Four Are Injured in Skirmish at PBH

Four people were injured and are now hospitalized following a confrontation last night between labor leaders and members of a black Vietnam veterans group in Phillips Brooks House.

A speech by a National Caucus of Labor Committee (NCLC) leader was interrupted by Vietnam veteran De Mau Mau members at around 9:40 p.m., according to Dean Epps. All of those injured, none of them Harvard students or employees, were rushed to Cambridge City Hospital.

President Bok confirmed late last night that he had received rumors that one of those injured was a professor at either B.U. or UMass. At press time, these rumors remained unconfirmed.

Cambridge police arrested a suspect in the incident. They declined to comment on the arrest.

Three of those attacked received head or chest injuries, and one suffered a lacerated hand, according to Dean Epps. They were not in serious condition, a hospital spokesman said late last night.

The meeting, billed by the NCLC, attracted over 80 people to the third floor room. Members of the NCLC, along with followers of the Youth Revolutionary Movement (YRM), sought to search all those who entered the gathering. The start of the speech was delayed at 8 p.m. by two Harvard police officers who attempted to stop the search proceedings on the grounds that a public meeting must be public.

Dean Epps revealed late last night that the police action might have been prompted by a call. While the police argued with the NCLC guards, several men entered the room, unsearched, some of them garbed in green Army jackets.

Members of the NCLC defended their searches as "national policy" and cited the alleged "violent disruption" of a meeting in Boston by De Mau Mau four weeks ago. They also said that none of their guards was armed.

At the meeting, black NCLC leader Isaiah Scott announced a workers' march on Brooklyn, N.Y., late this week. He said that if the march is blocked, "there will be a blood bath in Brooklyn."

Scott also denounced writer and politician Imanu Baraka (Leroi Jones), as an agent for the CIA in its attempts to yoke ghetto youths with "slave labor" jobs.

He called Brooklyn "the Chile of this country this week." At the end of the proposed march on Friday, he said, five wanted youths will turn themselves in to the police as test cases to expose alleged CIA involvement in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville sections of New York.

All five of the youths are members of either the Tomahawk or Outlaw neighborhood gangs, he said.

"Youth gangs are the only form of organized resistance left in the ghetto," Scott said. He alleged that the CIA had decimated the large memberships of Chicago's Black P. Stone Nation and Philadelphia's Zulus "because they have fought slave labor."

He said that all work/study jobs that pay either nothing or that pay the minimum wage are heralded as helpful to black youth but actually sap workers' strength. "They're working at their fathers' hospital jobs and sanitation jobs," he said.

"Revolutionaries don't push methadone poision and don't force youths to work for nothing," Scott said.

Scott chronicled Baraka's alleged cooperation with the CIA as beginning after the 1967 riots in Newark, N.J., when the city was "bankrupt."

He described the riot-torn Newark as a cordoned-off no-man's land. "I happened, unfortunately, to have been there," he added.

Baraka is worth "hundreds of millions of dollars to the CIA, "Scott claimed, in its alleged drive to force young ghetto blacks into slave labor.

"We're running Jones out of Newark," Scott said.

He labeled Baraka "a poverty pimp. The black kid who looks up to Superfly, the white who feels guilty at his comfort, you petty bourgois black students who came to a bullshit place like this [Harvard]--you created Leroi Jones," he said