Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

===Opposition to the Vietnam War===
The Meredith shooting in June 1966 had been preceded in January by the killing of [[Sammy Younge Jr.]], the first black college student to be killed as a result of his involvement in the civil rights movement, and by the acquittal of his killer. SNCC took the occasion to denounce the [[Vietnam War]], the first statement of its kind by a major civil rights organization.<ref>[http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1669 "Samuel Younge Jr."] Encyclopedia of Alabama.</ref>

"The murder of Samuel Young in [[Tuskegee, Alabama]]," SNCC proposed, "is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths." In the face of a government that "has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders," where," it asked, "is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States." It could longer countenance the "hypocrisy" of a call upon "negroes ... to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a 'democracy' which does not exist for them at home."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/vietnam/|title=Vietnam|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

At an SDS-organized conference at [[UC Berkeley]] in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in the August 1965 [[Watts Riots|Watts Uprising]] and in the ghetto rebellions that followed had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC had first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and [[Waldo Martin]], SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power [and] emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appear to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"<ref>Joshua Bloom and [[Waldo Martin|Waldo E. Martin]], ''Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party'' (University of California Press, 2013), pp. 29, 41–42, 102–103, 128–130.</ref>