Olympic Boycott Leader Edwards Cites Protest's Benefit to Spirit

Harry Edwards, professor of Sociology at Barkeley, last night said that no black movement in the United States has ever attained any immediate goals nor has any advanced even a partist solution to racism in America.

But Edwards, organizer of the black boycott of the 1968 U. S. Olympic team. said that immediate struggles, such as his own black power speeches. can maintain the self-pride and spirit of black people until the overthrow and demise of the present white racist structure.

Speaking before a crowd of 250 at Tufts' Cohen Auditorium. Edwards called the black power movement and the Panthers' "Power to the People" campaign, "nothing more than empty slogans,"

"The 400 years of black efforts for freedom have been nothing more than spiritual masturbation," he said, "They have blunted the impact of pent-up desires and have built up the desire for the real thing."

Edwards noted that each black protest movement has made the preceding movement "respectable and desirable to the white community."

"King and the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] pushed the NAACP into legitimacy and Marshall into a Supreme Court seat. Rap Brown and the brick-throwers pushed the SCLC into respectability and gave King the Nobel Peace Prize. And the Panthers have made everybody respectable." he said.

"There is now an atmosphere of revolution in the country Even Nixon speaks of revolutionary changes." he added. "We have to support all forms of freedom movements, even though they are blind alleys, in order to maintain our pride and self-assertiveness until the demise of the structure comes."

Edwards warned blacks of the results of a premature racial revolution. "If it comes to black against white it will be the most lopsided affair since the lions ate lunch at the Coliseum. You hear talk of guerrilla warfare, but the white people are going to be guerrillas too. We have neither the guns nor the hands."

Edwards said that blacks needed insight to continue to organize and form coalitions with whites. "Don't fall victim to our cultural and psychological slogans," he said.

But, Edwards concluded, "if the revolution comes prematurely, I urge all blacks to become totally involved, because all of us will be enemies by the color of our skin, and our lot will be the mass grave."

Diversity, Not Division

Edwards said he did not feel that the black movement today was divided. "There has always been a great diversity in the black movement. The white society just isn't putting the spotlight on one single leader."

He added that the quiet is doing more harm to Nixon. "Nixon couldn't have been elected without white fear of blacks. He rode the law-and-order issue into office. Now there are no niggers to distract ignorant white folk from seeing that the economy is falling apart and that we're in a war we can't win."