during Anti-Vietnam War Movement
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Student Activism during Anti-Vietnam War Movement
The movement against the engagement of the United States in the Vietnam War was sparked off by 1964 demonstrations. These movements grew in later years to become a national activity involving people from various social spheres most of which were students, women, and African-Americans. The country got torn into two between the pro-war activists who shared the opinion of continued involvement in the Vietnam War and those advocating for peace. Campus unrest remains in history books as one of the major aspects of Vietnam War era. Even if all the credit cannot be given to the college students as the ones who successfully protested against the war, students’ activism was very fundamental in bringing the whole antiwar idea about this war to the general public. There are various reasons why students advocated for antiwar policies. In their anti-Vietnam War campaign, the students employed various tactics as they tried to attract attention to their course in such a way that their activism became a success. This paper explores student activism during Anti-Vietnam War Movement.
Reasons for student opposition to the Vietnam War
There are quite a number of reasons why students who are expected to have supported the participation of their forces to protect the country’s interests in a foreign land in fact did not. These reasons fall into three categories: unfriendliness of the draft to most students, legal, pragmatic, and moral arguments against the US intervention, and reaction the devastation in the Southeast Asia as portrayed by the media.
Draft was one of the major sources of resentment among students in this error. The average age for a soldier serving in the Vietnam War was 19 years. The college students were perturbed by the fact that young citizens had attained the legal age of going to war and dying on the battlefield but were not old enough to take part in voting on consuming alcohol. The criticism brought about the 26th Movement that established suffrage to 18-year-olds. Since the draft, deferments were given to college students, the less prosperous, and less educated made up the largest part of the combat troops. Americans with higher education levels assumed the military offices following the draft. African-American and Latino males were more regularly assigned to combat as compared to their drafted white American counterparts. Antiwar demonstrations by students were few at first by the time the Congress adopted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Events in the Southeast Asia and back home made the number grow drastically. Peace movement continued to grow as Johnson Administration maintained its stance in the war. The television converted several minds. The American people watched in dismay as the body bags were carried away from the paddy fields of the Asian nation. All these sparked off student opposition to the war.
Tactics used by students to attract attention to the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Several cases of civic unrest came to surface on college campuses in the 1960s during the time that the students increasingly involved themselves in the anti-Vi...