Researching a Movement

an interview with Martin J. Murray

Active-duty GKs from Fort Still, Oklahoma came to Austin to meet up with anti-war activists. Opposition to the war inside the U.S. military was a critical factor in bringing the war to an end. (Insurgent Politics)

MARTIN J. MURRAY recently published Insurgent Politics in the Lone Star State: Remembering the Antiwar Movement in Austin, Texas, 1967-1973. He is a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where he focuses on planning in developing countries and also an adjunct professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies in U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. He is the author of ten books including The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina, 1870-1940; Taming the Disorderly City; and City of Extremes: Spatial Politics in Johannesburg. Joshua DeVries interviewed Murray.

ATC: How did you become involved in the movement against the Vietnam war?

MM: I went to Austin in August of 1967 to start a PhD program in philosophy. I came from California, where I attended the University of San Francisco. It was a small Catholic college where I had been involved in some anti-Vietnam stuff and especially anti ROTC, since ROTC was required. I was in the process of applying for conscientious objector status. I didn’t know anybody in Austin but within a couple of weeks, I started attending rallies.

That November there was a sit-in against marine recruiters. I sat down and stayed there for a week. A group from SDS had organized that; I got involved in SDS right from then.

ATC: The draft was obviously a huge factor in accelerating activism and resistance to the war. Was it socially divisive in the sense that college students could get deferments whereas a lot of working-class people and people from communities of color didn’t have that option? They were disproportionately drafted and killed. How did these divisions impact the anti-war movement?

MM: In some ways very profoundly and other ways, not so much. The issue of the draft was always there. I had the experience of being compelled to take two years of ROTC. It gave me a particular view about the Army. Applying for conscientious objector status was my response. There was a lot of work done, particularly with one wing of SDS in Austin, with anti-draft counseling. Greg Calvert and a vet named Terry Dubose were key. We did a lot of work with veterans at the Oleo Strut, which was the coffee house in Killeen, close to the Fort Hood base.

There were a number of big myths about the anti-Vietnam war movement along with smaller myths. One of the smaller myths was that when the draft turned into a lottery, it somehow took the sails out of the anti-war movement. I never experienced it that way and I don’t know anyone who did. The draft was just one more thing and that when it ended, it didn’t mean that people gave up on the anti-war movement.

ATC: Could you talk about the activities at the Ole Strut coffee house?

MM: The Oleo Strut was started in late 1967 by a small, dedicated group of people who lived and worked there. The point was to create a safe space off the military base where GIs could go have coffee and talk. The real effort was to talk about the war and opposition to the war. And every time we had demonstrations, there was always a contingent of active duty GIs from Killeen or Fort Sill in Oklahoma. They were distinguishable by their short haircuts.

ATC: I bet they were the only ones with crew cuts.

MM: They were young, young kids, deer in the headlights, you know. But against the war. By ’69, almost every major rally with speakers had either an active duty GI, which was pretty dangerous for them, or a Vietnam vet, or the family member of somebody in Vietnam. Very early on we reached out to active duty soldiers and saw them as part of our movement.

There’s another myth about that too. I was just in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago, and I went to the Vietnam Memorial. I listened to some guy who said that he had been a soldier, and that when he came home he wasn’t welcomed. He said he was spat on by people.

Well, that’s really a myth. A friend of mine, Jerry Lembcke, wrote a book called The Spitting Image. It’s a critique of this idea that when vets came home they were spat upon. It may have occurred in a few isolated incidents, but it was not the response of the anti-war movement. Our response was to embrace, to bring people in. It was not condemnatory or moralistic. It was to build a movement of working with Vietnam veterans.

We were building a movement to encourage people not to fight, but to resist. To help deserters was obviously a felony. I knew people who did that. But it was not something that you talked about or publicized. However, a number of deserters came through Austin that people knew about.

Trends in the Movement

ATC: What were the active political forces that played a role in organizing? What were the debates about the movement’s demands? What was your perception and involvement in these dynamics?

MM: In September of 1967, when I first arrived in Austin, the main objective was to try to build a visible opposition to the war in Vietnam. We started from needing to create an acceptable anti-war sentiment.

There were organized Marxist-Leninist groups, who were always rather small. There was the Communist Party but it played no big role. Actually, the CP had some really good organizers, like Larry Waterhouse and Miriam Vizard. They never proselytized.

Then there was the Progressive Labor Party, which was a splinter from the Communist Party. They were a real annoyance. Their slogan was to build a worker-student alliance. Their narrow focus was that the role of students was to support the industrial proletariat. It didn’t go very far.

Then there was the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance. They had the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC). They operated separately. They had their own separate agenda, their own separate meetings, their own separate recruiting strategies. We organized joint marches with them. That was not a problem.

Where we parted company was their very narrow perspective. Their one slogan never changed, “Bring the troops home.” They never got involved in anti-racist struggles. They never got involved in women’s liberation. They never got involved in countercultural stuff. It was very narrow. And they always hued the line when it came to legality. If the city council refused our marching permits we marched anyway. But they would only go if it was legal.

They were a presence but I think over time, a diminishing presence. The best example was the demonstration against the dedication to the Lyndon Bains Johnson Library on May 22nd, 1971. We mobilized about 10,000 people to be disruptive. The SMC student mobilization committee organized another demonstration. We had about 10,000, they had about 200. They became more and more irrelevant, but they did work especially around GIs, which was pretty good.

I got some great notes from the Briscoe Center from an informant who had infiltrated the SMC. I read a series of reports she wrote over a year and a half, when they were doing a lot of work with GIs. [The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin includes a wealth of archives from this period. —ed.]

ATC: To what degree do you think the war accelerated the radicalization of the Black Liberation Movement and other people of color movements in Texas? Wasn’t there a very strong Chicano movement, at least down in the Valley?

MM: We worked very closely with an African American community group. At various times it had different names. Almost every rally that we had with speakers, there was always somebody from Community United Front that spoke.

I think the war helped to radicalize young African Americans and Chicanos. We had people who worked with what’s called the Economy Furniture Strike in 1968 or ’69. That factory employed Mexican Americans. We built alliances through this work.

ATC: What impact do you think the antiwar movement had on feminism?

MM: It began with a rejection of what women considered sexism in the movement. The underground newspaper, The Rag, became a target. It tended to be led by angry young white men with big voices. The women who were doing the work for The Rag created a caucus and demanded equal participation. That took place in other organizations as well. With the breakup of SDS and subsequent organizations, there was always a women’s caucus. But women’s movements tended to operate separately, whether as consciousness-raising groups or in other areas.

One small group, probably 15 women, called themselves the Witches, the Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell. They carried out guerilla theater actions, graffiti and sloganeering.

By 1971, there was a huge march and a women’s splinter of about 800 people that took over the radio station. That was quite a dramatic action. Women also played a big role in ’71 and into ’72 with the bus strike. One of their big coups was stealing a bus. Later, in the 1976 strike they fought and won against random drug testing.

Politics and Counterrevolution

ATC: How do you see the insurgent culture of the anti-war movement impacting the broader U.S. cultural scene?

MM: It’s hard for me to talk about the movement nationally but certainly in Austin, I think we had a peculiar blend of a political movement and a countercultural movement. There was tremendous overlap. I think that was true in other places in the country, especially Berkeley, Chicago, New York.

I think that’s because we all faced the same enemy. It took forms of alternative living arrangements and a lot of discovery around sex, drugs and rock and roll.

I always saw them as operating in tandem. But by 1970-71 the countercultural movement was so hydra-headed and so young that those just coming in didn’t want to be political. They didn’t wanna go on marches, they didn’t wanna hear about Marxism or socialism. In a sense, we kind of lost control.

ATC: What do you think were the decisive factors that pushed the Washington to ultimately withdraw?

After the Ohio National Guard fired, and killed, students at Kent State, opposition to the war expanded to the majority of the U.S. population. (Insurgent Politics)

MM: The United States was not winning the Vietnam war on the ground or in the air. Certainly after the Tet Offensive in ’68, it was pretty clear that that the Vietnamese revolutionaries were well organized and willing to continue. They weren’t gonna negotiate a settlement that involved splitting the country into two.

The war completely changed from a ground war involving U.S. troops to a ground war involving Vietnamese troops and an air war. Certainly by ’71, the U.S. military was refusing to fight. You couldn’t count on military units to carry out the orders that they were given. They had to come up with some way to get out of there.

The American population gradually moved into varying levels of being against the war, and for different reasons. “Give peace a chance.” “War is not healthy for people and other living things.” The anti-war movement increasingly wasn’t just against the war, it wanted the other side to win. That created splits between the liberals and the radicals.

The Kent State killings [May 4, 1970] — Jackson State comes a bit later [May 15] — but Kent State, that was a huge, huge turn turning point. I mean, liberals, fraternity people, sorority people, all of a sudden people realized, this is terrible. We don’t want this war. Everyone was anti-war.

We built a march of 25,000 people. The student movement had been transformed. It was no longer a student movement, it was a popular movement. We didn’t have to convince people anymore about the nature of the war; we had to find things for them to do.

For the May Day demonstrations in DC 1971, we organized about 250 people from the region — Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas — and a whole bunch of people from Austin got arrested. The slogan was that if the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government. Pretty provocative, pretty utopian, pretty impossible. But it was a big, big deal.

The final event was the demonstrations [May 1971] against the LBJ library. Our goal was to disrupt the dedication of the library. We got criticism and we turned off a lot of people, maybe we pushed a little bit too far. Later in 1972 there was a whole series of marches that tended to be smaller, more angry and chaotic.

Imperialism Persists

ATC: U.S. imperialism took a hit on the chin from Vietnam but it was not fatally weakened. What can we learn from it as a movement from that experience?

MM: The international setting was such that there were political movements across the world that identified with broad anti-imperialist politics. There were movements in Central America, Chile, Brazil, Northern Ireland.

The U.S. anti-war movement saw itself as part of that. But that kind of global left disappeared. And by the time the United States got involved in Afghanistan, it would be hard to be sympathetic to the Taliban. I think that really changed the capacity to identify with something larger than yourself.

Looking back, U.S. imperialism was able to mess up a lot of places and destroy whatever progressive movements were there.

ATC: What did you learn as you researched this period?

MM: My twin brother had gotten his FBI files and he had 70 pages. I discovered files at the Briscoe Center on Burt Gerding, who was the head of criminal intelligence and the Red Squad guy. It was really an eye-opener. Number one, the extent to which they infiltrated us with informants, but number two, the extent to which they were really incompetent. And they weren’t particularly coordinated.

Gerding talks about setting off firecrackers at people’s houses and breaking into people’s houses. He talks about phone taps and letter-writing campaigns. I found it quite intriguing the extent to which this Texas good old boy without much training and not particularly intelligent engaged in this stuff.

It was most shocking to read a report from a graduate student, who came to a party at my house where we were forming a caucus in the sociology department. She named 30-40 people. She divided them into two groups: the radicals and the liberals. She was pretty jealous that I got to teach this course that maybe she should have gotten it. And she said something like “he taught this course and it was just Marxism and it was not a very good course.” How would she know? She wasn’t enrolled in it — but this was my first teaching evaluation.

January-February 2026, ATC 240