Hayden Scores Urban Policies

Tom Hayden, co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, scored white-directed community control organizations last night in a lecture sponsored by the City Planning and Architecture Department of Harvard and MIT.

Using familiar radical parlance, Hayden called the dominant white society a "sophisticated, neo-colonial system" and condemned its community control programs for their superficiality. "Manpower and community participation programs do not provide real involvement for the people living in the ghetto," he said, "hence they do not give ghetto people real control or decision-making powers."

Hayden said that these programs "try to make new men and women out of the ghetto people," by forcing them into the white middle class mold. This attempt to involve blacks in participatory democracy and pressure group politics, Hayden said, represents a "neo-colonial technique which avoids an examination of the assumed values underlying it."

Brutes, sadists, thieves

Hayden praised the Black Panther Party's means of community control as "the most important thing going on in this country today." He endorsed the Panthers' declaration of war on intruders into the ghetto. "The police are an occupying army of brutes, sadists, and thieves who have no right to survive so long as they control the ghetto community," he said.

Hayden said whites and blacks face the same organs of repression. "You can't humanize the monster--the military and corporations," he said. Some people in this society, he said, will have to be wiped out politically or exterminated. "Fascists and radicals cannot live together--it is not a matter of conversion," he said.

One listener who said he had come to find out what he as a city planner could do to abate the urban crisis, was disappointed. "I have no idea how you can be useful," Hayden told him.