Blacks Organize Studies Program In Neighborhood

The Cambridge Black Liberation Front, a newly founded community organization, will create a community Black Studies program in Riverside, members of the group announced at a press conference yesterday. The studies program will take the form of a Community Library, Bookstore, and Research Center.

Representatives of CBLF are also seeking assistance from professors at Harvard and M.I.T. and doctors at Cambridge Hospital for the location of a Drug Rehabilitation Center and Children's Health Clinic in Riverside. At present there are no such facilities in the predominantly black community.

CBLF was founded five months ago to deal "first-hand" with urban ghetto problems where federal and municipal authorities have allegedly failed. It is presently seeking financial and material support from citizens, business, and churches in the Riverside area.

We want a Black Studies program thatrelates to helping people in the ghetto, not to entering the power structure," Dwight Allen, director of CBLF said. "We want to study why the ghetto exists, what shapes it, what keeps it."

On Their Own

CBLF advisors Joanne Pelham and Joseph Tyree said they doubted they could obtain municipal or corporate funding for the Drug Center. They had previously spoken with the Cambridge Corporation, but received a "flat no." They hope to finance it with the income from the Black Studies Bookstore, they added.

"The power structure hasn't rehabilitated drug addicts, only the people in the community have done that." Allen said. "Compare [their programs] and the Black Panthers-there's a 90 per cent difference."

Free Lab

"We don't want to do what the universities have done on a jive level, using the ghetto for a laboratory but without paying a fee." Referring to Harvard and M.I.T., he added. "All they do is move in and take over the housing. They haven't been responsible to the community at all."