REFUTING COLES

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Dr. Robert Coles' attack on radicals for demanding the withdrawal of troops and police from the ghettoes is misdirected. First, it assumes that the police in fact protect ghetto residents. Yet in every "riot" so far they have produced terror, not security. They have beaten and shot "looters" and bystanders in discriminately, used machine guns against tenements, systematically destroyed black-owned property. Even in non-crisis times, as the constant complaints show, the police repress rather than protect black people from crime. Of course blacks want security; but peace must come from self-determination and justice, not from the barrel of a gun.

Second, Dr. Coles accuses radicals of desecrating the memory of Martin Luther King. Yet let us remember that King called not simply for non-violence, but for non-violent revolution. It is now fashionable for liberals to use King's rhetoric to inhibit action for liberasl to use King's rhetoric to inhibit action for change. Leaders like President Johnson decry black violence but continue the violence of white America against blacks and against the Vietnamese people. It is these men who desecrate King's memory.

Radicals do not glorify black violence, but demand an end to the much greater violence which police, poverty, and racism inflict daily on the souls and bodies of black people. Let Dr. Coles reconsider his priorities: Who in this society most deserves his anger? David Holmstrom   Michael Maller