Coles Blasts Radicals On Roxbury Demands

Robert Coles, research psychiatrist to the University Health Services, who has spent the last few days talking with frightened mothers in Roxbury, had angry words yesterday for SDS demands that police and troops be immediately withdrawn from ghettos.

"I am upset by upper-class liberal intellectuals always jumping at efforts to subdue riots without asking what they would do in the face of sniping and rampant destruction," he said in an interview yesterday.

"These people are talking from the safety of Harvard Square. I'd like to show these people who scream against Kevin White some of those mothers in Roxbury--mothers who are terrified, who are anxious for more police protection," he said.

Students who regard government and police efforts at riot control as just another example of racial exploitation are, said Coles, fitting the riots into a pre-conceived ideological scheme, without considering the actual plight of Negroes "whose houses are being gutted, whose children are being killed."

"I am sick and tired of white ideologues who exploit the Negro and riots as viciously as any lousy segregationist I've met in the South," he said.

Coles condemned white radicals who, by endowing all Negroes with rioter mentality, are--like white racists--stereotyping Negroes. "These people take rioters and call them the Negro community," he said. "In doing so they show themselves to be racist."

Coles condemened the "coalition of black snipers and white ideologues" who are now taking up the dropped cause of Martin Luther King. "These are people who have fought Martin Luther King all the way--who have spoken of him with contempt... They are now desecrating him in death the way they have in life."