NSA Volunteers Register Voters Over Christmas

Representatives of the National Student Association will soon seek volunteers -- they hope to find at least ten at Harvard and Radcliffe--for a large-scale voter registration drive in the South late this month. The drive will be called "Freedom Christmas."

The student volunteers will help to register Negroes in those areas of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina in which federal registrars are already working.

NSA plans no separate project of its own. Instead, it will place its volunteers in the already established voter registration projects of the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Civil rights leaders are anxious to increase Negro registration in time for the 1966 elections, for which some primaries are held in May. An NSA letter to volunteers estimates that there are still 1.7 million unregistered Negroes in the South, despite efforts since the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed.

Volunteers participating in the drive are being asked to provide $500 worth of bond coverage. William Hammond '67, NSA Coordinator for Harvard, yesterday explained that the organization makes this request because "we'd hate to have somebody spend his Christmas in jail.'