In 1967 I became one of the founders of the Greater Buffalo Draft Counselling Center.
There were two major groups in Buffalo that were opposed to the draft, each in a different way. One was Draft Resistance, part of a national movement that encouraged young men to destroy their draft cards and to take refuge abroad in Canada or Sweden. Canada was merely a few hundred yards from Buffalo across the Peace Bridge, and at the time was still willing to take in draft refugees. Our draft counseling center took a very different approach. We dissuaded persons subject to the draft from going to Canada, except as a last resort. Instead, we counselled them to explore the legal alternatives, such as conscientious objection, as well as medical and hardship exemptions. A number of my colleagues volunteered to do counseling. The Quakers (Friends) in Buffalo supported our efforts and let us use their Meeting House from Monday morning until Saturday evening. At this point we were a congenial group of well-meaning academics with little training in selective service law and regulations. The Friends recruited a young Quaker, Larry Scott, to organize and professionalize the counselling. Scott moved into the Friends Meeting House with his wife and began to train the counsellors. To begin with he had someone from the staff of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) to come from Philadelphia to conduct an intensive one-week training session, which included the thorough study of regulations. Almost none of the original counsellors took the course. Instead, a large number of young people came, many of them intent on applying for conscientious objector status themselves. Soon about forty volunteers counselled as many as three hundred young men a week. I committed myself to counsel at the Friends Meeting House every Tuesday and Thursday evening. I also met applicants at my office at the university and at home. We prepared applicants for their meetings with the draft board, and discussed their written statements in which they explained the nature of their pacifist beliefs and how they arrived at them. We then set up a trial session. They had to make it clear that they were in principle opposed to all wars, not only to a specific one. We advised them that in the event that they were turned down by the board, to follow all the steps required under the selective service law, such as submitting to the physical examination and reporting for induction. At induction they would be asked to take a step forward and with that step they would be in the armed services. We suggested to them that at this point they disobey and refuse to take this step. They could then be arrested and charged with a criminal offense, but from then on it would be up to the government to prove that they were not conscientious objectors. Buffalo was fortunate in having two federal judges who were sympathetic to defendants and either acquitted them or sentenced them to alternative civilian service. A fair number of draft resisters came to us to refuse induction in Buffalo from federal districts in the South where they were likely to receive sentences of as many as five years, until eventually new regulations required that they report for induction in their home districts. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who as a matter of conscience refused even civilian service, faced jail sentences. Canada for us was a last resort when all legal channels failed.
In retrospect I am not entirely happy with what we did. Our counselling center was a visible sign of opposition to what we considered a criminal war. But our clientele consisted almost exclusively of middle-class students, and in their place socially and economically less advantaged young men were sent to Vietnam. The procedure by which applicants had to explain their beliefs in writing discriminated against those who had fewer literary skills. We tried very hard to reach out to the black community, but with almost no success, even though the Friends Meeting House was in a largely black neighborhood. And we had no black counselors. I am also aware that few of the persons I counselled were pacifists, even if they pretended to be. They were against the war in Vietnam, or in many cases, like most middle class kids, just wanted to get out of the army.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 128