Riots Here Unlikely: Hub Rights Leaders

Boston is not likely to experience a racial flare-up like those in Los Angeles and Chicago, three area civil rights leaders and a State Representative from Roxbury agreed yesterday.

"But the potential is everywhere that Negroes are boxed into depressed areas," Rep. Frank Holgate (D-Roxbury) warned. He discounted the immediate possibility of riots in his own heavily-Negro district because, he said, low-income housing there provides Negroes with better conditions that a some other cities.

Holgate criticized the rioters, saying "They were wrong." "The pictures on TV of Negroes looting stores doesn't enhance our image, and it is worse that innocent people are being killed."

But local civil rights leaders had harsher words for the conditions which fomented the riots in the first place.

"It seems to me dammed funny that the same so-called Negro leaders who can't step in and do anything about a riot once it's started are now saying the riots won't spread," declared Cornell Eaton, head of the Boston Action Group.

Eston said that one cause of riots in Northern cities is police brutality toward "a large group of people here who are simply ignored, as if their existence were a big mistake."

John Mendelhof of the Dudley Street Action Center said that the riots are "wonderful to see as visible proof of the Negro's alienation." In Boston, he said, such alienation is more likely to display itself in the form of increased gang warfare.

Noel Day, head of the Massachusetts Freedom Movement, said that Indianapolis and Gary, Ind., are closer to erupting into racial violence than Boston. But, he added, "riots are inevitable as long as remedies are approached in a less than complete way."

Day was skeptical about the effect that present legislation could have on the bitterness of Negroes in Northern cities. He said that while the new voting rights bill might have some effect if it is enforced, similar have in the past not been implemented.

In the South, he added, "it will only make Southern Negroes more like Northern ones."