A New Group Fights Racism

Five prominent activists this week beseeched American college students to fast and pray against racism on Thanksgiving Day.

Declaring November 22 a day of "national rededication to the struggle against racism in the universities, in the White House and in [students'] homes," the organizers urged students nationwide to confront their parents on the issue of racism by boycotting the dinner table.

"The unique character of the appeal lies in the principle of an act of winess which takes place not in a crowd, but in the solitary presence of one's own mother or one's father," Bernice Miller, lecturer at the Ed School, told members of the press assembled at the Phillips Brooks House.

Miller joined antiwar activist Dr. Benjamin Spock, civil rights veteran Mary P. Peabody, George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, and Jonathan Kozol '58, author of Death at an Early Age, in announcing the "non-violent, non-vindictive, non-belligerent" action.

The protest, Miller explained, "asks young and old to put their bodies on the line in the most literal sense, in order to remind the nation of those 30 million people of all races who will not have turkey or food at all this year unless it comes out of a this year unless it comes out of a welfare can."

The attack, the organizers said, will be directed at psychologists and sociologists who claim that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, and at the White House and liberals who, they say, are destroying free schools and experimental schools like New York's Harlem Prep.

Over 40 political activists, authors, educators and public figures have endorsed the Thanksgiving campaign against racism. Among them are Georgia State Rep. Julian Bond, entertainers Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory and Ossie Davis, Robert Coles '50, and Harvard lecturer Ruth Hubbard.