[At a time when American casualties in Vietnam were
disproportionately African American, most of those who successfully
made it to Canada were white. ] [[link removed]]

WHAT DREAMS OF CANADA TELL US ABOUT RACE IN AMERICA  
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April Rosenblum
January 19, 2020
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ At a time when American casualties in Vietnam were
disproportionately African American, most of those who successfully
made it to Canada were white. _

,

 

A few days into the new year, Americans awoke to news that the U.S.
had assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Fears of military
conflict with Iran dawned on thousands, search engine hits for
“World War 3” soared
[[link removed]],
and both Iranians and their loved ones
[[link removed]] in
America braced for what might be next.

Although U.S. military personnel overseas were the ones closer
[[link removed]] to
harm’s way, many young people at home in the U.S. immediately
wondered if there could be a draft. By 8 a.m. on January 3rd, the
Selective Service, which maintains records of those registered for
military draft in case of war, was reporting website
[[link removed]] overload. On
social media, users posted memes about leaving for Canada
[[link removed]],
imagining spontaneous road trips north and draft-safe igloos. Others
posted more poignant messages, like the mother of an 18-year-old who
sat her son down for “the talk” about moving north if the draft
became real. Why does Canada spring to mind so quickly when Americans
fear war?

Canada’s unique role in the American imagination comes in part from
its very real history as a source of refuge. During slavery, enslaved
Africans sang songs
[[link removed]] with encoded
messages of resistance: Follow the north star to freedom, in Canada.
That was precisely what thousands of enslaved people did
[[link removed]],
founding Canada’s largest early Black community. 

One hundred years after slavery’s official end
[[link removed]],
a new generation of Americans sought refuge in Canada. Their goal was
to escape participation in the Vietnam War and they couldn’t help
but see themselves as a modern
[[link removed]]-day
version of that underground railroad, writes historian Wendell
Adjetey [[link removed]]. What resulted over
the next decade was a massive, highly organized project to resist the
war by draining the U.S. military of its human power. 

Roughly 50,000
[[link removed]] men
are estimated to have made it out of the draft’s crosshairs by
fleeing to Canada. Female activists, although exempt from the draft,
approached their political role with equal seriousness,
sometimes posing
[[link removed]] as partners
of male resisters to help them cross the border without arousing
suspicion. Volunteers in both countries threw themselves into the
work of helping young people get to Canada: staffing hotlines,
counseling youth about their options if drafted and putting them in
touch with people and resources to make the journey to Canada go
smoothly. Canadians
[[link removed]] put
pressure on their government, staging clever border actions
[[link removed]] to
demand immigration officials welcome a larger number of resisters. 

But when it came to the Underground Railroad analogy, there was one
problem. At a time when American casualties in Vietnam
were disproportionately
[[link removed]] African
American, most of those who successfully made it to Canada were white.
Other racialized groups among the resisters in Canada are scarcely
discussed in sources on the period. 

The experience of Black resisters
[[link removed]] in
Canada was fraught. While attempting to cross the border, they
faced scrutiny
[[link removed]] that
white resisters did not. For those who made it in to Canada, adapting
to their new country was difficult
[[link removed]] and blending
in was impossible. Local demographics, art and culture felt so white
that resister Eusi Ndugu compared arriving in Canada to “jumping
into a pitcher of buttermilk…There’s a race problem here, just
like in the Northern cities of the U.S.” Although Canadians were
polite, Black resisters could sense a “subtle anti-Black bias” –
not just among locals, but among white resisters, as well. 3

To combat their alienation, Black resisters took matters into their
own hands. In 1970, a small group of them founded BRO, the Black
Refugee Organization
[[link removed]].
BRO members helped newer arrivals meet their needs and worked out a
plan to match African-American resisters with local Black Canadian
families - which involved bridging cultural gaps with a now
predominantly Caribbean community. Yet very few Black resisters
ultimately remained in Canada. BRO members soon urged Black resisters
still in America to “stay there if it is at all possible – do what
you can to resist there.” 

The experience of white resisters was worlds apart. For many, Canada
became a new home; a place to reinvent themselves among like-minded
peers and create lives of meaning. Canadians welcomed them warmly;
even government officials later called
[[link removed]] the
influx of war resister immigrants “the largest, best-educated group
this country ever received.” When a 1977 amnesty
[[link removed]] allowed
draft evaders to return home without punishment, thousands chose to
stay in Canada.

Resisters of all races went to Canada because they were worried for
themselves – but also because of their horror at what was happening
to Vietnamese civilians. For a generation whose political awakening
had begun with Civil Rights, it was difficult not to see bombing and
napalming brown-skinned Vietnamese civilians as a racist war. Many
early anti-war activists had learned their tactics of non-violent
civil disobedience from Civil Rights work. The young Black activists
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led the way in making
this connection
[[link removed]] between war and
racism explicit. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
[[link removed]] soon
followed, gradually making his opposition to the war more visible in
his Civil Rights work. 

The desperation that many young people felt about stopping the war was
summed up by the words of 22-year-old Civil Rights activist Mario
Savio. Three months before the deployment of U.S. combat troops to
Vietnam, the young Italian-American cried
[[link removed]] out to student
protesters, “There's a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t…even
passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels…and you've got to make it stop.” 

For a decade during the Vietnam war, young Americans tried every means
they could think of to stop that machine. They sabotaged it
by destroying
[[link removed]] draft records
[[link removed]],
stood in its way by blockading the trains that moved troops, and made
it difficult
[[link removed]] for
napalm manufacturers and recruiters to show their faces in public. By
going to Canada, thousands attempted to remove themselves from the
machine’s gears entirely. Yet none of them could escape the way
that, in the end, racism shaped their available options.

Leaving America surely saved some resisters’ lives. But the machine
they fought is still at work. It is held together by the message that
some lives –at home and abroad –count as less human than others.
A new generation will now face the question of how to dismantle it.

APRIL ROSENBLUM [[link removed]] WRITES
ABOUT RACE, CLASS, JEWISH IDENTITY AND MOVEMENT-BUILDING. SHE IS AT
WORK ON A MICROHISTORY OF BLACK/JEWISH
[[link removed]] RELATIONS_. _Her essays
have appeared in The Washington Post, Class Lives: Stories from Across
Our Economic Divide, The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and
Protest, Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, Bridges and
Afn Shvel. Twitter: @homeandfreedom

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