Young Dems, YPSL Join in 'Frontlash' To Fight White Backlash in '68 Vote

The Executive Committee of Harvard's Young Democrats voted last night to join the Young People's Socialist League as co-sponsor of the activities of Frontlash-68 in Massachusetts.

Frontlash-68 is a national student organization attempting both to educate and to register voters in low-income urban communities.

By pointing up what they consider to be the joint economic interest of working class whites and Negroes, Frontlash hopes to limit the extent of white backlash and to lessen its potential impact on the 1968 elections.

Support for Frontlash has come from the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education. Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin and Gus Tyler are members of its National Advisory Board.

The YD's active participation in Frontlash activities will not begin until after the Massachusetts Presidential Primary on April 30.

Members of YPSL organized the Harvard branch of Frontlash during November's Freedom Budget Conference. The activities of Harvard Frontlash are being centered on the factory towns of Waltham and Watertown.

The Frontlash campaign will officially begin on Monday afternoon with a speech to an Italian-speaking local of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in Waltham.

Plans for canvassing neighborhoods, leafletting at factory gates, and speaking at union meeting have been outlined by the program's leaders.

Benjamin I. Ross '71 will represent the YD's on Harvard's Frontlash's executive committee. David A. Guberman '71 of YPSL will continue to serve as Harvard coordinator of the program.

Many of the Frontlash volunteers at Harvard support the Presidential candidacy of Senator McCarthy. Despite the official non-partisan stance of Frontlash, individuals have made plans to distribute McCarthy literature while canvassing for Frontlash.

But Guberman views the importance of the Frontlash campaign as transcending the fate of the McCarthy candidacy. "We support McCarthy but we're looking beyond him," he said yesterday.

Frontlash has a long range potential as an instrument of democratic social changes," he added, through a broad-based "liberal-leftist" coalition of students, labor, and sympathetic members of the middle class.