Group Leads Demonstration Amidst Political Feuding

Chanting "Bury Apartheid" and toning placards, members of the Spartans Youth League (SYL) led a sparsely attended rally on the steps of Memorial Church last night protesting the white South African government.

But SYE members attacked divesting as a way of bringing about black majority rule in the country, arguing that polling American investments out of South Africa would not thwart apartheid because the money would just be shifted to other oppressive businesses elsewhere.

"Where are [investors] going to take that money? To Mobile, Alabama, to open a non-union business?" said air conditioner repairman and SYE member Keith Manning.

However, several listeners assailed SYE's interpretation of divestiture, responding that pressuring American companies to pull out of South Africa is vital for reform because American made military goods and computers are helping the white minority government enforce apartheid. Damon A. Silvers '86, a member of the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee and the Endowment for Divestiture, charged that SYE, a small, radical Trotskyism group, was using the apartheid issue "for their own sectarian, totalitarian ends." Silver added that Black workers in South Africa approve of divestiture as a way of ending apartheid.

Spartacists, backdropped by a cloth banner reading "Black workers are the revolutionary powerhouse," loudly advocated that troubles plaguing Blacks--high rents, low wages and the constant threat of being arrested for travelling without a passport--could be eliminated through a worker's revolution.

"What we want to show is that Harvard students stand in solidarity with the workers and students against apartheid," said Thomas N. Creat '86, president of the Harvard branch of the SYE.