Civil Rights, Peace Group Leaders Discuss Implications of Movements

The possibility that the campaign to secure civil rights for Negroes has revolutionary implications was raised last night in a discussion of activist politics at Dunster House Senior Common Room. The suggestion came from several members of the audience, following four addresses by leaders of the peace and civil rights movements on the differences and similarities between their organizations.

The meeting was called to discover whether the two movements have enough in common to permit cooperative action; but this subject was all but ignored after the formal speeches. The general discussion of the speeches concentrated almost exclusively on the rights movement, in part because of the feelings expressed by the two representatives of Tocsin, Peter Goldmark '62 and Todd Gitlin '63, both past presidents.

In their remarks, Goldmark and Gitlin were extremely pessimistic about the peace movement, and Goldmark compared it with the rights movement by contrasting "tilting at wind-mills" with the "gritty, substantial" activity of the integrationists. Gitlin, while insisting that there was a "moral community" between the two movements, conceded that the civil rights workers "know what they want" and can get it by "direct confrontation with men and institutions," while the peace movement is confused in its purposes and unable to "make things happen."

Rights Leaders Concur

The two civil rights leaders, Claude Weaver '65, president of the Harvard Civil Rights Co-ordinating Committee, and Archie Epps, a graduate student in sociology, also stressed the different potential for success of the two movements. Epps went on to argue that until Negroes have full civil rights, "other movements will not be alive to us."

Weaver also rejected any close connection with the peace movement, although he asserted that as the rights movement grows more radical, it will come to share the other's unpopularity, and cease being "fashionable," as at present. Weaver expressed the opinion that this radical shift has already begun, and that student activists such as he have taken the leadership of the movement away from "the Negro lawyers in grey suits."

Weaver's forceful manner, and the contrast it offered to the apparent disillusionment of Goldmark and Gitlin, seemed to capture the audience's imagination and it spent most of the two hours discussion drawing Weaver and Epps out on their views. The questions and comments were almost all aimed at distinguishing the rights movement's pursuit of legal and political equality for the Negro from the more far-reaching demands of such men as author James Baldwin. Weaver and several activists in the audience agreed with those who said that Baldwin's rejection of the United States's whole style of life amounted to a call for a complete change in the social and economic order. Weaver concluded that the rights movement is actually a "Negro revolution" which is "attacking American society root and branch.