Students: Speaking for the Majority

Munching hamburgers in an Atlanta Airport restaurant last December, Emory University Senior Remar (“Bubba”) Sutton and the school’s sophomore class president, Don Brunson, decided in a rush of anger that they were fed up with student protest against U.S. warfare in Viet Nam. They went back to Sutton’s dorm, talked all through the night with four other students, by morning had drafted a set of purposes for a new organization—Affirmation: Viet Nam. They dedicated it to demonstrating that “the opinion of the majority cannot be obscured by the voice of the minority.”

A.V.N. spread to some 50 college campuses in Georgia, grew so influential that two weeks ago it attracted more than 10,000 people to Atlanta Stadium, despite a driving rain, to hear Secretary of State Dean Rusk explain again that “the answer to the problem of peace is not in Washington—it is in Hanoi.” The group has organized 150 Georgia college students as a speakers’ bureau, dispatched them to about 400 meetings.

This success cost its student backers missed classes, slipping grades, weeks of 20-hour-a-day effort centered in a 20-room section of Emory’s Wesley Hall dormitory. The brashness of Bubba Sutton, 24-year-old son of a Marietta, Ga., building contractor and former student on the world-circling University of the Seven Seas, provided the main push. He flew to New York to gain the backing of General Lucius Clay, to Los Angeles to get Bob Hope to make part of a television special explaining A.V.N. to Georgia viewers, to Miami to get Singer Anita Bryant out of bed and persuade her to take part in the stadium rally.

A.V.N. has no plans to organize outside of Georgia, but its leaders have been invited by the South Viet Nam government to visit Viet Nam over the Easter vacation, and they expect to explain their views on the war on a world tour this summer. “You just can’t have the people on the negative side making all the noise,” insists Sutton. How about all the time already lost from classes? Argues A.V.N. Organizer Wayne Wood: “We are lucky enough to be in college, and this is the least we can do. I can give up my grades and time—it’s all I’ve got to give up.”