Civil Rights Official Tells Students To Preach Job Equality at Home

Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general for civil rights, urged students Saturday to "preach to your parents about discrimination" to help break down the racial inequality in employment practices.

Speaking at an Adams House gathering, the U.S. official claimed that many adults are in positions where they can accomplish a great deal for desegregation merely by hiring Negroes. Job discrimination in the North, he said, keeps Negroes from managerial and highly skilled positions in manufacturing.

Asked what students can do about discrimination in the North, Marshall suggested that civil rights groups at Harvard make a survey of hiring practices in the Boston area and publish the results. "I'm sure many Bostonians would be shocked by the findings," he said.

"A lot of local managements don't understand the depth of the problems that a lack of equal employment creates," he continued.

Marshall said that employers could be "persuaded rationally" to integrate their businesses. If the persuasion is effective enough, he asserted, "the owner of that enterprise won't think he's going to be loved by his fellow man until he hires some Negroes."

Factors of Inequality

According to Marshall, many factors such as neighborhood segregation, unequal school facilities, high incidence of high school dropouts, a lack of sufficient vocational training, high unemployment, and a past history of discrimination work against equal job opportunity for Northern Negroes.

The North's discrimination patterns are harder to deal with than the South's racial problems, Marshall asserted. Though the South's problems are "curable," he pointed out that the difficulties are of such great magnitude that "it is entirely unrealistic to expect the courts to handle them all by themselves."

Marshall's civil rights division of the Justice Department employs 40 lawyers, most of whom work on segregation cases in the South.

After the talk, several members of Harvard's Civil Rights Co-ordinating Committee met with Marshall to discuss plans for eventual action on job discrimination in the Boston area.