The Sympathizers

Passive resistance hardened in the South last week. Some 4,000 students at segregated Southern University (all Negro) in Baton Rouge, La. threatened to withdraw because 18 students had been suspended for sitdowns. Students in Greensboro, N.C. went back to picketing after Woolworth's and Kress's refused to integrate their lunch counters. In Marshall, Texas police broke up a crowd of Negro demonstrators by training a fire hose on them. But while police clamped down on demonstrations in the South, sympathy demonstrations by white students spread over campuses in the North:

P: At Yale, a group called Challenge, which debates the burning issues of the day, debated the sitdowns, inspired visiting students to organize rallies championing sitdowns on their own campuses.

P: In Boston, students from Harvard, M.I.T., Brandeis, and even prep schoolers home on vacation helped form an organization called EPIC (Emergency Public Integration Committee), picketed chain stores that practice segregation in the South, engaged Singer Harry Belafonte to kick off a fund-raising drive at Boston Arena.

P: At Oberlin College, students collected in ten days the largest sum to date, $2,709.10 to help with court costs of Negroes arrested in Nashville, Tenn.

P: The student government at the University of Michigan fired off hot letters of protest to Southern Governors, got blistering replies.

P: At Connecticut's Wesleyan, students braved a bitter New England night to collect $400 for a scholarship fund.

P: A white professor of sociology and ten white students from MacMurray College in Illinois went to Montgomery, Ala. to gather firsthand evidence, were all arrested for eating with Negro students in a Negro restaurant.

Not everyone joined the movement:

P: The chairman of the Yale Daily News grumbled: "If integrationists want to be helpful in fact as well as in theory, they must realize that there is nothing people hate worse than to be told what to do by groups of outsiders." P: Wisconsin professor of sociology scoffed: "These are harmless pleasures of students a little starry-eyed."

Harmless or not, the demonstrations inspired New York's Taconic Foundation to donate $10,000 for an April nationwide student conference in Washington on ways to help embattled Negro students in the South.

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