Black Power! Vietnam vets exhibit at the NCRM in Memphis

After following the "Music Highway" stretch of I-40 from Nashville to Memphis this weekend, I visited the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM), located at the old Lorraine Motel near downtown Soulsville USA. My favorite exhibit was not the permanently displayed assassination paraphernalia (eerily placed in the former rooming house where Ray fired the fatal shot at Dr. King on April 4, 1968), but rather the NCRM's moving temporary exhibit about the bitter experiences of African-American veterans who served in large numbers in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973.

I learned so much in that single small room, laid out around a recreated "hootch" (i.e. hut where soldiers bivouaced awaiting combat, from the Japanese "uchi" or house). For example:

* I dug the video demonstrations (from file footage & vet testimony) of "dapping," a complex system of hand/fist touch-signals used by black soldiers to communicate such information as how long they'd been on patrol & how many assaults they'd endured.

* Mau Mau was a black nationalist organization established on U.S. military bases in West Germany (including the Heidelberg Army HQ where I was born) in the 1960s, which quickly spread to 'Nam; a few black-red-green MM-type flags - rich in war & peace symbolism, some featuring Swahili slogans - were on display, along with several photos & filmclips of troops giving the black-power salute, occasionally alongside sheepish white guys trying to look hip to the brothers.

* Civil-rights hero & Nashville native Julian Bond authored an anti-war comic book called "Vietnam" (with stylish illustrations by T.G. Lewis) at age 27 in 1967 while appealing his expulsion from the Georgia House of Representatives for opposing the war & the military draft; he was ultimately exonerated by the United States Supreme Court (see Bond v. Floyd, 385 U.S. 116), which ruled that the state legislature had violated Bond's free-speech rights by refusing to seat him.

* NAACP attorney (later U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall attended Pres. Truman's ceremonial signing of Executive Order No. 9981, ordering desegregation of the Armed Forces, in May 1948; Marchall stands tall & dignified as ever behind the beaming but seated "Buck-stops-here" Harry with an expression that conveys both well-deserved pride & appropriate skepticism.

* Pres. Lyndon Johnson, in cahoots with then-warmonger/Defense Sec. Robert McNamara, authorized "Project 100,000" in 1966, lowering the Armed Forces' qualification standards so as to instantly raise available troop levels, i.e. to summon more cannon fodder for LBJ's Vietnam Disaster.

* The Selective Service System suspiciously issued Orders to Report for Induction even to 26-year-old activists with student deferments who dared to drop out of school in order to work for civil rights in the South; sometimes SSS induction orders were sent in clusters to black neighborhoods.

* African-Americans suffered about 40% of the combat casualties in Vietnam, despite comprising just 10% of the U.S. population at the time.

* The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) officially came out against the Vietnam War in 1966; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. followed in 1967, upsetting even Bobby Kennedy, who didn't dare publicly oppose the war until early 1968.

* Wallace Terry, a journalist who covered the war up close as Time magazine's Saigon bureau chief starting in 1967, wrote a classic book called "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War," which focuses on African-American combat troops; in 1957, at age 19, Terry disguised himself as a waiter in order to get an interview with Arkansas' segregationist Gov. Orville Faubus - the story caused a sensation when it hit the front page of the NY Times.

Perhaps the most moving items at that NCRM exhibit, however, were a pair of telegrams sent by the Dept. of Defense to the family of sailor Leroy Mudd in 1970: the first, dated June 29, states (in cold bureaucratic, typo-riddled language) that Mudd was missing & presumed drowned after diving into a river in pursuit of a football that had gone overboard; the second, dated July 1, notes that Mudd's body had been recovered, adding that the government would pay up to $500 to cover any private burial costs. Mudd, 18, had only been in 'Nam for a few months.

"Afghanistan," as I like to remind friends with whom I correspond through the U.S. Postal Service, nearly rhymes with "Vietnam." The Masters of War just can't seem to inflict enough violence & mayhem on humanity. Sorry, Bob - your 1963 protest song has fallen on too many deaf ears, even all these years after the Cold War ended.