If only for a moment, the tribunal’s findings helped invigorate the global antiwar movement to increase pressure on the Johnson administration to bring the Vietnam War to a close. Influenced by what they had already witnessed in Vietnam between the two sessions, two tribunal members, the antiwar activist Dave Dellinger and the writer Carl Oglesby, worked with antiwar activists to plan a peaceful protest to occur around the world in October 1967. That month tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators faced off against troops outside the Pentagon and in front of American embassies across Western Europe, in Central and South America, and throughout Asia. Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British Council for Peace in Vietnam organized demonstrations in Washington and outside 10 Downing Street in London. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, yet another organization sponsored by Russell, collaborated with Tariq Ali to stage a march in Trafalgar Square in addition to picketing outside the Australian, New Zealand and American embassies.

The tribunal and the marches did not bring the war to a close, but they helped energize international opposition to colonialism and imperialism: Puerto Rican nationalists who sought to liberate their country from American imperialism, for example, saw the Vietnamese as spiritual allies, even as Puerto Ricans were drafted to fight on behalf of the United States in Vietnam.

The tribunal resonated in the United States, too. Stokely Carmichael, a member of the tribunal, and other young black leaders joined hands with these revolutionaries as they came to see American war crimes in Vietnam as another product of the racially oppressive nature of American imperialism. They argued that the African-American community existed as an internal colony dominated by racial hatred and violence.

War crimes uncovered by the tribunal and, later, the My Lai massacre poisoned American credibility abroad and sparked a domestic national identity crisis. Such revelations forced American citizens to come to terms with the military’s “kill anything that moves” approach to the war. And yet that reckoning didn’t last; the reality of America’s crimes in Vietnam has been blanketed over by presidents, politicians and other leaders looking to heal the country — even if that meant ignoring history — to promote a new patriotic nationalism. Government-backed corporate slogans such as “The Pride Is Back” campaign in the 1980s manipulated collective memory by overlooking the war crimes and human rights violations that the tribunal helped to expose.

The tribunal’s most significant legacy was the appearance of “people’s tribunals” long after the Vietnam War ended. People’s courts, called “Russell Tribunals,” have investigated Third World dictatorships, the 1973 Chilean coup, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in East Ukraine. Most recently, the World Tribunal on Iraq opened in 2003 to charge the United States with war crimes and violating the Geneva Conventions. Once again the tribunal forced the world to listen to new narratives of civilian bombing and new torture tactics adopted by American armed forces.

Russell’s hope was that his tribunals would build momentum toward a people-driven, international peace movement that did more than protest. In his mind, the people — properly organized and motivated — could hold governments in check. It was an urgent idea in 1967; it remains one today.