Black Communist Leader Predicts Liberalism's End

The Presidential candidate of the Communist Party, a 38-year-old black woman named Charlene Mitchell, told a Harvard audience last night that "the old grey goose of liberalism is dying and after Tuesday, it may be dead."

Mrs. Mitchell, speaking on "Communism in the U.S.A.," said that the defeat of Hubert Humphrey would be proof of "the irrelevance of liberalism" to the problems of contemporary society. "Even if Humphrey wins," she said, "it will only be because his New Deal smile has become a mouth-piece for 'law and order' blacklash."

"American liberalism has perverted itself," she went on. "The liberal coalition brought on the war in Vietnam. Liberals say that violence has brought about the crisis in our country. It is, instead, the failure of liberalism that has driven demonstrators and rebels into the streets."

Mrs. Mitchell spoke to an audience of about 150 people in the Leverett House dining room. "To replace the rhetoric of liberalism," she told them, "we need a counter-vision with counter-values. Today, the movement on the left offers the only hope. If it fails, if we do not find a way to give power back to people and restore dignity to black people, then there will be horrible days ahead."

At the end of her speech, Mrs. Mitchell asked her largely student audience, "What are you going to do with your lives? Are you going to be on the side of Che Guevara or of McNamara? Are you going to join the movement, or will your life be one of quiet desperation, drowned out by Black Label scotch and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation?"

Marxism

The challenge facing America, she added, is the effort by its people to "take over the basic means of production" from the power structure. "We are revolutionaries," she said. "If there is no end to racism, if there is no end to the exploitation of poor people by rich people, we will be violent."

During the question period, a middleage woman asked Mrs. Mitchell, "How can you be a Communist and still call yourself an American?"

"America is a revolutionary country," Mrs. Mitchell replied, "that is how we were born. America is a violent country, that's how we held our Union together."