National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam

The Madison, Wisconsin-based National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (NCC) was a short-lived organization formed in August 1965 in order to mobilize nationwide activity against the war in Vietnam and to coordinate the more than thirty different local antiwar groups which had sprung up in protest to President Johnson's escalation of the war in February 1965. Its roots lay in the Assembly of Unrepresented People, an organization which linked social injustice to the war in Vietnam. The NCC sponsored the International Days of Protest in October 1965, which involved nearly 100,000 people nationwide and included a gigantic rally at Berkeley with a teach-in at the Oakland Army Base, a parade of twenty to twenty-five thousand people down 5th Avenue in New York, and the first draft card burning since Johnson had signed the order making such burnings a felony. The NCC, which included an uncomfortable coalition of the Old and New Left, antiwar liberals and different pacifist groups, disbanded in January 1966 because of splits within the organization about whether to remain an umbrella group or to reorganize as a national organization making immediate withdrawal from Vietnam the group's basic priority. The NCC's last action was to call for another International Day of Protest in March 1966. The large size and international scope of the second International Day of Protest showed the increasing strength of the antiwar movement and the escalating unpopularity of the war.

Se også: USA: Historiske fredsorganisationer.

Litteratur

Organizing a Vietnam Protest Committee. / : Information Committee of the University of Wisconsin, CEVN.
- Madison, Wis. : National Co-ordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1965. - 29 s.